Mr. Speaker, today's topic of conversation might be a little bit awkward for some. I am going to talk about sex, but I am not talking about sex between two people who have consented as adults. I am talking about sexual acts performed for the sake of entertaining a remote audience.
I am talking about pornography, which is an industry that targets young people to get them hooked on their product as children in order to profit from them for life. I am talking about an industry that produces a product that portrays violent, degrading, and dehumanizing acts toward women. I am talking about a product that plays a significant role in shaping the development and attitudes of our nation's young people.
We no longer exist in the year of 1985, a time when those who wanted to access pornographic materials had to enter a public place and pay for said materials. In the digital age, there is no store clerk to verify a user's name. In fact, many children are not even looking for pornography when they stumble across it for the first time on the Internet. This is 2016, and where there is Wi-Fi, there is access to pornography. The videos that are often accessed, however, are not the so-called miracle-of-life educational videos. The videos that are most often accessed nowadays are, in fact, violent in nature.
The material I refer to often goes by the label “hard core”. These videos are graphic, exploitive, dehumanizing, sadistic, aggressive, and altogether violent. They are humiliating. They routinely show men ignoring consent and performing sexual acts on women against their will. These videos are readily available and easily accessed by children during school hours and at home. This is deeply concerning, because there is a growing body of medical research that has shown that early age exposure to sexually explicit material is harmful to the development of young people.
Exposure to sexually explicit material does the following. It influences youth's sexual values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour. It shapes youth's expectations of relationships and love. It incites youth to experiment sexually before they are ready or prepared, and also gives them expectations of body image, which are often unrealistic. It can lead to compulsive behaviour and addiction. It feeds the demand for sex trafficking and sex workers, and lures youth into a field that they would not otherwise enter. Most alarmingly, it shapes the attitudes of boys and men toward women, and it blurs the boundaries of consent.
The average age of first exposure among boys is at the age of 12. This is often before they have hit puberty, or have had the opportunity to receive proper sex education or an understanding of consent. In fact, many young people are reporting that pornography serves as their primary source of information with regards to sex. This is extremely frightening, given that 90% of mainstream sexually explicit content features violence against women, and in fact goes so far as to normalize it.
It comes as no surprise then that young people who watch violent pornography are significantly more likely to hold a negative attitude towards other genders. They are also more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behaviour, including non-consensual violent acts toward women. Several studies have shown that youth who view pornography engage in higher levels of delinquent behaviour and, due to higher incidences of depressive symptoms and decreased emotional bonding, often lack in their social development.
Lois Roth, director of the Caribou Child and Youth Centre has noted that, “Positive messaging about gender and relationship equality, consent and respect, are undermined by this mainstream industry, which promotes and endorses sexual and physical violence.”
The issue of pornography is not just an issue of physical security for women and girls but of the mental effects and brain development of our nation's young people. Viewing pornography can shift a young person's psychological and emotional perception of other genders, and it further creates a flawed perception of what it looks like to be in a healthy sexual relationship.
Viewing pornography causes women to go from being a sister, a daughter, a niece, a neighbour, a person, to being little more than just an object. Women become a hair colour, an age, a body type, a breast size, or simply a living sex toy.
Because of the quantity of pornography that is consumed by individuals, the values that are taught in school and at home are simply just not enough. They become overwhelmed.
Dr. Victor Cline, a researcher in psychology, stated that in the scientific world, the question of pornography effects was no longer a hot issue, that the scientists and professionals were no longer pretending not to know.
Everybody knows that pornography can cause harm. It can also change people's sexual appetite, values, and behaviours. It can also condition people into deviancy and cause addictive behaviour.
The president of the Australian Medical Association also noted that there had been an increase in sexually transmitted diseases and violent practices which were not the norm and were accompanied by the availability of porn. This was resulting in physical and mental harm in youth.
In Canada, we prohibit young people from access to alcohol or tobacco because of the negative impact on their healthy development. We delay their ability to access these substances because they have not reached the age of majority, the time when our society considers youth capable of making a fully informed decision. Therefore, why are we allowing pornography then to go unregulated when it too has a negative impact on the development of our young people?
Ph.D Gail Dines likens the unregulation of pornography to “standing outside a convenience store handing out cigarettes” to kids.
Surprisingly, Parliament has not studied the impact of sexually explicit content since 1985, well before the Internet existed. That is over 30 years, as my hon. colleague has already pointed out. During this time, there have been huge advancements in terms of how pornography has evolved.
The worldwide revenue from porn is estimated at $57 billion, which is more than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo or Apple. The mainstreaming of pornography increases daily. This is having a significant impact on how boys grow up perceiving women and thus treat them during adulthood. One in three women in Canada will experience sexual assault in their lifetime.
One in three women will be harassed, inappropriately touched, taken advantage of, or forced into sexual acts against their will. In addition, one in three of these women will be under the age of 16. These are women and girls in Canada, our daughters, our granddaughters, our nieces, and our sisters.
It took a generation of feminists to legalize pornography in North America. Pornography was seen as a positive force for the liberation of a woman's sexuality. Four decades later, a new generation of feminists is now fighting against the negative impact that pornography is having on their lives.
It is truly scary how many boys do not understand that “no” does in fact mean “no”. At the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, which I am a part of, the mother of Rehtaeh Parsons explained to us how one of the boys that raped her daughter did not even understand that what he did was in fact rape. He felt that it was just simply appropriate sexual behaviour with a peer. That peer committed suicide.
We need to understand the impact that pornography is having on our young people. We need to change the attitudes and behaviours that are fuelling violence against women and girls.
As policy-makers, we have a shared responsibility to take a stand for the health and the well-being of all Canadians. We have a particular obligation to ensure the healthy development of our children.
Today, I respectfully ask my colleagues from all sides of the House to support Motion No. 47. Together we can help ensure that women and girls are treated with dignity instead of degradation, as human beings instead of objects.