Health Committee on April 4th, 2017

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I will pass my time to Mr. Viersen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Okay.

Mr. Viersen.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our guests for being here today. It's much appreciated.

If you wanted to continue with an anecdote or story you could share with us, that would be great.

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

Well, there are a couple of stories, and they range from a colleague at the law school telling me that her daughter was doing research on the Internet for a book called “Little Sisters”, and when searched for “little sisters”, they got all this pornography suddenly. It was of a nine-year daughter.

I have had a graduate student who told me about how her son was, again, just on the Internet doing some kind of research, and he came across some without searching for it, ostensibly some rather extreme sexually violent type of pornography.

There have been a few examples of that sort. People, knowing that I do research in this area, will often bring up the topic or mention it, but it's a bit of anecdotal evidence of this type.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

That's been my experience as well. It seems that the Canadian context is that the first age of exposure is about nine years old, and it's typically accidental, much like the two stories that you outline there, so thank you for that.

Dr. Fisher, Dr. Peter Silverstone from the University of Alberta states that over the past two years child sexual abuse is up over 300%, and he correlates that. Today, we know as many as one in six girls and one in 12 boys are currently experiencing sexual abuse. When all types of sexual abuse are combined, including exposure to pornography or other sexual materials, the number of sexually abused children is as high as one in three girls and one in four boys.

Do you believe that exposing children to sexually explicit material is child abuse? Do you think there should be an appropriate response to that?

[Dr. William Fisher]

The question is whether I believe that exposure to pornography on the part of children is a form of child sexual abuse. I think context is all important. If an Internet lurker is using pornography to lure somebody or if someone hanging around a hockey arena—and I have three kids who hang around hockey arenas, and I watch them very carefully—is lured via..., then that is an element in a criminal and abusive act.

The fact that a kid can log onto the Internet to do a book report and accidentally come across pornography is the cost of doing business in the Internet age, unfortunately. My kids also watched the news and saw some sad events of gassings in Syria, and things like that.

I would focus very strongly on prima facie criminal abuse. In the material my colleague talked about, there's no discussion but that child sexual abuse is a crime. There's no discussion but that the production and possession of child pornography is a crime, that the use of pornography in luring, that involuntarily forced exposure, or that cultivating someone is a crime. So I would direct our attention to the criminal nature of this, as opposed to pornography per se. As to whether a child coming across this material is a form of child abuse, I would wait to see if it has very negative consequences.

This discussion of children exposed to sexuality rests on a background of now largely discredited Freudian thought. Freud, of course, talked about the primal scene and the damaging consequences of a child walking in and seeing Mommy and Daddy making love. We now know that those scenes are pretty common, at least until you put a lock on your door, and we know that they're not uniformly damaging.

In conversation with my colleague Dr. Malamuth, early in the Internet era I wrote a paper and said, wait a minute—because I'm an open-minded scientist and an agnostic. In fact, my remarks concern what science can and can't tell us. So I wrote a paper and said that maybe Internet pornography was different. It was because of the work of Dr. Malamuth that I said that an individual could take his pro-social, anti-social, or whatever characteristics and select potentially reinforcing material from the Internet. Maybe the Internet was different, because there's an unrestricted array of stuff that might resonate with bad people. So far I haven't found that to be the case.

In an open-minded way, I have said this is plausible. If it were plausible and reflected in fairly substantial increases in rates of sexual assault that were assessed not by police reports but by very broadly defined sexual assault in Statistics Canada victimization studies, ranging from unwanted touching and kissing to much more aggressive behaviours, then I'd say that I wrote that paper early, that the confluence model has an opportunity to flourish on the Internet, and that that's a plausible possibility. I haven't seen the data.

The questions about child exposure, questions of any kind, anecdotes of any kind, and clinical experience of any kind have to be a stimulus to systematic broad research. I would like to know the answer to your question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

I'll allow one very short question.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Dr. Roberts, do you have anything to add? In your experience have you had any cases of child-on-child abuse that you could speak to?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

That's very hard to say. When you look at any kind of epidemiological study, you don't have all the data. You only have the people who will say they've been abused. That doesn't mean that other people who didn't respond to that did not get abused. The chances are that we are completely underestimating how many children have been abused.

I want to add that I don't think the question should be, is it sexual abuse if a child sees pornography? The question is, if a child sees pornography, is that harmful? It doesn't have to be a crime for it to be harmful.

