Health Committee on April 11th, 2017

[Lianna McDonald]

Okay, yes.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thanks.

I did want to congratulate you and thank you for the work you're doing with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and the work you're doing to stop the abuse of children and the sexual exploitation and violence against children. It's a really important group you have, and I have great support for it.

I want to move the conversation away from the criminal activity. When I look at the public health effects of online violence and degrading sexually explicit images, I think about who's most vulnerable other than the participants, obviously. It's the accidental exposure of children and youth to those images.

We've had some discussion about age verification. I can appreciate how effective that would be but difficult to implement. You mentioned in your testimony helping parents with child protection tools. In the conversations I've had, in my own personal experience, it is very difficult with parental tools right now. It seems that if you put screens in, they block out 90% of Internet material, and you're having a big fight with your kids because they can't access the sites they want to get to. If you take them off, then there are no filters. There doesn't seem to be a....

You mentioned there were child protection tools available for parents to work with that we could maybe look at in the short term. Do you have a list of them? Do you know which apps there are? I think it would be very helpful if we could communicate, as a committee, the current tools that are available for parents.

[Lianna McDonald]

Yes, and just to echo your point, it is very difficult to manage that.

These are my final two points. One, we'd be happy to put that together. I have a brilliant team who can help pull some information, and we would submit it to the committee for review. We have to have a starting place. There has to be someplace where we start. That would be one thing.

The other thing is that, as we have talked about today in terms of these other new remedies, the U.K. is doing some very remarkable work. There is one individual there, Mr. John Carr. We've been in communication with him about some of these new remedies it's putting forward. It might be worth the committee's time to have him join you by video conference to walk the committee through some of the hurdles it went through, how it did the consultations, and what some of the outcomes of those efforts were. It is doing some really important things there.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Great. Thank you very much, and thanks for taking a few more minutes to answer those questions. I appreciate that.

[Lianna McDonald]

Thank you.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you, again, for your testimony.

I will ask you the same question. Are you aware of tools, apps, or things that parents could be using that give you a better filter than the very clumsy ones that are available for most electronic devices?

[Cordelia Anderson]

There are a number of tools. Again, we could compare lists and help get a list for you. As important as that is, what different studies have repeatedly shown was the failure of parents to use them, or to know how to use them, or to get access to them, and the limits of what we can get individual parents to do, because there's been a pretty hard push towards that. There are lists, and we can talk about those. There are issues with the fact that the older and more sophisticated your children get, the better they can quickly learn how to get around those, so there are limits to them as well. They exist, but also, I want to remind you, because you've heard this testimony quite a bit, that they put the burden back on individual parents as opposed to a collective leadership.

I think there's room for both. I believe firmly in education of children and parents, but I believe that we need to do something about making their job easier.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I absolutely agree. I just have to say that as a parent of a 12-year-old, I have tried to find better tools. I have to tell you that it's been a difficult search. I still haven't found effective strategies, and I want them.

[Cordelia Anderson]

We'll get you that list. We'll work with Lianna and we'll get you the list.

One thing I just want to keep in mind is that, while I spoke to broader issues than education, many will say that the best tool you have is open and ongoing conversations with your children about why you're concerned about this content and why you don't want them to have access to it. I know you do that well.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

That was my next line of questioning. We heard that the public health mandate is “developing, implementing, and evaluating public health policies, programs, and services aimed at promoting and protecting the health of Canadians.” I know you are coming at this from a U.S....

We already talked about education. One of our witnesses, who was a doctoral student, said that pornography is “a part of a much larger discussion about improving sexual health, especially for youth, in Canada” and that it begs the question of “how can sexuality education be made more consistent, coordinated, and comprehensive across the provinces?”

When the Province of Ontario tried to introduce a comprehensive sex education program, Forum Research showed that one in six parents considered pulling their children out of public school because of the sex ed program, and in fact 3% did, according to that same research.

