Why are these men downloading child pornography?

… And how much risk do they pose to a fearful public?

Teachers. Businessmen. Military members. Politicians. Every week there’s another headline about a seemingly upstanding citizen caught with child pornography. The natural assumption is that the man is a closet pedophile, hiding his deviant desires behind a façade of normalcy.

This pedophile assumption is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Either way, its circularity stymies deeper reflection. “He’s a pedophile so he seeks out child porn. Duh.” It is only if we step away from its micro-focus on the creep of the hour that we may detect something else going on here. Something bigger and more ominous. Something that should awaken our collective concern.

Many of us in the forensic trenches have glimpsed it: a seemingly normal guy who’s become so wrapped up in the online smorgasbord of sexual fantasy offerings that he spends every spare minute frenetically downloading massive amounts of ever-more-deviant porn, as if trying to quench an insatiable thirst.

Medical doctors are seeing another facet: teenage boys and young men with enfeebled sexual desire, who cannot maintain erections or achieve orgasms. More than half of young men ages 16-21 in one study reported such sexual dysfunctions. Unlike with the elderly or infirm, nothing is physically amiss: The problem is all in their heads.

Screenshot: Visits to PornHub in 2016

These trends are developing so fast that they've caught us off guard. With the Internet so ubiquitous, it is easy to forget its recency. “Tube” channels streaming digital video content have only been around since the mid-2000s. But in the brief decade since their emergence, video porn sites have proliferated like mushrooms in a bog: One popular site boasts 91 billion (yes, that’s billion, with a “b”) videos viewed just last year alone, or 12.5 videos per every person on earth!  

The popularity of internet porn is generally attributed to the “three A’s” – anonymity, availability and affordability. People can learn about sex and engage in experimentation without interpersonal vulnerability or fear of embarrassment. There is no responsibility for another’s satisfaction.

There is little question that the rapid proliferation of internet porn is ushering in a sea change in sexuality, especially among digital natives – those in their teens and 20s who know of no other world. Porn viewing is near-universal among male youth throughout the Western world, with average first use steadily dropping to a current average of under 13 years of age. A connection between internet porn and the sudden, unprecedented surge in sexual dysfunction is also abundantly clear: Men seeking medical help for copulatory impotence report obsessive porn use and, just as telling, they quickly recover normal functioning if they can manage to curtail their porn viewing.

With the online porn explosion so new, medical researchers are just starting to catch up to its effects. But an emergent body of neurological research paints a disturbing picture of an oversatiated evolutionary system gone haywire.

The brain is a remarkably elastic organ that readily transmutes in response to environmental and behavioral input. Take the famous taxi driver study, which demonstrated that successfully navigating London’s byzantine streets causes the memory-processing hippocampus to bulk up like a pro wrestler’s biceps. In contrast to this example of plasticity’s utility, the evidence suggests that brain plasticity is maladaptive in the case of heavy porn use.

Wearing out the reward circuitry

Credit: Discover Magazine

Evolution has hard-wired humans to feel pleasure from activities like eating and sex that increase our chances of species survival. But because the brain is not evolutionarily prepared for incessant, artificial sex, constant masturbation to video porn overstimulates the pleasure-seeking circuitry and causes both structural and functional damage. Preliminary neuroimaging research indicates that the ventral striatum (the brain’s so-called “reward center”) shrinks in size. The neurotransmitter dopamine – the “feel-good” chemical that helps animals remember experiences both good and bad – reduces its signaling. Perhaps most alarmingly, the frontal cortex -- responsible for higher-order thinking and planning -- loses grey matter. It’s as if, says researcher Simone Kuhn of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, the heavy porn user is actually wearing out his brain’s reward circuitry.

Psychologically, heavy porn use may foster a vicious cycle of avoidance and poor skills for coping with stress, much like that found in heavy drug users. People may use porn to escape their real-world stressors and anxieties, zoning out in a fantasy realm millions of miles away. Over time, this becomes a preferred strategy that is relied upon for handling stress. Experimental research suggests that such habitual pursuit of immediate sexual pleasure reduces one’s capacity to delay gratification for long-term benefit. The user becomes increasingly impulsive, spending more and more time sitting in front of his computer in a disinhibited state of chronic sexual arousal. As plans and goals are sidetracked, he feels worse about himself, leading to depression that – you guessed it – creates an even stronger urge to escape reality.

Meanwhile, habituation makes it harder and harder to achieve gratification. What was once new and exciting becomes stale and boring. To achieve the sexual release that was once so easy, the consumer must frenetically search for ever-more-exotic and novel stimuli. Today’s porn users, report the ever-helpful statisticians at the popular porn site PornHub, are no longer satisfied with “vanilla” erotica or the old “in-out, in-out”; they are searching for wilder and wilder fantasy.

With an endless menu of novel sexual stimuli available via the mere click of a mouse, this process of habituation sends heavy consumers spiraling down a rabbit hole, sampling ever-more-hardcore themes, from bestiality and bondage to myriad fetishes and – heedless of the legal risk – child pornography. About half of male porn users report that they have found themselves searching for content that they formerly considered disgusting or unappealing. Given what we know about habituation, it is not surprising that this progression to more deviant themes is predicted by the amount of time spent online, the quantity of videos viewed and the age of first porn use.

6-year-old model in fashion ad

But the progression to culturally taboo fetishes is also promoted by the industry itself, which uses the allure of the forbidden to increase its profits. Indeed, it is rather ironic – even perverse – that the very culture that condemns child pornography as the twisted fantasies of the deviant pedophile engages in the widespread eroticization of children to sell products. As British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes points out, the titillation of mass audiences via sexualized images of children can be seen as “the soft end” of a culturally pervasive continuum that at its extreme features hard-core child pornography. 

Jewkes and her colleague Maggie Wykes go so far as to call the current moral panic over child pornography a "smokescreen" that serves to divert attention from the real sexual harm to children in patriarchal societies. After all, the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse occurs within the home and is committed by a male family member, not a teacher, doctor or even a priest.