One of my concerns is that this is becoming normalized. Children learn what the norms of society are. It takes years and years for them to get to that point. It starts with parents, goes through school, peers, and so on. Especially in the teenage years, knowing the norm is essential to children's identify development. Everyone wants to be part of the cool group. The peer group is very influential for them.

When children themselves are posting pictures—and believe me there is a lot of that going on—that becomes normal. My concern is that girls, particularly, all learn that it's okay to put pictures of themselves in a bikini when they're not at the beach or this type of stuff. It becomes the norm. I think that has a greater effect. It's not just that moment of seeing it, whether it's harmful or not. It's what this does for the rest of their life, how they see themselves, how they see women.

I mean no disrespect to anybody here today, but I'll just point out that the majority of people around this table are men. There are some women. There are a lot of women assisting in administrative roles, journalists, I assume, and that kind of thing. But the main players at the table are men. I'm not going on a feminist drive here, but I think that when children have been socialized that way and when women who are victims are trying to enter a workplace, they don't have the confidence to do that. They don't believe they are going to be treated equally by males. I think this has a massive cost. I think it is harmful when you get to a situation like that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to all of the witnesses for being here today.

Looking back to the last Parliament, I think what we're doing today is “committing psychology”, which is a nice job of Parliament here.

I want to pick up on the last theme of Dr. Roberts and ask you, Dr. Malamuth, about one of the subjects of this study, the public health effects of online violence, integrating sexually explicit material, on children, women, and men. Does the research tell us anything about the effect of violent, degrading pornography on women?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

There hasn't been much research looking at the effects on women, partly because this has been a fairly small research area. I have perhaps been the most frequent contributor in it. When I was interviewing with the University of Manitoba many years ago, the chair at the time, John Adair, took me aside and told me he'd be very happy to have me there and that I could do any research I'd like, but, as a man, he wanted to tell me that I was going to get into trouble and get him into trouble if I used female subjects. He asked me to do him a favour, though he wouldn't require it, and refrain from doing any studies focusing on women.

There have been a few studies, but relatively speaking, it's very few. I should say that I tried to get women graduate students to be the ones doing the research about that aspect. They generally refuse because being exposed to violent pornography bothered them too much.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I'll stop you there, Dr. Malamuth, because I have limited time and I think I have your answer.

Dr. Fisher, you've talked about the research in terms of the effects of pornography. I want to come back to the distinction between pornography simpliciter and violent and degrading pornography, but hold that for a moment.

It seems that a lot of the research tries to find a link between pornography, whichever of those two types, and sexual assault. Is there research about the impact of observing violent, degrading pornography on mental health or relationships generally? I'm talking about the ability to form attachments, the ability to have a healthy sex life, however we define that, and men's attitudes towards women, not necessarily in terms of assault but just generally.

[Dr. William Fisher]

The question focuses on violent pornography. The first point I would emphasize—and I think that Dr. Malamuth and my other colleagues share this view as well—is that in this research area, there is no single definition of pornography. In fact, a recent review looked at about 42 different studies and didn't find two studies that defined pornography in the same way. That's number one, and it's a limitation in the field. An even more serious limitation that bears directly on your question is that exceedingly little research has focused on violent pornography.

Let me make a couple of observations. As part of his dissertation, one of my graduate students, Tony Bogaert—now a senior professor here in Canada—gave young men the opportunity to choose the kind of pornography they'd like to see in a research study. The least common choice was violent pornography. It's not a popular choice in general, although it may be popular with people with particular anti-social personality traits. Very few studies outside of the laboratory studies that have created violent pornography have dealt with this.

In the study that Dr. Malamuth and I have spoken about that involved sex drive, we found that men with a high sex drive, indeed, used more violent pornography than other people. In the couples study, in which we looked at 700 individuals, we found no comment about violent pornography—and these were all open-ended questions that were asked, so there are thousands of comments. This is a research area that we need to go into.

We know that when men and women are exposed to nonviolent pornography, the typical response is a slight increase in the kind of sexual things they already do with their partner or with themselves. We know from Meredith Chivers' laboratory at Queen's University that women and men are both aroused by nonviolent pornography. We know from Wendy Stock's unpublished dissertation that women were sexually aroused by rape themed pornography, although they didn't like it. We have very limited specific information on anybody's response outside the laboratory studies, the experimental studies. This is an area we need to look at.

I very much sympathize with my colleague that, you know, we've been asking the wrong question in part. How does this affect women? No one here seems to be able to tell you.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I'm going to finish with you, Dr. Roberts, although I want to come back to Dr. Malamuth with one question.

