Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
It is a privilege for me to be able to speak with you today. I am a pediatrician who works specifically in child development, especially the healthy development of children and children who are at risk for developmental disorders. I am also a forensic pediatrician and have spent nearly 40 years now working in the area of child maltreatment. The last 18 years have been focused on Internet crimes against children and information and communication technology crimes.
The presence of Internet pornography and its easy availability to children and youth present a significant threat to the psychosexual development of children and youth today. This threat to the children, the inability of their parents to provide protections, and the resultant aberrant sexual behaviour decisions by more and more groups of teens and older adolescents really provides a clear road map of a threat to society. Therefore, looking through the lens of the ecological model, Internet pornography affects the child, the family, the community, and society.
Efforts to protect children from this prurient content were completely acceptable when print materials were restricted from sale to minors. However, since the public availability of information and communication technology, which really began around 1995 or 1996, this content can no longer be controlled without legislative actions. The very nature of the Internet and smart phone technology fosters a sense of digital normalization that causes parents to have a sense of helplessness with respect to trying to intervene and protect their children from unwanted content.
There are seven different ways in which adult pornography harms children. The first is that adults who view this content often use it as a template for production of their own personal materials as they sexually abuse children. These images are often their plan for action. In hundreds of investigations where I have had to review the storage of images and videos of child sexual abuse material, previously referred to as child pornography, there was existing and saved adult pornography content on the hard drives of offenders who were used to replicating the sexual acts of those children as they downloaded, possessed, and traded these images with like-minded offenders.
Second, adults now use adult pornography to entice youth for self-production of similar images, typically for the purpose of blackmail and continued online victimization, now referred to as “sextortion”. It is so easy for an adult to groom a youth into believing that the online explicit material reflects normal sexual relationships and that their romantic interest warrants the child sending mined content to them via the Internet.
Children have described for decades that adult sex offenders will first look at adult pornography just prior to committing a sexual assault. Children have also described the frequent behaviour of sex offenders in encouraging children to view adult pornography with them. This was usually done in hiding and behind locked doors as the offender prepared to sexually assault the child.
Of course, young children do not typically experience the resultant sexual excitation that the offender does, who is under the cognitive distortion that “this will be as good to you as it is to me”. The purpose of the adult pornography in this particular scenario is for the education and seduction of these innocent children. What better and easier means of seducing children is there than to simply pull out a smart phone and show adult pornography videos to an unsuspecting child?
We now recognize that adult pornography has become one of the most common catalysts toward youth sex-offending behaviours against peers and younger children. As these youth become habituated to the content, responding, as do adults, with masturbation and the need for more and more egregious content to become sexually satisfied, they often become in essence “disinhibited” if there is not more content to become sexually satisfied. It isn't uncommon for them to victimize a younger child who is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. These youth also use adult pornography as a means of normalizing sexual acts to younger children, so that the victim child will comply with the nature of the assault.
Another way in which harm occurs to children by adult pornography is the beginning of this downward spiral into anti-social behaviours, as is often noted in online adult content.
When the criminal actions bleed into adolescent relationships, we have the making of both a template for adolescent sexual assault, and—very sadly, these days—more and more cases of memorialization of that sexual assault through cellphone videography and ultimate transmission over the Internet.
A final means of harm to children that is propagated by adult pornography is the visual invitation to seek more and more egregious content. This leads our children down the slippery slope from adult pornography to so-called “barely legal” sites, where adult women and likely adolescent victims are made to look like children, and then eventually to the actual downloading, trading, and possession of child abuse images. This terrible path is life-changing for youth and can cause them to enter into a criminal justice system that changes their futures forever.
From a public health perspective, mirror neuron research has underscored that what we see is more than an image transmitted to our brain. What we see is also processed by other parts of the brain, which convince us that we are actually experiencing what we are seeing. This is particularly relevant to the public health threat of online adult pornography, and especially its impact on children.
I'd like to end my testimony by quoting the words of an imam who testified at a hearing called by our Department of Justice, entitled “Defending childhood: children exposed to violence in 2012”. This national task force, of which I was a member, travelled around the United States for nearly a year, listening to sworn testimony from children, adults, and subject matter experts on the impact of exposure to violence to children. This particular imam spoke of trying to provide counter-messages to his congregation of young, growing adolescents—particularly adolescent males—in the hopes of trying to restore and to underscore the need for respect for women and girls, the need to define misogynistic patterns of behaviour, and the need to be, in essence, an upstanding person. The words of this esteemed leader in the community of Baltimore, Maryland, to youth who were growing up in his community are as I quote, “It is said that what you see is what you get, but I would say instead that what you see is what gets you.”
Thank you very much for your attention.