How do we close that gap? There seems to be a great resistance amongst many parents to having sex education happening in the school system, and yet everything I've heard from you and from Lianna has been that this is where it's needed, with which I agree. How do we close that gap?

[Cordelia Anderson]

I think I'll let the pediatrician start here, and then I'll jump in.

[Dr. Sharon Cooper]

That's a really good question. One of the things we have found, from the perspective of health in general, is that sexuality has to be brought into the conversation in infancy. When we are seeing our patients as they go to preschool and toddler groups, we should be talking about sexuality at that point so that it's not a taboo subject for parents. The American Academy of Pediatrics, and I'm sure the Canadian academy as well, fosters this in pediatricians and family medicine physicians to try to really make sure that parents understand that if they make a child's sexuality a taboo subject, the child is at greater risk of being exploited, because they don't know what may happen to them.

One of the things that have been spoken of is to follow the model of bringing sex education—I'll call it sex education but I'll try not to call it sex education—into the school system under a different rubric. One system is bringing it in under computer safety, in computer classes, so that you're talking about how to be safe in the online world and in the off-line world. That is one way that parents will accept pretty readily, because they do want their children to be safe in that setting.

The other way to bring it in from the perspective of helping children to be safe is to bring it in within physical education, helping them understand that in order for children to be completely healthy, they need to not be overweight or sleep-deprived. If they are going to be adequate students, they have to have these parts of their lives under control. Another component of it is Internet use, because Internet use in general can really distract children from their ability to study well, and they become very driven at times, if they become addicted to Internet behaviours, to include video gaming and pornography.

If one uses that model, one could then begin to say, “These are the five most common things that will detract from a child's academic performance.” Really focusing on the role of the Internet and the content in there is another way that isn't really so much about sex education. It's about education. It's about how your child can be a better student. How can you help them be more productive in their online behaviour so that it doesn't distract them from what they're trying to learn?

It's really about how you frame the messages to parents, because parents are afraid of the whole issue of “Don't take away my teaching my child about sexuality”, but parents teach their children about sexuality hardly at all.

Consequently, the school systems do have to be more mindful of alternative methods of bringing that kind of information in.

[Cordelia Anderson]

I've seen different types of studies—I don't have them right here—that show that many parents want help, especially about this. In fact, I had one person—and Dr. Dines has probably experienced this too—who was very anti-sexuality education. He knew I spoke pro-comprehensive sexuality education, so he was there to just be upset with me. After listening, his counter was, “Listening to you talk about the harms of pornography is the first time I've believed that we need a comprehensive sexuality education that includes this reality of the cultural messages in our world, with our hypersexualized media and pornography, and we need help.”

There are different studies that point to that. To Dr. Cooper's point, it's talking about health, about the science, and about the brain.

[John Oliver, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I want to get a quick question in because I'm going to run out of time. Are there any jurisdictions in the U.S. that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

You're out of time. We're out of time. I'm finding there are no short answers on this subject, but we're well over the time for this question period.

Now we're going to move to our second question period, with Ms. Harder.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

My first question is going to go to Ms. Dines. You used a few phrases I thought were key. One of them is that pornography, particularly violent pornography, drains the health care system. The second thing you said is that it hurts the economy.

Can you please expand on those two points for us?

[Dr. Gail Dines]

First of all, we know from the violence that is perpetrated because of the use of pornography.... One of the leading causes of oral cancer today among youth is the HPV virus, which is caused by oral sex. We know that's one of the biggest growing groups for all cancer in adolescent girls. We know that for anal injuries, all kinds of injuries end up in the medical system.

We know that a good percentage of men who were studied have put it between 40% to 70% of men access pornography at work. What does that do to the workplace in terms of sexual harassment when you go in to have a meeting with maybe your male boss or your male colleague, and he has just been masturbating to pornography? How is he going to see you?

