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.