If you wanted to stop gun massacres, you’d take away guns. So the solution to the tide of porn is obvious too
ALIST of four girls’ names is pinned to the wall of the boys’ toilets in a Cork school. Male pupils are asked to ‘vote’ for one of the girls to be sexually assaulted. Or, as the notice put it, ‘The ones with the most ticks is going to get raped’. Astonishingly, this was not the first time the list appeared, or even the second time. A student from the school, Davis College, told a radio programme last week that this was the third time the list had been pinned. But it was, says the school, the first they heard of it. However, they accept that it had appeared twice before, and are now trying to identify the culprits.
Over the weekend, the four girls on the list issued a statement complaining that the matter had been made public against their wishes. They’re ‘devastated’, they say, that their privacy and dignity have been compromised by media reports – even though they’ve not been named – and that the matter was being ‘dealt with discreetly’ by the school.
And while it must be deeply distressing for those girls and their families, the problem is that this is not a ‘discreet’ issue. If teenage boys feel free to discuss raping fellow pupils, and to do it brazenly and repeatedly without any apparent fear of consequences, that is a matter of national concern. If we had no other evidence that young men, in particular, are being damaged, desensitised and even corrupted by the pornographic material they are accessing online, perhaps the Davis College incident could indeed be considered an aberration. But we do, and it cannot.
Far from being scarce, the evidence of toxic influences on our children’s behaviour is becoming too abundant to ignore. The recent teachers’ conferences heard that assaults, harassment, intimidation and verbal abuse, often of a sexual nature, are commonplace in Irish classrooms: one boy threatened his pregnant teacher that he’d ‘kick the baby out of her’.
And the Belfast rape trial shocked the nation with its almost-casual depiction of the porn-fuelled activities of the young men involved. The kind of behaviour indulged in by Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding could not have been more alien to the Methodist culture in which they were schooled. They didn’t inherit those expectations from previous generations, they didn’t hear of them in any relationships and sexuality classes: ‘spit roasts’ and threesomes are not about love, or pleasure, or respect, they are pornographic tableaux. They are staged by adult filmmakers to appeal to male fantasies, and the women involved are nothing more than receptacles.
And, if anyone doubted that porn was an influence on the men involved, they were put straight by the new evidence that emerged last week. Judge Patricia Smyth had taken the unusual step of maintaining the ban on publication of material heard in the absence of the jury, which is usually lifted once a trial is over. But a media challenge saw the ban removed, and so we heard of another exchange between the men the day after the party in Paddy Jackson’s house.
Rory Harrison, the ‘gentleman’ who had escorted the tearful woman home following the incident, sent Stuart Olding a clip from a porn movie showing a ‘spit roast’. It arrived two hours after they’d met for lunch in a café, even though they’d all denied discussing the early-morning activities. We can’t conclude that clips from porn movies were common currency amongst these young men, only that Harrison knew exactly what he was looking for, and knew where to find it with ease.
Sordid
The Whats App comments, the sharing of pornographic videos, the casual familiarity with ‘spit roasts’ and threesomes – all of the most sordid elements of the case would have been a lot more difficult without smartphones. And I’d venture it’s a safe bet that whoever posted those Cork ‘rape lists’ had a smartphone in his pocket at the time, too.
Commenting on that incident over the weekend, Leo Varadkar linked it directly with ‘the age of social media and the prevalence of pornography’. The solution, he suggested, was to ‘modernise and improve relationships and sex education in our schools’. That’s certainly an element of the solution, just as beefing up classroom security is one element of the battle against school shooters in the US. But, from our perspective, there’s a blindingly obvious answer staring the American people in the face: take the guns away. And yet, even as our Taoiseach acknowledges the ‘prevalence of pornography’ in young people’s lives, his solution is education, relationships and sexuality classes, discussions on consent and respect. All of which is worthy, of course, but it’s on a par with Donald Trump’s ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the aftermath of a school massacre – take the dangerous devices away first, and talk later.
There’s only so much, after all, that you can achieve by strengthening classroom defences against guns. And, copious research shows, teachers battling against the toxic and corrupting effects of early exposure to hardcore porn – available at a couple of clicks on a smartphone – are facing an uphill struggle. If children of nine and ten, buying smartphones with their First Communion money, have seen violent pornographic images by the time they reach secondary school, much harm has already been done. Having no context for what they are seeing, they can be profoundly traumatised by extreme images to the extent that the structure of their brains is permanently altered. Kids who stumbled upon hardcore porn, before they could process it, suffered a neural shock that ‘tattooed’ those images onto the cortex, according to eminent neuroscientist Dr William Struthers, and they can recall them with great clarity years later. This can lead to anti-social behaviour and ‘acting out’ of what they’ve seen, coupled with guilt about having felt aroused by the images and not understanding their reactions.
Even aside from acute examples like the Belfast rape trial and the Cork ‘rape list’, the consequences of children’s exposure to porn, and to unhealthy social media influences, are all around us. ‘Sexting’, where youngsters feel pressured to share naked images, and revenge porn are all products of a culture that encourages them to view their own bodies, and those of others, as commodities. And teachers across the country will tell you that these are issues they deal with on a daily basis, all of them arising since smartphones became commonplace accessories within the last decade.
You can argue that taking smartphones from young kids won’t stop them accessing images on their parents’ or siblings tablets or laptops. But they’re far less likely to hunt for porn on a shared computer, or one located in a family room, compared to the unchecked access available on a privately held device like a phone. And if you’re a vigilant parent who reckons your own supervision will keep them from harm, think again – savvy youngsters are buying new apps designed to look like calculators, but which actually disguise password-protected storage for private images and messages. They’re ahead of you at every turn.
The sort of behaviour exposed by the Belfast trial and the Cork ‘rape lists’ is shocking, and the individuals involved are properly reviled for their attitudes, but they also show that the effects cited by neuroscientists like Dr Struthers are not merely abstract: they have real-life outcomes and real-life victims. And while it is tempting to distance ourselves from these attitudes, and to lay the blame entirely on the shoulders of the perpetrators, the truth is that we’ve been amply warned about the results of early exposure to porn for years. We know how this material affects developing brains, and we know how they’re accessing it. And still there’s political reluctance to take the one step that could actually make a real difference, the restrictions of smartphone access to children.
But when young men think ‘spit roasts’ are a normal expression of human sexuality, when young boys think nothing of listing the girls they’d like to rape, the time for ‘thoughts and prayers’ has passed.