We also know that it causes depression and anxiety. As a college professor, my students come into class at 18, and they are so tired, exhausted, and depressed from having to deal with the porn culture. I want to specifically talk about girls because we've focused on boys. This is a key issue of gender equality. Are we going to allow our boys access to images that tell them women are nothing more than orifices to be pounded away, and that they have no rights to arrive at equality, integrity, and equal pay? All the things that women want, which is really a life of dignity, and a life to be free from fear of poverty and violence.

The questions we want to ask are what kind of men are we going to bring up, and what is going to be the cost to the women and the children of having to deal with these men? It is going to be profound. My Ph.D. is in sociology and communication, and it's very important to say there is no way—and you can pick any type of effect you want—that any male who masturbates to pornography will walk away unchanged. The question is how is he going to change? We have enough data to know that it's a continuum of effects. That is, anything from seeing her more as a sex object to wanting rough pounding anal sex, right through to rape and murder.

I want us to focus a little more on the issue of gender equity and not just around boys.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

My next question goes to Sharon Cooper. I'm wondering, again, if you can bring some further thoughts to a couple of your quotes. You talked about what you called distorted cognition, and then you also talked about what you called mirror neuron research.

Can you please comment and further expand on each of those points for me, please?

[Dr. Sharon Cooper]

What we know about sex offenders, especially child sex offenders, is that they frequently have a cognitive distortion that their desire is the victim's desire. They often will say that the reason they did this is because she wanted it. This cognitive distortion is a very common thing that those who treat sex offenders have to first address. That is one of the reasons adults who show children adult pornography are doing this. The pornography excites the adult, and in their cognitive distortion they think it will excite the child as well, when in fact that's not the case.

The other question you asked me was about mirror neuron research. This started around 2007 from Italy. Researchers began to notice from functional MRI studies and others that when people were looking at something, multiple parts of the brain were lighting up as compared to just the eyeball and the optic nerve going to the back of the brain. These other parts of the brain, the temporal part, the frontal part, they thought had nothing to do with vision. They were absolutely right. It helped us to recognize that what those mirror neurons taught us is that when we see something, our body starts to react in many ways. Our heart rate can increase and our blood pressure can go up, because our body becomes convinced we are experiencing what we are seeing at those moments.

This is relevant when we talk about the role of Internet pornography whether it's youth or adults. It causes the body to have a reaction that is much more than what you see. Now there are over 1,000 papers written about mirror neuron research, and I definitely encourage you to look into it.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you very much.

My last question will go to Cordelia. We've had a lot of conversation today, of course, with regard to the impact that pornography, particularly violent pornography, has on women and girls but also on the attitudes and perceptions of men and boys.

In your estimation, what can be done and what should be done? If you were to outline your three top priorities, what would they be?

[Cordelia Anderson]

As a person who has spent a great deal of my time in trying to prevent sexual violence and child sexual abuse—sexual exploitation, particularly—we used to always focus on how to help people reduce their chances of being victimized, looking at that. We're now really thinking about how to help not grow those who will perpetrate acts of sexual harm.

That to me means that we have to look at the impact of pornography on that. We cannot prevent sexual violence, child sexual abuse, and child sexual exploitation and promote sexual health without stopping the exposure to pornography and helping them understand what it is doing to them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Your time is up.

Go ahead, Dr. Eyolfson.

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

Thank you.

Thank you very much, all, for coming.

Dr. Cooper, there was a question I was going to put to you, and you actually made a reference to something that leads right into this question. I was going to ask you a question about pornography and how it seems to be infiltrating more mainstream culture. We see pornography in...of course it's on the Internet. Before that, it was those shady video stores. But there's more of these kinds of imagery and attitudes that are getting into what we would call mainstream culture—TV, radio, and that sort of thing.

You mentioned Grand Theft Auto. Fortunately, I've never played this game. I've been told by others that among the things that you can do in the course of playing that game is kill sex trade workers.

[Dr. Sharon Cooper]

Yes. That's right.

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

It is one of the things you can do in this game, apparently.