At last, politicians with the courage to stop our children being destroyed by easy access to porn
IN 2018, Dr Mary Aiken was before the Oireachtas Children’s Committee when the discussion turned to the impact of pornography on young people.
At this stage, Dr Aiken should probably need no introduction, but for anyone who doesn’t know: she’s the country’s – and possibly the world’s – most eminent expert on the psychology of the internet.
As well as having published the leading books on the subject, she’s academic adviser to the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol and a Fellow of the Society for Chartered IT Professionals. She has served as an Adjunct Associate Professor at University College Dublin; as a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Cyber Analytics at AIRS; and Sensemaking Fellow at the IBM Network Science Research Centre. Dr Aiken is a former lecturer in Criminology and Research Fellow at the School of Law, Middlesex University; she has held a Research Fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; and is the former Director of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Cyberpsychology Research Centre.
Oh, and the hit US TV show CSI: Cyber is based on her and her work.
So when the question about the impact of pornography on children was asked, Dr Aiken gave – as you might expect – a very considered answer.
She accepted that from a pure research point of view, there was no definitive causational evidence linking pornography to sexual violence by children. (This is hardly surprising: to prove causation, you’d have to take a group of at least 1,000 children, expose half of them to hardcore pornography for a lengthy period, then measure the difference between the two groups. You’d struggle to get that particular study past the Ethics Board).
Shudder
But, having given the answer on pure research, Dr Aiken added the following statement – and it’s one that should make every parent, teacher, garda, social worker and policymaker in the State shudder. She said simply: ‘It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if an eight-year-old boy is looking at hardcore pornography, by the time he is 18 he will be damaged as a result of exposure to that content.’
Pretty clear, no? And even that’s not the same as saying there’s no evidence of the harm being done to children by pornography: the proof may not yet be ‘causative’, but it’s still pretty damn persuasive.
In 2017, for example, the Australian Institute of Family Studies published a research report into the effect of children’s exposure to pornography. Among its key findings was this: ‘Pornography may strengthen attitudes supportive of sexual violence and violence against women.’ The report went on to say: ‘Adolescent pornography use is associated with stronger beliefs in gender stereotypes, particularly for males. Male adolescents who view pornography frequently are more likely to view women as sex objects and to hold sexist attitudes.’
Eight years earlier, another Australian academic, Dr Michael Flood of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University, published a paper which found that ‘especially among boys and young men who are frequent consumers of pornography, including of more violent materials, consumption intensifies attitudes supportive of sexual coercion and increases their likelihood of perpetrating assault’.
I’ll just emphasise that last line: Exposure to such pornography ‘increases their likelihood of perpetrating sexual assault’.
Dr Flood’s study cited ‘consistent and reliable evidence that exposure to pornography is related to male sexual aggression against women’, and said that ‘this association is strongest for violent pornography and still reliable for nonviolent pornography’.
He added: ‘While such findings cannot simply be extrapolated to children and young people, there is some evidence that high frequency pornography use or consumption of violent pornography is associated with sexually aggressive attitudes and behaviours among adolescent and older boys.’
Terrifying
That’s not all. In 2012 a group of US university academics reported that ‘consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behaviour’. They added: ‘Research suggests that adolescents who use pornography, especially that found on the internet, have lower degrees of social integration, increases in conduct problems, higher levels of delinquent behaviour.’
But, as Dr Aiken pointed out, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work all of that out. It’s blindingly obvious.
What’s truly terrifying though, is that in recent weeks and months we’ve started to see these warnings coming true.
The courts are seeing cases where young children are coming before them charged with serious offences, which started with exposure to pornography and smartphones.
Just think about it: that’s real Irish children – young children – who have committed serious sexual offences after they were exposed to pornography on smartphones.
And that’s the most shocking thing: in every one of these crimes, we are all guilty. We as a society have stood by and allowed young people to be given access to material which is destroying them and destroying others.
We all wring our hands and say how ashamed we are that we let children be abused at industrial schools or in religious-run homes: and yet at the same time, as a society we are collectively inflicting equally horrifying abuse on the children of today. (Except we’re doing it to far, far more of them). As Dr Aiken told the Children’s Committee last year, everyone who allows a child to be exposed to this ‘is collectively involved in the abuse of the child’.
Abuse
What’s worse still is that it’s all so utterly unnecessary. This problem is so, so easy to tackle.
All that’s required is a law telling the tech industry it has to do exactly what we demand our pub owners and shopkeepers do every day: check someone’s age before you serve them an adult product. If Big Tech was told it had a week to come up with a robust, secure, privacy-assured age verification system it would have one ready in three days.
The technology is there: all we need to do is make them act.
We did it with smoking; we did it with headshops. We did it with sunbeds, for God’s sake! We could do this tomorrow… if the political will existed.
And that’s why I’m so heartened that, on Tuesday, our Health Minister became the first senior member of Government to publicly call us out.
Simon Harris didn’t just point out the dangers: he was clear that we have all been ‘burying our heads in the sand’.
And the very next day, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin insisted he would also fight to make tech firms take responsibility for what children can view online.
The reality is that – as with Mr Martin’s smoking ban – change only happens when those in a position of political power and influence are prepared to stand up and demand action.
Hopefully, these interventions have kick-started a process where our elected representatives realise they can no longer hide from their responsibilities.
Or we from ours.