Health Committee on April 4th, 2017

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

Mr. Malamuth.

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

Canada did, as I mentioned, in the Butler case—and there have been various decisions since then—try to draw the line on what is legal and what is not legal, particularly focusing on violent pornography as being illegal and other types of pornography mostly being legal. Of course, child pornography is illegal all around.

Canada used to prosecute some violent pornography, but now pretty much has stopped doing that because it's become virtually impossible. With the Internet, you can now put in certain key words if you're looking for certain types, such as “rape” or “forced”, and you will get a plethora of violent pornography. It is pretty much impossible to prosecute anymore compared to years ago when Canada was primarily focusing on pornography that was brought across the border from the U.S. and that was violent. So a lot of it what is technically illegal in Canada is no longer prosecuted.

In the United States, there isn't such a division, and violent and other kinds of pornography are legal. If you use certain select words, you can find virtually any type of pornography on common sites that are now available, except child pornography, which, as mentioned, is part of an underworld that you have to really seek out. But if you go to some of the most common sites, and I can give you the names of them, and maybe I should, but let's say it's videos and you put in the word “forced”, you will see hundreds of videos that show rape. That is no longer [Inaudible—Editor].

While Dr. Fisher mentioned the work of his former graduate students, insofar as people are attracted to this type of pornography, in the published version of Boeringer's study and other studies, they do show that a significant minority of men in the general population are sexually aroused, particularly by violent pornography—and that is the best single risk predictor. Even though none of the individual risk predictors are good in and of themselves or predict very highly, you have to take six or seven of them. But if you were only to select one, then sexual arousal to violent sexual images would show the highest correlation with actual sexual aggression.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you.

Now we're going to go to our five-minute rounds, starting with Ms. Harder.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

My first question is for Kim Roberts. From your point of view, what would you say is the association between violent pornography or violence in pornography and sexual assault cases against women and girls, but particularly also children, because that's your field of expertise?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

I think, because of this underground pornography network, because you have to upload your own images, that if you haven't gotten them from somewhere, you do create them. Anecdotally, while talking to the police whom I train, and social workers and emergency room doctors, I feel I have been hearing a lot more about people often abusing their own children. In the majority of cases, it's their own children, for the purposes of getting material that they can then upload, because that gives them access to more pornography for themselves.

[Technical difficulty—Editor].

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Sorry, are you done?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Yes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I've been looking at some different statistics, and I realize that we're in Canada, but I think this one perhaps stands true here. In the U.S. the FBI is reporting that at 80% of the scenes of violent sex crimes they have found pornography—80%. I understand what you're saying, Mr. Fisher, with regard to correlation and causation. My background is research; I'm a sociologist. But that 80% figure seems hard to get past and somehow explain away without there being a causal association. Can you perhaps comment on this 80%? This is a statistic coming from the U.S., from the FBI, and they are finding this at 80% of sex crime scenes.

[Dr. William Fisher]

Let me respond—forgive me—first with a question. What percentage of university undergraduate men use pornography on a daily or weekly basis?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I'd prefer not to know.

[Dr. William Fisher]

It's at least 80%, so this is not a distinctive finding. The base rate of the use of Internet pornography is very, very high among non-rapists, as well as sexual criminals.

The second question has to be whether it is the fact that sexual criminals who possess a variety of anti-social personality traits, etc., are attracted to pornography and sexual criminality, or whether this is a spurious relationship. It's there, but it's not there in a causal role.

The best evidence I can give you, again trying to look at the systematic science, is that multiple studies of convicted sexual offenders, in contrast to the FBI, show less use of pornography by sex offenders than by other people—by comparator groups. Whether this is a causal factor or not, I can't tell you; I don't know in those particular situations. I can tell you that the baseline rate of use of pornography among young males, for example, who represent sexual criminals, at least age-wise, is very high, and that the systematic studies generally suggest that sex criminals are not distinctive in their use of pornography.

I would also look at the general rates of sexual assault, which, in the context of unlimited access to pornography, have not increased.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Neil, would you say that government needs to invest more money to look at further studies with regard to how violent pornography might impact the actions of men and boys toward women and girls?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

We always welcome more research funding.

I have to say that it's become much more difficult to actually do experimental studies, because the ethics boards will say, “We believe your findings. Therefore, we don't want you to expose men who are potentially at risk to violent pornography.” It's a catch-22 situation. However, certainly in terms of survey studies and various kinds of studies, without actually randomly assigning people to exposures, of course, more research is always valued.

Again, at the risk of differing too consistently with my esteemed colleague, Dr. Fisher, I would not argue that correlation is causation, by any means, but I'm not familiar with the statistic you cited from the FBI. However, research on rapists and other sexual offenders actually shows that they have not been exposed less to pornography. They've been exposed more at an earlier age and, most importantly, they report being affected by it more.

Consistent with our findings, you could have, given a confluence of factors, one person exposed to pornography and it's not going to affect them, except maybe that they'll masturbate, or maybe it won't affect them at all. It might even affect them in certain circumstances to be more sexually desirous toward their partner. However, for somebody else who has the risk factors, that same exposure can have a very different effect and can exacerbate those anti-social tendencies. That's the key to our conclusions, so amount of exposure is in fact not the key.