In fact, the very term “child pornography” distracts from the incestuous nature of much of the sexual violence depicted, in which fathers callously videotape the abuse of their young daughters for profit and status within their deviant subculture.

“The images found on computers [have] led to calls for an international database of missing children, thus ignoring the evidence that most children are abused at home and so are not ‘missing,’ ” they point out. “The power of moral panic lies not in what it does address but in what it doesn’t.”

The irony doesn’t end there. In our current climate of “paranoid parenting,” in which parents are charged with neglect for letting their kids walk home from a suburban park without adult supervision, the fear of digital child images is making everyone see the world through the lens of the pedophile, thereby colluding with commercial sexual exploitation by fetishizing youthful bodies.

So, what about risk?

Broader cultural discourses aside, on an immediate practical level the questions for forensic psychologists revolve around risk: If a man is caught with illegal child pornography, what is his risk for molesting an actual child? And what is his risk of reoffending by downloading more child pornography?

The fact that reported child sexual abuse has continued to plummet in recent years despite the meteoric rise in child pornography argues against any direct causal link between child porn and hands-on offending. But direct research on child porn consumers is tricky, because such people are less than keen to step forward and reveal themselves. This has forced researchers to focus on those who have been apprehended, likely skewing data toward the more deviant and criminally oriented.

Despite this limitation, the cumulative data bring good tidings: Overall, men who have been arrested and/or convicted for child pornography offending pose a very low risk to the public.

Aggregating nine extant studies on reoffense risk using meta-analytic statistical methods, prominent pedophilia researcher Michael Seto and colleagues found that, on average, a man who has been caught with child porn has about a 3.4% chance of committing another non-contact offense. The risk he will actually molest a child is even lower, around 2%.

These extremely low risk levels -- especially for child pornography offenders with no known history of hands-on offending -- is further evidence that much of their misconduct is driven by curiosity and internet-enhanced impulsivity. Once caught, all but the most deviant learn their lesson and apparently refrain from further misconduct. 

In any body of scientific research, of course, there is always that pesky outlier. In this case, there is one loner study that reached very different conclusions from the pack (and got a substantial amount of attention in the process). That article, based on convicted offenders at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, is regarded as an unreliable anomaly. Prisoners at the facility have alleged that they were coerced into falsely claiming that they had molested children under threat of being expelled from the treatment program and shipped off to more dangerous penitentiaries. Further, they were never informed that they were part of a research project, and did not give their consent (which if true would be a violation of the Nuremberg Code). Federal judges have been harshly critical of the study. Based on its multiple identified problems, there is even an effort underway to get the Journal of Family Violence to issue a retraction.

The first big wave of child pornography prosecutions caught forensic psychologists off guard. With little extant research and no established tools to assess risk in this emergent criminal class, some practitioners turned to instruments like the Static-99 that were designed to assess reoffense risk among hands-on sex offenders. Not surprisingly, given the obvious differences between sexual assault and online pornography viewing, these instruments turned out to greatly overestimate the risk to the public posed by pornography-only offenders.

Michael Seto has been on the forefront of trying to rectify this situation. He and his colleagues have developed a new instrument to try to distinguish between garden-variety child pornography offenders and the tiny fraction who pose a greater risk to the public. The risk factors on his Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool, or CPORT (publicly available HERE), are largely common-sensical: Men at greater risk are those with more entrenched pedophilic and/or criminal propensities, as indicated by such factors as criminal history or prior contact sex offending against minors. 

Additionally, it is sometimes possible to distinguish men with primary pedophilic attractions from those who fell down the rabbit hole by analyzing the totality of their downloaded images. The pedophiles will tend to have a preponderance of child images, often quite well organized, whereas those without fixed sexual interests in children will have a wider variety of images, including those of adults and other themes such as bestiality, bondage and the like, with child photos in the minority.

Criminologist Jewkes is correct that the current obsession with prosecuting child porn cases distracts from the bigger picture. It not only encourages a warped and ineffective approach to child sexual abuse prevention, but it also sidelines critical analysis of legal adult porn. Because it is legal and its harm is more subtle (albeit far more pervasive), adult porn doesn't generate the moral outrage of child pornography. But just as child porn promotes distorted beliefs about children and child sexuality, much mainstream adult porn promotes destructive messages about women – what they like, and how they should be treated. It fosters objectification, and legitimates violence and abuse.

Whither this social experiment?

Zooming out even further, online porn -- whether legal or illegal -- can be viewed as just one facet of a massive social experiment into completely uncharted waters.

Realdoll sex dolls rolling out this year

Echoing the sci-fi movie Ex Machina (kind of an isolationist Stepford Wives for the 21st century), the market in sex dolls and robots is booming, as “fembots” and “sexbots” become ever more realistic in appearance and feel; they're now even being programmed with "personalities" (sexual, shy, naive, brainy, etc.). As Europe’s first android brothel opens its doors in Barcelona, some predict we are on the brink of a sex-robot tourist industry. Others go so far as to predict that “sex with humans could soon be a thing of the past.”   

Although one is tempted to scoff at such alarmist predictions, in trend-setting Japan, there is much government hand-wringing over the steadily growing proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds who remain single and virgins. Whether porn’s ubiquity is a cause versus a symptom of these larger, global sea changes in sexuality and family life remains an open question. But it is certainly safe to say that online pornography will do nothing to make it easier for people to reach out and connect, either sexually or socially.

After all, there is mounting evidence that porn contributes to young people’s insecurity about their physical adequacy and attractiveness. Heavy porn consumption also weakens men’s commitment to romantic relationships. Real-life partners are mundane and flawed in comparison, incapable of living up to the idealized fantasy model. And, unlike sex-bots, they do not always obey.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Black Mirror (my episode rankings are HERE), but in this era of increasing social isolation and alienation it doesn't take too much imagination to envision a dystopic future in which people wall themselves off in lonely cubicles, growing old alone as they desperately scour digital media for satisfaction and companionship that remains tantalizingly out of reach.

