Health Committee on April 11th, 2017

[Dr. Gail Dines]

We need to do something, and I'll tell you why. If we do not do anything, it is a mass dereliction of duty on the part of adults to hand our children over to the pornographers. It is our duty as full citizens to protect our children. It is also our duty to make sure there is gender equity. As an elected official, as a government, I think it is your duty to take care of the citizens of your country.

This is a very full statement that you have made about pornography as a public health issue. You need governmental action. You cannot ask any industry to voluntarily monitor itself. We know what happens when you ask them to do that. They lie and they cheat because they're interested in maximizing profits.

I think, at this moment in time, you need to bring down legislation. You need to follow the U.K. example. Rather than making it voluntary—opt-in, opt-out—you need to make it law. You also need to bring in age verification and make it work. Do not ask industry to monitor itself because it fails every time.

[Dr. Sharon Cooper]

I would have to agree with Dr. Dines. It's too accessible to children. It just is. If we don't eradicate this accessibility, then we will not be able to justify all of the actions that we're seeing that are negative about our children because of the unknown sexual messages that are being promoted to them on such a common ground.

I would agree with both of those measures.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

All right. I'll give my remaining time to the next questioner.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

We'll go right to Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

I want to ask a couple of hard questions on sociological evidence, because we heard some of this last week.

Dr. Fisher testified at this committee that, over the last 25 years, since the mid-1990s when we had the real advent of the Internet and Internet-based pornography, the rates of sexual assault in Canada have not gone up.

What would be your comment on that? Would we not expect that to go up if, in fact, there was a clear linkage with pornography?

[Dr. Gail Dines]

First of all, he's an outlier in the field of research. Let's be very clear.

When you do social or physical sciences, you go with the weight of the evidence. You don't go with one study here or there. It's the same as global warming. I can show you some junk science that says there's no such thing as global warming. You know that in the scientific community it is not a question. There are numerous questions to be asked, but nobody's saying there's no such thing as global warming. I would put Dr. Fisher in the same example as a global warming denier.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

But is he wrong, Professor Dines, about the rates of sexual assault?

[Dr. Gail Dines]

I'll tell you what I don't know. I don't know the statistics.

What I do know is that what has probably gone down profoundly is the reporting. Many women will not report that they have been sexually abused or raped, because what happens after is that they get a second rape in at the police station in terms of emotionally being raped, being told that they're not telling the truth, often being called liars.

What happens, I know, across college campuses in the United States, and I'm sure in Canada, is that when a woman speaks out, the college closes ranks and protects the college. Often the friends of the rapist start harassing the woman. It is the woman who has been raped who leaves; he's left in college. In terms of speaking to young people who've been raped, I can tell you as a college professor for 30 years that I can count on one hand the number of students who have gone forward to report their rape.

Now if on average a quarter of my students over 30 years have been raped, and a quarter of the women I've spoken to at different colleges, but I can literally put on one hand—

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Professor Dines, hasn't that always been the case? When was it a positive experience for women to report rape, or when were they taken seriously?

[Dr. Gail Dines]

I don't think it has ever been positive, but I think it has gotten worse, because the more that pornography becomes part of our sexual templates and culture, the more we think that maybe women deserve this, maybe she's a liar, maybe she's a slut. All the ideologies of pornography come to bear on a legal system. You just have to look at some of the results, some of the judges and the lawyers who come out against rape victims. One judge very famously said of a 12-year-old, “She was a little bit promiscuous for her age,” after she was raped by her father.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

We've had some of those experiences in Canada recently.

Ms. Cooper or Ms. Anderson, do you have any thoughts?

[Dr. Sharon Cooper]

Briefly, what I would say is that we have seen the incidence of child sexual abuse declining in our country. However, we have seen the incidence of child sexual abuse images, which are the most objective measures of child sexual abuse logarithmically, exponentially increasing.

We have more than 150 million images on the Internet now of children who have been raped. The overwhelming majority of these children never made a disclosure. The only way that we found them was because we saw the images first.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

I'm sorry, I have to end that now. I'm very sorry we have to leave, but we have to go to a vote now. It's part of our process here.

I want to thank you very much for coming. I'm sorry if we seem rushed, but we have 20 minutes and 37 seconds to get to the vote.

I want to address Ms. Harder's issue about going over the time. Every single question and every single answer was over the time today, but when we have two or three witnesses, it goes over. When I did cut off one witness a few meetings ago, Mr. Webber took exception to that at the time. It's a balance I have to choose as chair. I try to let the witnesses complete their answers. I don't like to interrupt them, but if they do go over...in that case it was three and a half minutes beyond. I just want you to know that every single question went over.

Thanks very much, and thank you to the witnesses.

The meeting is adjourned.