Hi. It's wonderful to be here, and it's great to follow this up. I really appreciate your doing this study and the opportunity to address this group.
For over forty years, I have worked to promote sexual health and to prevent sexual harm. I began my study at the program in human sexuality at the University of Minnesota, where I was trained, at that time, that pornography was harmless and was, indeed, a sexual aid. I learned a lot about the importance of promoting sexual health and fighting sexual oppression. When I left there, I started one of the first child sexual abuse prevention programs in the U.S.A., and I was a consulting therapist for those who commit acts of harm and for those who were harmed. That all changed my understanding of the impact of pornography on individuals and culture.
Others who have testified so far have mentioned that this is an unregulated social experiment so great that we don't yet know the full extent of the harm or the impact. Some who have testified argued that, because of what they called a lack of research and trends, there is no demonstrative harm. I'm here with my colleagues today to point out that there's a wide range of credible research and trends that clearly point to this as a public health issue that requires a parallel range of efforts to counter.
I want to just go back to Dr. Cooper's comments about the brain. For me, some of the brain research is critical to understanding this as a public health issue. I am not a neuroscientist, but I can cite a lot of the research, guide you to where that is, and try to find some of the simple essence. There are 32 studies and 10 reviews of literature. Very simply put, the neurons that fire together, wire together. Whatever the brain does a lot of, what we do a lot of, we get good at, and it literally changes our brains. The potential for harm is not related to the nudity, but rather the novelty. The brain is malleable. It's always changing.
You heard about the mirror cells. There's also innate programming that's triggered by unrealistic supranormal stimulus: we're drawn to the bigger, the shinier, the brighter. Also, when there's a spike in dopamine and other feel-good chemicals like there is with pornography use, it reduces the ability to achieve the same intensity with a real-life partner. People get desensitized and habituated. They develop a craving for more. The reward centre of the brain wants its fix. When the brain is queued up from consumption, it actually over-responds. The frontal lobe is rewired, and the brain's brake pads to the reward centre, some argue, are gone, and some say are worn out. When that happens, the brain is wired for reward, and that's why there's a growing link to problematic sexual behaviour and sexual aggression.
Further, the brain science is pointing to a biological addiction. You can go to the website yourbrainonporn.com for a compilation of all of those studies and analyses. The fact that children's and adolescent's brains are still under development is why we are so concerned about the additional impact on children.
Now, central to public health, along with the effect on the brain, is the environment. The environment matters to public health. When these toxic images are normalized—which you've heard a lot about—in the hypersexualized mainstream media, as well as in pornography, then that's what most have access to. At the same time, we're censoring healthy images and healthy messages. We wonder why individuals are making the choices they are. It's because toxic decisions make sense in a toxic environment. When there's so much of this stuff out there, consumers don't even know the difference. If they're under a certain age, they haven't even seen the difference.
Let's talk more about children and youth.
Children should be learning about building caring relationships and connections that are mutually respectful, about understanding consent, and about understanding identity. What they're learning from pornography about sex is that it is about performance, about men getting off and women getting men off. It's about physically and emotionally harming another person.
Consent doesn't matter in pornography. Indeed, sex is framed as sexual abuse and aggression, and women's needs don't matter. Pain and degradation are simply to be tolerated. That's why, in a survey of children in the U.K., an 11-year-old boy asked, “If I have a girlfriend, do I need to strangle her when I have sex with her?” The girls were asking if they had to have anal sex even if it hurt, and if they had to be shared with their boyfriends' friends.
A mother called me. I get lots of calls from parents. She was desperate to find help for their 13-year-old son who was very bright, very good on technology. He found porn. The parents did everything they could. They locked up the technology. He broke in. They sent him to two therapists. Both therapists, while this boy was getting worse and worse, said, “Hey, a 13-year-old boy, perfectly natural, normal sex drive, get over it”. The boy then acted out on a younger girl.
Individual stories do not make this a public health issue, but other studies and trends do. A study of 14- to 21-year-olds shows that 9% of them engaged in some form of sexually abusive behaviour and in that 9% there was much more use of violent sexual material. An Australian study showed that, of seven- to 11-year-olds who were in treatment for problematic sexual behaviour, 75% of the boys and 67% of the girls had been oriented through pornography. In the U.K. between 2013 and 2016, there was a rise in child-on-child sexual abuse by over 80%. Another study of 300 teens' media consumption and sexting behaviour found a statistically significant link between porn use and sexting.
In Peggy Orenstein's book Girls & Sex, she interviewed more than a hundred girls, and the girls talked about being emotionally disconnected from their bodies. They were expecting sex to hurt, and further, they didn't believe they should say anything, which is very frustrating to those of us doing sexual violence prevention work for so long.
An Italian study of male high school students said that almost 22% defined their porn use as habitual, 10% said they had lost interest in a real-life partner, 9.1% described their own use as a kind of addiction, and 19% talked about how it created abnormal sexual responses.
The Fortify program is an online treatment program designed for children and youth to find help for their concerns about pornography. In a little over two years more than 35,300 youth found their way to the site and went through the program: 87% were male, 75% viewed their first porn between ages nine and 13. There are strong links with depression and anxiety, which fits with Philip Zimbardo's research outlined in Man Interrupted, where he looked at what's happening to our boys and men in education and in the workplace. Why are they losing ground? He called it a social intensity syndrome, and he found two key factors—so much time on video games and so much time on Internet pornography, away from social interaction—were creating a social awkwardness and attention deficit.
There are also studies that show a second-hand effect from pornography. If I block my children from seeing it, they're still affected by the expectations and behaviours of others.
You've heard a lot about child sexual abuse materials, but I want to say two other things about that. When a child is 13 and looks at images of 13-year olds, that's probably more normative than looking at an adult, but it's in the illegal category.
If they stay fixated, which we're now seeing more of them doing, that becomes a huge problem. For men who are not pedophiles but they get used to wanting new and different stuff, they're used to seeing children sexualized in mainstream media and pornography, and they start looking at these images of younger and younger children. The reality is that the porn industry is not responding to demand but shaping demand for its own profit.
Timothy Kahn, who treats juveniles who sexually offend, says he always assesses youth for their pornography use because he sees that the sexual behaviours of so many of them were triggered by pornography. For adults there's a meta-analysis of 22 studies in seven countries that say there's accumulated data that leaves little doubt that more porn use is affecting not only attitudes but sexually aggressive behaviour.
Contrary to the porn industry and others who have testified saying this is harmless, the fact that there is such a rapid increase in porn-induced erectile dysfunction among our boys and among our men shows yet another health consequence.
A public health response means we cannot arrest, prosecute, incarcerate, legislate, treat, or educate our way out of this. This is a public health issue that requires us to assure conditions in which people can be healthy. We help them to make the healthy choice.
Effective public health initiatives have shown this cannot be done with education alone. Let me give you an example: toxic polluted water. If we have a toxic polluted water source, one of our choices could be to educate children about how great it would be to have intake of pure and healthy water and the potential harms of polluted water. We can educate their parents to put on better filters to protect them. We can educate our health providers to learn about the symptoms when harm is showing up in their bodies from drinking so much polluted water, and we can listen to a lot of people who say, “Hey, there's nothing we can do about all that polluted water. So many people have had it that there's nothing we can do”.
Otherwise, we could listen to the leaders who say, “Hey, maybe while doing all those other things, we should focus on the source of the polluted water.”
There are no studies that show pornography is helpful to children, youth, or culture, yet there's a range of studies that show it's polluting individual and collective sexual and relational health and wellness. I've outlined a range of actions in my written brief. I'm happy to address those during our questions.
Thank you.