-----
A NOTE ON COMMENTS: To view or post comments, you must first scroll up to the top of the post you are interested in and click on its title.

Sex addiction: Science or pop fad?

Thirty-one years ago, when Patrick Carnes walked onto the Phil Donahue television show to promote his new book on sexual compulsivity as an addiction, his notion was – in his own words – “widely perceived as a joke.” 

But Carnes got the last laugh. With the mainstreaming of the addiction industry (eating, gambling, exercising and working are all potential addictions now), Carnes has risen to become guru of a lucrative empire with dozens of rehab centers staffed by thousands of paraprofessionals. Media outlets including Newsweek have uncritically jumped aboard, warning of a grim, pornography-fueled plague afflicting up to 5 percent of the U.S. population.  

With neuroscience all the rage, celebrities including Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods have been recast from mere cads to tragic victims of a progressive and often-fatal “brain disease.” The push for scientific legitimacy reached a zenith in 2013, with an unsuccessful bid to legitimize “hypersexuality” by adding it to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

So, what changed over the course of the last three decades that made the public more receptive to seeing sexual misconduct through the lens of addiction?

In their meticulously researched Sex Addiction: A Critical History, three cultural historians from the University of Auckland in New Zealand trace the rise of this social movement primarily to a politically conservative, sex-negative backlash against the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 

One clue to its underlying cultural values, historians Barry Reay, Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder observe, is the movement's enduring strand of homophobia. Even before Carnes's 1983 book Out of the Shadows popularized sexual addiction, the term had been invoked by Lawrence Hatterer, a psychiatrist whose work in the 1950s-1960s focused on curing the “illness” of homosexuality. Heteronormativity remains prominent in the field, with gay men who violate heterosexual norms of sexuality labeled as sex addicts.

Unlike many purported disorders that are promoted by researchers or the pharmaceutical industry, sex addiction is a bottoms-up movement, with people self-diagnosing themselves via self-help books or quick-and-dirty Internet surveys. Its infiltration into popular culture owes in large part to the media’s abdication of its role as scientific gatekeeper, argue the authors of Sex Addiction. As the Columbia Journalism Review also pointed out in a critique of the Newsweek puff piece, “The problem with relying on therapists, as most of the articles over the years have done, rather than qualified experts in academia, is that they have a vested interest in promoting the idea that there’s a widespread problem. The more people believe it, the more money they make."


In contrast to the lay public, academic scholars have remained skeptical of a construct that is too broad and amorphous to have any scientific validity; everything from viewing pornography or having an illicit affair to feeling ashamed about one's sexuality can count toward a diagnosis. Indeed, research studies have found that people’s anxiety over their sexual behavior is tied more to their moral values and level of religiosity than to the actual intensity of their behavior.

It is findings such as these that open sexual addiction up to ridicule. One prominent critic, David Ley, author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, has mocked sexual addiction literature as "valley-girl science" -- a hodge-podge of anecdote and metaphor rather than any provable theory. As he told a Salon interviewer:

“All of these behaviors have been happening for millennium — people cheating, people having lots of sex…. There’s nothing new about this…. For every one of the behaviors they raise as addictive — whether it’s porn, strip clubs, masturbation, infidelity, going to prostitutes — I can present 10,000 people who engage in the exact same behavior and have no problems, and they can’t explain why that is.”

Historically, hysteria over sexual depravity is somewhat cyclical. Way back in the 1870s, a crusade against "smut" by a U.S. Postal Inspector and politician named Anthony Comstock resulted in thousands of arrests and the destruction of 15 tons of books. Interestingly, Comstock's passion for moral purity stemmed from his own personal demons; as a youth, he was said to have masturbated so compulsively that it almost drove him to suicide.

Treating a case of "Madness of the Womb" (1600s)

The pathologizing of female lust has a particularly long tradition, dating back hundreds if not thousands of years. In the late 1600s, women were diagnosed with nymphomania (a diagnosis that still exists in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, or ICD), or “madness of the womb," a disease said to be triggered by amorous courtings, lascivious books and dancing. As with today’s sexual addiction, the condition was considered progressive; if not promptly treated it would lead to “true and perfect madness.” Treatment included bleeding, cool baths with lettuce and flowers, marriage to "a lusty young man" or -- no kidding -- rubbing of the afflicted woman's genitals by "a cunning midwife."

Nowadays, as then, there is a common pattern in the way proponents of scientifically questionable new problems attempt to establish their legitimacy. First, they announce discovery of the problem; next, the problem’s lineage is traced back through time to show that it existed all along but was overlooked or neglected. Finally, and most critically, alarmist claims are made about a growing epidemic.

This pattern could be observed in the 2013 campaign to legitimize “hypersexuality” by making it a DSM disorder. For example, the claims-making process included articles by psychiatrist Martin Kafka  tracing hypersexuality’s lineage back to the pioneering sexologists of the 19th century. But in their first-rate scholarship, the Auckland historians scoured those primary sources – the writings of early sexology heavyweights such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Iwan Bloch – and found that their descriptions of the sexually compulsive bore little resemblance to contemporary hypersexuality or sex addiction. Rather, the early sexologists described tortured souls who were both rare and bizarre, typically suffering from more global psychiatric or organic maladies rather than a primary sexual disorder. For example, writing in 1908 about the “sexually insane,” Iwan Bloch described him as resembling a “wild animal” who:

“rush[es] at the first creature he meets … to gratify his lust …. He seizes in sexual embrace any other living or lifeless object, and in this state may perform acts of paederasty, bestiality, violation of children, etc. In these most severe cases we can always demonstrate the existence of mental disorder, general paralysis, mania, or periodical insanity … as a cause.”

Judging from singular descriptions like this, the early hypersexual was an extraordinary creature, a far cry from the mundane individual proposed for the DSM-5. Indeed, the proposed operational definitions for contemporary hypersexuality are striking in their breadth. For example, one diagnostic criteria proposed for the DSM-5 was experiencing seven or more orgasms per week by any method. Based on one survey of the general population in Sweden, this arbitrary cutoff would have pathologized almost half of all men (44%) and more than one out of five women.