You've spoken about the ethical issues involved in research. Obviously, we can't take a control group of children and expose them to violent and degrading pornography and follow them for a few years, as you've pointed out. Can we ever prove with scientific certainty what the impact of violent, degrading pornography is on children, given that limitation?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

In science, we never prove anything, but we do have supporting evidence. Here, Dr. Fisher and I disagree on the weight of the evidence because I and my colleagues have published at least 20 studies on violent pornography, and while some of them have been in the laboratory, some of them have not. What Dr. Fisher and I may have common ground on is that when you do research in naturalistic settings, in real world settings, people don't just watch violent pornography or nonviolent pornography. It's very difficult to disentangle. You can say that for people who watch generally a higher level of pornography, more extreme pornography, some of that is violent pornography. The Supreme Court of Canada cited our research and other research in the famous Butler case to change the law. In fact, it said the weight of the evidence is sufficient to show that violent pornography does have kinds of effects that Canadians should be concerned about in terms of attitudes about women and the potential, at least, for violence against women.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

I'm going to stop you again just because I want to give one last quick question to Dr. Roberts.

Given that, modelling others' behaviour seems intuitive to children. Children who grow up being spanked are more likely to spank their children. Children who grow up with their parents smoking seem more likely to smoke. This is an intuition. I'm very mindful of causation, correlation issues, problems of definition, all sorts of those issues, but are we correctly assuming that adolescents or children who are exposed on a regular basis to violent pornography or what we could all agree is degrading pornography—let's assume we could agree on that—are more likely to view that as acceptable behaviour? Would it interfere in their normal psychosexual, social development as a matter of intuition? Can we draw that conclusion?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

It's any type of what we could call the more disturbing side of images. It could just be physical aggression that children are watching.

There were a ton of studies of those images in the eighties and nineties when television was seen as the biggest concern. The more you watch something the more desensitized you get to it, and you start to believe it is the norm.

Looking at those psychological processes, yes, I could very well see that a person's view becomes accepting of this as the norm. Then, they're going to need more and more degrading things to get that same pleasure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you.

Mr. Ayoub.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for their input on this topic.

In your remarks, one of the things that struck me is that it would be naïve to think that everything in society does not affect us in one way or another. When we are exposed to something, it certainly has some influence on us. That influence can be positive or negative; it can have an impact on our real or virtual lives. We are talking about the availability of pornography on the Internet. Education, culture, freedom, and even religion can shape our criteria for rating the pornography we find on the Internet.

What I wonder is whether some pornography can be legal and other pornography, illegal. I think so. Is it possible to rank the level of accessibility or availability of Internet pornography? I haven't tested it myself or gone as far as looking at potentially illegal things, but is it available? Maybe.

As for the extent to which looking at Internet pornography affects people, research is hard to come by. I would be interested in learning more about that.

Ms. Roberts, you referred earlier to the number of women and men who were at the table or in the room. I would be interested to know how many people in this room have looked at pornography on the Internet and what influence it had on them. How does it affect our lives? I would go even further. I will let the leading scientists and professors here today answer this. Does studying pornography, participating in this type of research, or viewing more pornography than the average person affect your behaviour? Could it also influence the behaviour of the people being studied?

Is some pornography legal and other pornography, illegal?

Ms. Roberts, perhaps you can go first.

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

I'm not quite sure I picked up the question.

Are you asking whether there different levels of harm that can be contributed by more intense pornography or more legal or illegal pornography?

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

There is pornography, so there is a rating of what kind of pornography one can get over the Internet.

The question is, are there legal forms of pornography, or is everything illegal? Is there illegal pornography that we can get? What is the effect or influence of watching that pornography for the rest of our behaviour?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Right, there are a couple of things there.

The first one is that the pornography that my work involves is pornography that's not usually accessible to most people. It's the deep web. It's all very clandestine. You need to know exactly where to go. It's a global community.

As I said there are rules. For instance, to get pornography you have to give pornography. You either have to have a set of photographs, images, or videos of yourself you can give, or you create those images and videos.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Is that illegal?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

That's illegal, yes.

As for the legal pornography, I can't answer that question. I don't know what would be classified as legal or illegal. As my colleagues have said, the actual definition of pornography is so hard to obtain. I don't know whether there would be any kind of set guidelines about what's legal and what's not legal. I think my colleagues can answer that better than I can.

I did have another point that I can't remember. In the interest of time, I'll pass it to my colleague.