Pornography and sexual violence
By Kath Gelber
The question of pornography and sexual violence has often been debated in Green Left Weekly. Whether pornography has a causal link with sexual violence is crucial to broader questions of censorship. Those who believe that pornography, particularly violent pornography, provides a trigger for sexually violent crimes argue that therefore sexually explicit material should be more tightly controlled, ie censored.
Others argue that pornography does not have a direct link with sexual violence, although violent pornography, particularly when produced within a sexist society for profit, needs to be criticised and debated from a feminist perspective. It follows that increased censorship will not assist in the prevention of sexual crimes. Instead, an open discussion which tackles sexism and the broader causes of violence provides the framework for tackling the problem.
Some feminists have become very well known for championing the anti-porn cause, such as US feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. Unfortunately, the viewpoints of feminists such as these have often been taken as representative of feminists as a whole, thus obscuring the differences of opinion on the issue.
A new paper published at the end of last year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry lays an even firmer foundation for saying that pornography does not cause sexual violence. Written by Atsumi Fukui and Bruce Westmore, the paper analyses various experiments that have attempted to assess the effect pornography has. Its authors point out the unreliability of such experiments on a number of grounds: their reliance on incarcerated sex offenders as representative of sex offenders in general, problems of self-reporting, and the difficulty in determining whether pornography fostered an existing tendency for sexual aggression or caused it.
The article concludes that "there is no consistent evidence" of a causal link between non-violent pornography and sexual violence; in the case of violent pornography, the evidence is highly inconclusive. More importantly, it draws on broader issues relating to sexual violence. The authors highlight that focusing on pornography distracts attention from more pertinent issues such as changes in the social make-up to enable women to gain equality, and the need for a broad framework tackling educational, social and legal aspects.
This broad-based approach is crucial to combating the real causes of sexual violence. Fukui and Westmore's paper is an important contribution.