Despite official rejection of hypersexuality by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, the ideology of sexual addiction is gradually seeping into forensic quarters. For example, in some civil detention sites for sex offenders, minimally trained "treatment providers" play the role of moral arbiters, determining what forms of sexual desire are "appropriate" based not on their illegality or potential harm but whether the providers find them "healthy."

To be deemed “healthy” in some such programs, captive patients are required to develop vanilla “masturbation fantasy scripts” that resemble a corny Hallmark card:

"My masturbation fantasy involves Amanda. She is 40* years old, with flowing auburn hair and large green eyes. We enjoy cuddling by the fireplace, taking long walks on the beach in the moonlight, and gazing into each other’s eyes by candlelight."

(*The fantasy object must be the same approximate age as the offender; if she is more than five years younger, he will be told to rewrite his script to make it more "appropriate.")

Despite the enduring popularity of teachers, nurses and -- especially -- librarians as objects of male fantasy, in the burgeoning sexual offender treatment industry, even these cultural tropes may be labeled as "deviant." In one case I was involved in, a man's fantasy of seducing a librarian was advanced as evidence of sexual danger, based on the notion that the library (even after hours) is a public setting.

Of course, this not-so-thinly veiled moralism masquerading as treatment has no empirical support as a method to reduce former sex offenders’ risk to the public. But it does comport with popular cultural notions of addiction and sexual compulsivity, however unproven -- even bizarre -- they may at times be.

* * * * *

Sex Addiction: A Critical History by Barry Reay, Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder is as well written as it is insightful; I highly recommend it. Also recommended is clinical psychologist David Ley’s thoughtful work, The Myth of Sex Addiction.  

“Pornography addiction”: Naked rhetoric?

No one actually knows what percentage of Internet use is sexually oriented, or how much money the porn industry is making. Many commonly cited figures are widely exaggerated, and the true statistics remain murky and contested. Yet it's safe to say that for some portion of the public, the easy accessibility leads to habitual use that interferes with other activities, such as family life, relationships, work or school.

But no worries. Treatment providers are standing by to help. A quick Google search produces dozens of residential treatment programs for pornography addicts.

What's not so easy to find is the price tag. The sites I surveyed require that you call them, or submit an online application for more information. That reticence is not surprising, given that costs average about $675 per day, or more than $180,000 for the nine-month minimum stay that some programs recommend.

This burgeoning pornography addiction treatment industry is the latest example of the therapeutic opportunism that has swept across the United States, selling snake oil remedies for alcoholism, drug addiction, overeating, adolescent rebellion, and so many more problems of modern living.

Unbeknownst to a gullible and desperate public, this new treatment industry is largely unregulated, and its grand claims have scant scientific support. Indeed, its underlying theory of sexual addiction has been widely repudiated by scientific researchers.

In a scathing new critique in Current Sexual Health Reports, authors David Ley and colleagues challenge the scientific basis for the sexual addiction industry. They argue that the pathologization of visual sexual stimuli (VSS), as they prefer to call it, is more reflective of religious and moral values than science.  

Chicken or egg?

There is no question that many people are discontented with their use of pornography. About one in 200 Americans reports problematic viewing habits, according to Ley and colleagues’s estimates. The ambiguity is whether pornography is a cause, or a reflection, of life dissatisfaction. Supporting the latter possibility, for example, is a large-scale Dutch study finding that lower life satisfaction predicted greater use of online pornography, not the other way around. Similarly, people with more severe psychological problems and drug and alcohol use are more likely to be heavy viewers of visual sexual stimuli.

It makes sense that people might escape into fantasy not only for sexual release but also to avoid negative mood states such as loneliness. We have only to look to the wave of relationship-phobic soshoku danshi (literally, "grass-eating boys") in Japan and the technosexuals like Davecat (whose YouTube video has gone viral) who prefer robots or blow-up dolls to "organic partners" to sense the breadth of interpersonal alienation in contemporary culture.

Thus, pornography consumption is perhaps more a symptom than a cause of angst, and targeting it for primary intervention might distract from the deeper issues at play.

Ley and colleagues go further, arguing that a skewed focus on negative effects, such as erectile dysfunction and relationship difficulties, hides potential positive health outcomes of "sexual visual stimuli" consumption. Of relevance to forensic practice, there is some evidence that pornography viewing may reduce risky sexual behaviors, especially among individuals who report high levels of sexual sensation-seeking.

Stigmatizing sexual minorities?

One of the more intriguing topics raised by Ley and colleagues is the religious tenor of many treatment programs and advocates of the addiction paradigm. High religiosity turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of treatment-seeking for sex addiction, suggesting that conflicts over personal values rather than the use itself may be driving dissatisfaction.

Taking this one step further, they argue that the anti-pornography movement serves an ideological function of promoting certain values while suppressing others. Individuals reporting addictive use of visual sexual stimuli tend to be non-heterosexual males with high libidos and high levels of sensation-seeking. The sexual addiction model, they claim, is an effort to exert social control over technological expressions of sexuality, suppress marginalized forms of sexuality, and stigmatize sexual minorities.

Intriguing as this argument is, I am disheartened by polemics that minimize the dehumanization and degradation of women, in particular, that are the mainstay of pornography. As revealed by scholars Miranda Horvath, Peter Hegarty and colleagues, the messages about women in British "lads mags" are indistinguishable from the rape-justifying statements made by convicted rapists. It's hard for me to see how this could be harmless, both to viewers and to society at large.

With the 12-step style pathologization of individual use ascending parallel to the rapacious and exploitive pornography industry, the porn and antiporn industries seem symbiotic and mutually reinforcing, each resting on an anemic foundation of hyperbole.

Meanwhile, the few who try to explore the deeper and more nuanced cultural implications of pornography find themselves attacked. I was shocked to hear  about a tenured sociology professor getting suspended a couple of years ago for showing a progressive critique, The Price of Pleasure, which delves into the seamy underbelly of the lucrative industry. (My first thought was “Whew! Glad I didn’t get any complaints when I showed that same film in my Sexual Violence course at San Francisco State University a few years ago.”) 

