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.