Starting from the earlier studies by Goldstein et al, which I think Dr. Fisher is referring to, and a lot of studies since then, do show that sex offenders have often been exposed to more pornography at an earlier age. They've been more affected by it, and over the life course, in fact, are exposed to more rather than less, which somehow used to be believed. However, if you look at the systematic studies that look across different studies in meta-analytical way—I'll be glad to give the reference to that—they show that more pornography exposure is the case for sex offenders, and more of the violent sexual offenders.

Again, I caution that does not show there is a causation. I would agree with Dr. Fisher that many college students, the majority of college students, let's say, who regularly use pornography, are not affected in that same way, but I would say that with those who have the more anti-social tendencies, according to the research, it can indeed reinforce and strengthen those tendencies.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Thank you very much. Your time is up.

Dr. Eyolfson.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thanks to all of you for coming.

My first question is for you, Dr. Roberts, because you're a specialist in childhood and childhood memories. We had some testimony on March 23 from Professor Gahagan from Dalhousie University. She talked about the need for a sexual health promotion strategy so that children, teachers, and parents would have the tools to help deal with this, particularly when we talk about the risk out there of accidental exposure.

In your view, is there a need for a national educational and promotional strategy for sexual health?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

I think that would be an excellent idea. Now, bear in mind that a lot of the sex education that children get has now been pulled from the curriculum through parents' concerns and so on. Certainly it's still within the Ontario curriculum, which is what I know best. There's a lot of emphasis put on trying to teach children how to be responsible on the Internet—i.e., your account will be up forever, so don't put these types of materials out there.

It's not having any effect. It's not doing anything.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Is it possible that some of the positive effects from this kind of education are being interfered with by the fact that so many parents are taking their children out of it?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

Quite possibly. What happens is that if children aren't taught by credible sources—it could be parents, it could be teachers, or it could be whoever the person is who could do that—then children will learn things on the playground that are often very unreliable. I've had teenagers say to me, “I took two pills because we had sex twice that night.” This is the type of thing they're learning. It's all rumour. It's all distorted information.

So yes, I think there needs to be a really thoughtful discussion on how we can best equip children. It's difficult in the sense that a lot of the skills you need for this are quite mature skills. There's a type of perspective-taking that you need to have. If you quickly type something in Snapchat or Facebook.... With Facebook especially, you learn that it's there forever. This works with very extreme examples, but for just little things, such as putting out some political opinion, it can later come back to bite you.

That type of perspective-taking is very difficult for people to have. I think it's difficult because we always think of perspective-taking as “your view, my view”, but it's actually chronological as well, right? It's thinking about the perspective now and the perspective in 10 or 20 years. That's what I think is very difficult for children to grab hold of.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Sure. Thank you.

I'll go back to a further statement made by Dr. Gahagan when questioned about this. As you say, we do find that there seems to be an issue here. Dr. Gahagan's opinion was that there should not be an opt-out for this for education, because there is such a public health issue with it. This should be a subject like math. You can't opt out of math. You can't opt out of English. You can't opt out of history.

Is there enough of a problem here to say that you cannot opt out of this?

[Dr. Kim Roberts]

That's very difficult for me to answer, because I realize that there are lots and lots of different opinions, some based on cultural values. I mean, parents have lots of reasons for doing that. To me, it's part of health, part of health development, part of respecting and protecting yourself, just the same way any other aspect of health would be. It's taking responsibility for yourself as well.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

All right. Thank you.

Dr. Malamuth, there's a mention in here of an article entitled “The Importance of Individual Differences in Pornography Use”. You made reference to the impact of wider media, things that are available beyond the Internet, such as what's on TV and what's in magazines. Would you say that there is an influence on wider social media? Is there enough exposure to at least the suggestion of this violent and degrading material that's having an effect on children?

[Prof. Neil Malamuth]

I try to focus primarily on what I can say with confidence based on the research findings. It's very difficult, if not impossible, in North America to do the kind of research on children that we've done with adults. What I've written about the effects on children I've extrapolated from the research on adults, arguing that these kinds of effects are at least as likely, probably considered more likely, to occur with children, who have less experience and perhaps less ability to access other kinds of information and so forth.

I think it is the case that you can't necessarily isolate pornography exposure from a whole host of other influences, and many other media influences, but at the same time there has been a change over the years in what children may be exposed to. I think we all agree that at least on a survey basis, we need to have more information about that.

Again anecdotally, in talking to parents and to some underage individuals, I'm amazed at how they can access certain kinds of pornography that were not available when I grew up—and certainly, if that pornography were was available, it was very difficult to access. As a parent, yes, I am concerned about how that is affecting our children.

Coming back to the issue of legal control, I think it's impossible any longer to control that from a legal perspective. It's just so rampant and accessible that the best we can do is to try to educate kids in a way that will inoculate them to the potential negative effects on some of the individuals. That's what I'd like to see more emphasis on at the children's level, as well as trying to reduce the chances of people stumbling upon on it or having too easy access to it.

By and large, I think sexual education that is more primary, that is a more about a healthy type of sexuality, is where we should probably be focusing with children.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

The time's up.

Mr. Webber.

[Len Webber, Conservative, Calgary Confederation, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll direct my question to Dr. Roberts.

I see that you wrote a nice letter to all of us indicating that you offer your support for motion M-47. You said, “On behalf of Canadian children across the country, I thank you for your consideration to take definitive action to moderate this damaging aspect of our children's lives.”

Dr. Eyolfson mentioned sex education and how we can best teach kids at an educational level, which is mainly a provincial jurisdiction. What other ideas do you have with respect to taking definitive action in order to alleviate issues of child porn?