Ascendancy of the “sex addiction” model

Lest we forget, Ley and colleagues’ critique is not really new. It used to be pretty well accepted among serious scientists that "sex addiction" was a bogus pop psychology invention, yet another example of the quasi-religious 12-step model being grafted onto every conceivable behavior.

Detractors hail back as far as the late 1990s, when sex therapist Marty Klein, Ph.D. wrote his prophetic essay, "Why ‘Sexual Addiction’ Is Not A Useful Diagnosis -- And Why It Matters," dissecting the politics of this social movement. More recently, Forbes writers Matthew Herper, David Whelan and Robert Langreth tackled "The Shadowy Science Of Sex Addiction." British psychologist and sex educator Petra Boynton followed up with a 2008 critical essay, "Medicalising sexual behaviour" (which includes some good links and discussion of the parallel construction of "female sexual dysfunction”; see my review of Meika Loe's The Rise of Viagra for more on that topic). 

The media hype over the sexual peccadillos of golfer Tiger Woods (which had a lot to do with cultural angst over a Black man having lots of sex with white women, blondes no less) proved a huge boon to the fledgling industry. Also lending an aura of legitimacy was the ill-fated proposal to add "hypersexuality" to the DSM-5. A training announcement for sex offender professionals on "Sexual addiction and compulsivity -- the proposed DSM-5 diagnosis of hypersexuality” mustered a veritable grab-bag of 12-step pseudoscience: Patrick Carnes' "levels of hypersexuality"; the "family of origin of a sex addict" and "co-dependence and the co-addict spouse."  And now there’s even an academic journal with the trendy title Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity.

But unless and until the data come in to establish sexual addiction as a viable scientific construct, it’s yet another example of an over-eager industry putting the cart before the horse.

*****

NOTE TO READERS: To view or participate in a vigorous, critical discussion of this topic, go to the COMMENTS section of my mirror blog, "Witness," at Psychology Today (HERE). 

The article, "The Emperor Has No Clothes: A Review of the ‘Pornography Addiction’ Model," by David Ley, Nicole Prause and Peter Finn, is part of a topical collection on "current controversies" in Current Sexual Health Reports. It may be requested from the first author (HERE).  

Related blog posts:

• Pornography and contact sex offending (Guest essay by Jon Brandt, David S. Prescott and Robin J. Wilson), Jan. 16, 2013 
• Study: Lads’ mags sound identical to rapists, Dec. 15, 2011 
• New entry in porn-rape debate, June 3, 2009 
• Child porn use not linked to contact crimes, July 30, 2009

(c) Copyright Karen Franklin 2014 - All rights reserved

Pornography and contact sex offending

Guest essay by Jon Brandt, David S. Prescott and Robin J. Wilson*

Many people have grave concerns about the potential for a relationship between pornography and inappropriate sexual behavior. For obvious reasons, there are apprehensions about the sexual behaviors of those who have sexually abused. As a result, it is not uncommon for persons who have sexually abused to be restricted from certain activities that would have remained available to them had they not sexually offended. However, questions remain as to whether we are using our professional energy and resources wisely in trying to prevent persons convicted of sexual crimes from being sexually active. This point extends to whether persons who have sexually abused should have access to sexually explicit materials.

There are many reasons not to like pornography. Perhaps women, more than men, are objectified by pornography. Both women and men have raised questions about how pornography cheapens and depersonalizes sex. As men dedicated to sexual violence prevention, we are concerned about both the demeaning representation of women and the unflattering portrayal of men (e.g., piggish, self-absorbed, or uncaring) in much commercial pornography. There are also concerns about the effects of the depiction of unhealthy, violent, or potentially harmful sexual behaviors. There is an open question about the long-term effects of exposure to sexually explicit media. These are important considerations, but as offensive as pornography is to many people, extant research does not support a causal relationship between pornography and sexual offending.

Not just academic

Defining pornography remains a challenge. In our field, this is not simply an academic discussion. Sexual offenders are typically restricted from possessing any type of pornography, but there are no clear demarcation points between artistic expressions of the human form, sexually suggestive images, erotica, or hardcore pornography. When the legal consequences for possession of any sexual media are so severe, defining pornography has never been more important.

Jon Brandt

In the US, numerous court decisions, presidential task forces, and various think tanks have been unable to produce an agreement or useful definition of "pornography." With the need for greater precision within our profession than perhaps elsewhere in public discourse, our field would benefit from fine-tuning and distinguishing between various types of sexual media. Using "pornography" to describe all forms of sexual media is both imprecise and emotionally loaded. It can obscure treatment needs and interventions. Missed opportunities of therapeutically beneficial sexual imagery could inadvertently lead to more harm.

Good science or moral panic?

The historical perspective that sexually explicit images are offensive and therefore must be harmful is such a powerful narrative that it is difficult to close the gap between what we know about private sexual behavior and widespread public perceptions. We wonder whether some restrictions imposed on our clients are the considered application of good science or a default result of moral panic. If the latter is true, are therapists complicit in the unwarranted enforcement of social controls more than the healing arts of rehabilitation?

Gone are the days when pornography originated in adult bookstores or arrived discreetly in the mail. Most sexual media today is user-produced and shared through cell phones and the Internet. The use of sexual media by male teens and adults today is not just normative, it is pervasive. Science has yet to show any key differences between those who "sext" and those who do not, except for the behavior itself. Consumption of sexually explicit imagery has been explosive in the last decade. Sexual content in cyberspace may account for more than 30 percent of the data transfer of the entire Internet. Starting as teenagers, consumers are overwhelmingly male, but also include a significant percentage of women.

David Prescott

Though controversial and perhaps even counterintuitive, evidence of the adverse effects of sexual media has not been established. Other than child pornography, broad sexual media restrictions for most persons who have sexually abused do not appear to be supported by research. Frequently, restrictions on "pornography" for such clients include prohibition of every type of sexual media. Without knowing whether some level of exposure to some form of sexual media might have some adverse effects on human behavior, we use a shotgun approach to such restrictions. These squishy definitions and operatives also compromise research.

We each entered the field of treating sexual aggression at a time when professionals assumed that all persons who had sexually abused were at high risk to persist. Not only has this turned out to be untrue, but the rates of sexual aggression and re-offense have declined at the very same time as access to sexually explicit imagery has never been easier. Although we know of no interactive relationship between these co-occurring trends, they should each cause us to reconsider our attitudes and beliefs about what is important in the treatment and supervision of persons who have sexually abused.

There has been limited research involving pornography's influence on sexual aggression. The strongest concerns in studies published in refereed journals include a potentially aggravating influence of routine pornography use by men already at high risk for re-offending (and/or higher in entrenched antisociality, sometimes referred to as psychopathy). Certain types of pornography with high-risk offenders may also increase risk. Researchers such as Drew Kingston and Neil Malamuth appear to support the cautious position that without more conclusive research we should evaluate higher risk situations on a case by case basis. To our knowledge, no studies have as yet produced a credible indictment of pornography usage among persons who have sexually abused.

No definitive link found

Two additional facts are worthy of consideration. First, both biased and impartial groups have been funding research for more than 50 years to find a connection between pornography and sexual offending, and none have been able to find any definitive link. Second, despite the explosion of sexual media since the advent of the Internet and rapid transfer of visual imagery, there has been no increase in rates of sexual offending—everywhere it has been studied, around the world. Arguably, the same information superhighway that provides access to pornography has also brought attention to the numerous media outlets that remind us that true sexual violence is intolerable.

Robin Wilson

Several researchers have suggested that the correlation between pornography and sexual offending is either absent or inverse. A noteworthy advocate for this theory is sexologist Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii. His published research on pornography and sexual offending in the US, Japan, and Europe persuasively argues that the relationship between pornography and sexual offending is negatively correlated. Diamond's research appears to also hold true for the relationship between child pornography and engagement in contact offenses. If validated, consider the implications of such findings in mitigating contact offenses against children, as offensive as it may seem. Perhaps adult pornography really is more offensive than actually harmful in the treatment and supervision of people who have sexually abused.

What might account for a negative correlation between pornography and contact offenses? Diamond and others have theorized that sexual media may provide a vicarious satisfaction of sexual curiosity and/or a cathartic venting effect for libido. If this theory turns out to be correct, restricting most sexual offenders from having sexual media might not just be overly cautious, it might, in individual circumstances, be counterproductive.

Individual differences proposed

Kingston and Malamuth have challenged some of Diamond's research, but only to the extent that Diamond's aggregate data, while compelling, might not apply to certain individuals. Theirs is an important point for consideration. Michael Seto has raised similar concerns with respect to certain risk factors and child pornography. We can also see how this is an important aspect to consider. However, a ban on all sexual media for all persons who have sexually abused appears neither science-based nor justified.

At what point does research become conclusive? It may be that pornography currently remains too controversial and emotionally charged for effective public policy to emanate from good science. Nonetheless, our concern is that broad bans on sexual media may be squandering resources, at the expense of truly science-based treatment and supervision elsewhere. 

These are not simply academic points. Revoking a person's parole or violating their probation because of behaviors that are socially undesirable, rather than an established characteristic of risk or harm, can be costly to society as well as the individual. All too often, we implement public policies and impose restrictions on offenders because we feel better to believe we are doing something to help stop victimization. However, we should also consider that when we overreach with risk management, limited resources are stretched thin.

Recommendations

We are not suggesting that pornography use by clients should be ignored. Following the model of Risk-Needs-Responsivity, the risk and need principles may guide the formation of effective therapeutic and correctional interventions. To that end, clinicians would be wise to thoroughly assess the effects of sexual media on individual clients (see appendix). Professionals should avoid restricting clients' access to sexual media based only on personal values, unsupported professional beliefs, or undocumented theories. Therapeutic efforts should be focused on managing abuse-related sexual interests (as opposed to all sexual interests). Therapists can provide clients with education about healthy sexuality, with the end goal of a safe, fulfilling, and non-exploitive sex life.

Given that science continues to better inform us about the psychological and social dynamics of sexual behavior, we should periodically review status quo. When scientific trending suggests current policies or practices might be unfounded, outdated, or perhaps even counterproductive, we should gather the professional courage to explore better pathways that might more effectively prevent or mitigate sexual offending.

Appendix

In assessing the effects of sexual media with individual clients, clinicians might explore:

1) The client's history, current use, and experience with different types of sexual media.
2) The client's use of sexual media compared to normative data.
3) Possible connections between certain sexual media and problematic sexual behavior.
4) Escalating or compulsive patterns of the use of sexual media.
5) The possible relationships of sexual media to the index offense(s).
6) The use of sexual media as socially or psychologically protective measures.
7) How sexual media could be interfering with relationships.
8) The use of sexual media to explore or satisfy sexuality curiosity.
9) How sexual media is an element of libido management.
10) Whether clients might benefit from a modified use of sexual media.
11) The possible therapeutic or conditioning benefits of proscriptive sexual media.
12) Sexual media that might be contraindicated therapeutically or socially.
13) The legal hazards or consequences for accessing certain types of sexual media.
14) Limitations on certain sexual media for specific higher-risk offenders.
15) The various risk factors involved in client’s access to sexual media via the Internet, cell phones, digital cameras, Wi-Fi communication devices, and social networking websites.
16) The degree to which clients can exercise internal controls in managing sexual media or to what level external controls might be beneficial to aid in risk management.
17) How clients can move from external controls to internal controls prior to discharge from treatment or supervision in anticipation of independent management.

References

Andrews, D.A. and Bonta, J. (2010). The psychology of criminal conduct. 5th Ed. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Bensimon, P. (2007). The role of pornography in sexual offending. Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 14.

Burton, D. (2010). Comparison by crime type of juvenile delinquents on pornography exposure: The absence of relationships between exposure to pornography and sexual offense characteristics. Journal of Forensic Nursing, 6.

D’Amato, A. (2006). Porn up, rape down. Northwestern Public Law Research Paper No. 913013.

Diamond, M. (1999). The effects of pornography: An international perspective. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.

Diamond, M. (2009). Pornography, public acceptance and sex related crime: A review. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry.

Diamond, M., et al. (2010). Pornography and sex crimes in the Czech Republic. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40, 1037-1043.

Diamond, M., et al. (2011) Rejoinder to Kingston and Malamuth. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40, 1049-50.

Ferguson, C.J. and Hartley, R.D. (2009). The pleasure is momentary… the expense damnable?: The influence of pornography on rape and sexual assault. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 14, 323-329.

Kingston, D. and Fedoroff, P. (2008). Pornography use and sexual aggression: The impact of frequency and type of pornography use on recidivism among sexual offenders. Aggressive Behavior, 34, 1-11.

Kingston, D. and Malamuth, N. (2009). The importance of individual differences in pornography use: Theoretical perspectives and implications for treating sexual offenders. Journal of Sex Research, 46, 216-232.

Kingston, D.A. and Malamuth, N.M. (2011). Problems with aggregate data and the importance of individual differences in the study of pornography and sexual aggression: Comment on Diamond, Jozikova, and Weiss (2010). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40.

Seto, M.C., et al. (2010). Contact sexual offending by men with online sexual offenses. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, Vol. 23.

Williams, K.M., et al. (2009). Inferring sexually deviant behavior from corresponding fantasies: The role of personality and pornography consumption. Criminal Justice and Behavior, Vol. 36, 198-222.

Winick, C. and Evans, J.T. (1996). The relationship between non-enforcement of state pornography laws and rates of sex crime arrests. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 25.

*Originally published at the Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment (SAJRT) blog. Republished by permission of the authors.

Of related interest: Salon - Did porn warp me forever? Like other boys my age, I grew up with unlimited access to smut. At 23, I wonder if it's totally screwed me up, by Isaac Abel.

Study: Lads’ mags sound identical to rapists

As I was driving through America’s Farm Belt on the way to a prison (miles and miles of cows and plowed corn fields as far as the eye could see), it was a bit incongruous to suddenly see --

Photo by Karen Franklin

-- an ADULT SUPERSTORE, perched on the side of the freeway like a giant mousetrap. While sex offenders are chastised for even thinking about pornography, a free-world traveler like me can't escape its dehumanizing specter, whether on the highway or in my hotel room. Novelist Russell Banks was surely on to something when he called sex offenders the canaries in the coal mine, victims of a $10-billion-plus industry that preys on their loneliness and alienation.

With that vision in mind, I was pleased to see that two of my favorite academic scholars are getting a flurry of media attention over their new study finding that most people cannot distinguish between statements about women in British lads' mags and those made by convicted rapists.

In the study, due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology, men identified more with the comments made by rapists than the quotes made in lads' mags. And that's not necessarily a bad thing: On the whole, the statements pulled from Britain's four leading lads' mags (what North Americans would call men's magazines) were actually more denigrating of women than the rape-justifying statements made by rapists.

For example, here are two quotes:

• "There's a certain way you can tell that a girl wants to have sex . . . The way they dress, they flaunt themselves."

• "You do not want to be caught red-handed . . . go and smash her on a park bench. That used to be my trick."

The first quote is pulled from the book, The Rapist Files: Interviews With Convicted Rapists. The second is from a lads' mag. (If you want to test your ability to differentiate rapists from lads' mags, Jezebel has obliged with an online quiz containing 16 of the statements used in the study.)

The study authors worry that lads' magazines (which are not categorized as pornographic because they do not show full nudity) are mainstreaming hedonistic, predatory attitudes toward women.

"The apparent normalising effect of lads' mags runs counter to the work that is done with sex offenders both in prison and the community,” lead researcher Miranda Horvath told the Guardian. “Sex offender programmes challenge the men about their sexist, misogynistic and derogatory beliefs about women and seek to reeducate them. Yet it appears that some similar beliefs have been presented in recent lads' mags, which are normalised and accepted in mainstream society."

Said co-researcher Peter Hegarty in a press release, “We are not killjoys or prudes who think that there should be no sexual information and media for young people. But are teenage boys and young men best prepared for fulfilling love and sex when they normalise views about women that are disturbingly close to those mirrored in the language of sexual offenders?”

He added that young men should be given credible sex education and not have to rely on lads' mags as a source of information as they grow up.

Dr. Horvath of Middlesex University is a pioneering researcher into multiple-perpetrator rape and co-organizer of the London conference on sexual violence at which I gave a keynote this summer. Dr. Hegarty at the University of Surrey has just completed a fascinating research project on Lewis Terman of Stanford University; his book, Poison in the Gift: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men is in press by the University of Chicago Press.

The article is: "Lights on at the end of the party: Are lads' mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?" by Miranda Horvath, Peter Hegarty, Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield, in the British Journal of Psychology. Author correspondence may be addressed to Dr. Horvath (HERE).

Russell Banks' new novel explores sex offender banishment

The Kid is all alone in the world, hiding in the shadows under the freeway, part of an ever-growing mass of exiles electronically shackled to a society that despises and shuns them.

But who are these modern-day lepers? And why are there so many of them? What if sex offending is a symptom of a malfunctioning society, and these men are just the canaries in the coal mine, carrying the burden of society' shame? What if the Internet is the snake in the Garden of Eden, and pornography is the forbidden fruit?

In Lost Memory of Skin, best-selling novelist Russell Banks explores the deeper ironies of a culture that condemns pedophiles even while turning its children into dehumanized sexual commodities. But on a deeper level, the novel is about the profound loneliness and alienation of the digital age, the inability of people to get beyond false facades to truly trust and connect with each other.

My review continues HERE.

(As always, if you appreciate the book review, please click "yes" at the Amazon site, to boost the placement of my Amazon reviews.)

Sex offender roundup

So much being generated on the sex offender front that it's hard to keep up. Here, in no particular order, are just a few choice items:

The Atlantic: Overzealous sex offender laws harm public

As the tide begins to turn, The Atlantic magazine has joined the backlash, with a well-written and insightful piece by associate editor Conor Friedersdorf that begins like this:

On the Texas registry for sex offenders, Frank Rodriguez's crime is listed as "sexual assault of a child." If I lived in his neighborhood and had young children, I'd be frightened upon seeing that. Safe to assume that some of his neighbors discovered his status and became alarmed. Needlessly so, as it turns out. Delving into his story, journalist Abigail Pesta has discovered that Rodriguez was arrested for having sex with his high school girlfriend. He was 19. She was 15. They've now been happily married for years, and he has fathered four girls.

The anecdote is part of a larger story about America's sex offender registries and the people on them who don't belong there. It's a timely subject. This month, some state governments are racing to bring themselves into compliance with the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in order to avoid losing federal funds. As a result, the sex offender dragnet may pull in even more people. Says Pesta, "Each of the 50 states now has at least one grassroots group dedicated to getting young people -- many high school age, but some under the age of 10 -- off the registry."

So perhaps the backlash will grow too.

The article continues HERE.

Juvenile registries harmful, study finds

Dovetailing nicely with the Atlantic piece, a leading researcher and national expert on sex offender policy has found that placing the names of juveniles on sex offender registries does nothing to make society safer, and has harmful unintended effects on youth and on juvenile case processing.

Based on her research, Elizabeth Letourneau of the Medical University of South Carolina is calling for an end to notification requirements for juveniles.

A summary of her research is HERE.

California releases audit of SVP program

The State Auditor’s Office has issued its long-awaited report on the practical implementation of California’s civil commitment scheme for sex offenders. It isn’t as hard-hitting as I would have liked, but there are a few interesting tidbits.

One I found interesting was the statistic that out of all of the sex offenders who were NOT civilly committed and who were released into the community between 2005 and 2010, only ONE was later convicted for a new sexually violent offense. Talk about a low base rate!

The report also details the program’s meager bang for the buck. From 2005 to 2010, the state paid nearly $49 million in evaluation costs alone to a small group of privately contracted evaluators. Some of these psychologists earned upwards of $1 million per year. And for what return? Last year, the SVP program screened 6,575 prisoners for possible civil commitment. And guess how many were committed? THREE (much less than 1 percent)!

Just think about how much primary prevention work to reduce sexual violence all of those waste millions could have funded.  

The full report is online HERE.

More on the social costs of civil detention 

Unlike the California auditors, who seem to have bought into the promise of the Static-99 as an “actuarial” technique capable of predicting future behavior, law professor Tamara Rice Lave of the Miami School of Law has just published an article in New Criminal Law Review claiming that the Static has little utility in SVP determinations not only because it is inaccurate, but also because it does not link dangerousness to mental illness as U.S. laws require. Here is the abstract of her article, “Controlling Sexually Violent Predators: Continued Incarceration At What Cost?”

Sexually violent predator (SVP) laws are inherently suspicious because they continue to incarcerate people not because of what they have done, but because of what they might do. I focus on three major criticisms of the laws. First, I use recent recidivism data to challenge the core motivation for the SVP laws—that sex offenders are monsters who cannot control themselves. Second, I situate the laws theoretically as examples of what Feeley and Simon call the “new penology.” I argue that the SVP laws show the limited promise of the new penology—that we can use science to predict risk accurately—because the actuarial instruments used in SVP determinations make many mistakes. In making this argument, I focus particularly on the most commonly used such instrument, the Static-99. Finally, I argue that the Static-99 fails to meet the constitutional criteria laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks because it does not link an individual’s mental illness to his dangerousness.

Her full article is available online HERE.

Government SVP reports off target, says Allen Frances

Allen Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, has been dabbling with SVP cases as an expert witness for the past year. After reviewing almost 100 cases, he is  – to put it mildly – under-impressed by the reports of government experts:

In not one case did the sexual offender qualify for anything remotely resembling a DSM-IV diagnosis of Paraphilia. And this is in an enriched sample of offenders who have been carefully screened and are presumed to have Paraphilia. Certainly state evaluators are wildly over-diagnosing Paraphilia and the courts are sanctioning unjust psychiatric incarceration based on their misguided opinions.

The evaluators all misinterpreted DSM-IV in just the same way. They routinely equate the act of committing a sex crime with having a mental disorder. Their reports gave remarkably detailed descriptions of the offender's criminal behavior, but provide little or no rationale or justification for a diagnoses of Paraphilia. The write-ups are all long and thorough -- but completely off point and generic. Although written by dozens of different evaluators, they have a rote quality and all repeated exactly the same mistakes.

His full post, at his “Couch in Crisis” blog at the Psychiatric Times, is HERE.

Is porn "driving men crazy"?

Last but not least, the prolific and insightful blogger Vaughan Bell deconstructs a CNN article by social crusader Naomi Wolf, who claims that pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing [men] to have more difficulty controlling their impulses.”

According to her article, … “some men (and women) have a 'dopamine hole' – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.”

Wolf cites the function of dopamine to back up her argument and says this provides “an increasing body of scientific evidence” to support her ideas.

Porn is portrayed as a dangerous addictive drug that hooks naive users and leads them into sexual depravity and dysfunction. The trouble is, if this is true (which by the way, it isn’t, research suggests both males and females find porn generally enhances their sex lives, it does not effect emotional closeness and it is not linked to risky sexual behaviours) it would also be true for sex itself which relies on, unsurprisingly, a remarkably similar dopamine reward system.

Furthermore, Wolf relies on a cartoon character version of the reward system where dopamine squirts are represented as the brain’s pleasurable pats on the back....

The full post is HERE.

And after all of this if you're still in the mood for further browsing, I highly recommend the wide-ranging Mind Hacks blog; the topics are always fascinating (at least to me).