A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.
- Plato
The debate about how viewing pornography might affect children's development is furious, but little empirical data exists to support any side. Experts, government officials, parents, and even children themselves weigh in on the issues frequently, but no one seems able to agree on exactly what constitutes "matter harmful to children." In addition, most of the arguments on all sides are based on anecdotal evidence and emotional responses to moral messages. Interestingly, most current anti-porn arguments can be traced to a single individual's notorious sex-crimes rampage in the U.S. in the 1970s. Still, scientists have done little to advance true understanding of the underlying issues.
By his own admission, Theodore "Ted" Bundy began reading violence-laced pornographic magazines when he was 12 or 13 years old. Years later he would be executed for the sex slaying of a 12-year-old Florida girl. Bundy was one of the most notorious serial killers in history. He confessed to dispatching more than 28 young women and girls in Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Florida before he was convicted and sentenced for the murder of Kimberly Leach. Some believe he was responsible for as many as 50 more.
Bundy admitted his crimes. He said the porn made him do it. He said after years of reading about brutal sex acts and looking at violent sexual images, he was compelled to act out some of his fantasies. Just 17 hours before his 1989 execution, Bundy told Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Ph.D., that unless society curtails the availability of pornography that depicts violence, "... there are lots of other kids playing in streets around this country today who are going to be dead tomorrow and the next day and the next day and next month, because other young people are reading the kinds of things and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today."
"The most damaging kinds of pornography are those that involve violence and sexual violence," Bundy told Dobson, according to transcripts of the interview published by the psychologist. "Because the wedding of those two forces, as I know only too well, brings about behavior that is just too terrible to describe.
"I take full responsibility for whatever I've done and all the things that I've done. The question and the issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape these kinds of violent behavior."
Bundy's case became an overnight cause celebr� for the religious right and anti-porn crusaders. His apparent confirmation of a supposed link between violent sex-related crimes and pornography - what some have labeled "the evil byproducts of pornography" - continues to fuel the religious right's zeal to eliminate sexually oriented materials of any kind from contemporary society. As recently as Sept. 4, 2002, Dobson wrote in a column on his Website, www.family.org, "I fear Bundy was right. Every few days we read about another boy or girl who has been sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. When a suspect is identified, authorities typically find boxes of pornography in his possession, much of it depicting violence against women and children. It has become a very familiar pattern."
And why wouldn't people take Bundy's word for what effect pornography really could have on otherwise normal people? Despite the fact that he was, in the final analysis, among the worst monsters ever to walk American soil, he was by all accounts attractive, charming, articulate, and bright, with an intelligence bordering on genius. He was raised in a religious, middle-class home. He was the boy next door. If pornography could turn him into a vicious, scheming, seemingly soulless creature, what might it do to lesser men?
That the Internet now makes pornography easily available to more people with greater frequency is seen by some as the number one reason to censor the medium. It's not enough, they say, to age-limit access to sexually oriented Websites - those they say contain "matter harmful to children" - because children can stumble across porn in the most unlikely places: Unsolicited e-mail advertising "adult" wares and hijacked domain names are two notorious examples. Commercial Web browser filters are called both not comprehensive enough and overly comprehensive. Not even the U.S. Congress has devised a workable solution for keeping "harmful matter" away from kids.
Part of the reason is that a workable definition of "harmful" content is elusive.
Many Questions, Few Real Answers
A quick query of any Internet search engine turns up a plethora of things researchers have deemed "harmful" to children. Some of them seem to be supported by solid research: the deleterious effects of smoking cigarettes; the health risks of consuming lead-based paint; hearing loss associated with continuous exposure to loud noises; the absence of stable "parental" influences early in life; and of course the lingering effects of infectious childhood diseases like polio, measles, and scarlet fever. In other cases, professional opinions of "harm" vary because research findings are contradictory: divorce and the continued marriage of unhappy parents; "standardized" learning exams and the lack thereof; fluoride toothpaste and the failure to use it; spanking and sparing the rod; home crowding and the absence of siblings, food additives and the lack thereof; and working mothers and stay-at-home moms. For still other "harm" questions, so-called "findings" seem almost silly, based more on conjecture and personal bias than on solid scientific inquiry: Harry Potter indoctrinates for the occult; experimentation with marijuana leads to use of harder drugs; and using computers discourages creative thought.
Although many are hesitant to declare a causal relationship between media violence and real-life aggressive behavior, scientists have documented a correlation, according to the Feb. 2001 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatricians:
In the scientific literature on media violence, the connection of media violence to real-life aggressive behavior and violence has been substantiated. As much as 10% to 20% of real-life violence may be attributable to media violence. The recently completed 3-year National Television Violence Study found the following: 1) nearly two thirds of all programming contains violence; 2) children's shows contain the most violence; 3) portrayals of violence are usually glamorized; and 4) perpetrators often go unpunished. A recent comprehensive analysis of music videos found that nearly one fourth of all Music Television (MTV) videos portray overt violence and depict weapon carrying. Research has shown that even television news can traumatize children or lead to nightmares....
According to a recent content analysis, mainstream television programming contains large numbers of references to cigarettes, alcohol, and illicit drugs. One fourth of all MTV videos contain alcohol or tobacco use. A longitudinal study found a positive correlation between television and music video viewing and alcohol consumption among teens. Finally, content analyses show that children and teenagers continue to be bombarded with sexual imagery and innuendoes in programming and advertising. To date, there are no data available to substantiate the behavioral impact of this exposure. [Emphasis added.]
This analysis lends a bit of credence to the notion that Bundy was somehow warped by exposure to violent material as a youth, but does not completely explain his predatory behavior. Rape, for example, is generally considered to be a crime of power, not of passion, as Bundy alleged it was in his case. Years earlier, the July 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (the "Meese Commission") concluded that establishment of a link between aggressive behavior and sexual violence "requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence." Tellingly, it went on to say, "We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions... that are plainly justified by our own common sense." Paradoxically, in another section, the report notes that viewing of sexually violent materials "[does] not vary with the extent of sexual explicitness so long as the violence is presented in an undeniably sexual context." [Underline contained in original document.] Commission members specifically noted that so-called "slasher" films "are likely to produce the consequences discussed here to a greater extent than most of the materials available in 'adults only' pornographic outlets."
The effects of early exposure to pornography remain ill-defined, primarily because so little real research has been done in the area. Perhaps Richard Kim expressed the problem best when he wrote in a May 9 article for In These Times (www.inthesetimes.com), "contemporary discussions over children and sex take place in an 'empirical vacuum,' in a fantasy landscape populated by innocent, unspoiled children and violent, incurable pedophile-pornographers." According to Al Cooper, Ph.D., director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Center (www.sex-centre.com) in San Jose, Calif., training director for psychological services at Stanford University, and editor of the book Sex & the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians (Brunner-Routledge, 2002), research data is sparse because utilizing minors as subjects increases the complexity of studies enormously.
"Most research [about sexuality and pornography] deals with adults. There is not a lot of funding for research about children," Cooper says, noting that, at least in the U.S., the very suggestion of such research is greeted with raised eyebrows. "In addition, there are issues like obtaining parental permission and other criteria to be met."
Research about children and the Internet is especially lacking, Cooper says. "It's so new and there's so little of it, that right now we're just trying to get a broad-brush sense [of what's actually happening]." Essentially, he says, "We're making decisions by guessing."
As a clinician, Cooper doesn't necessarily denounce guesswork out of hand, except when it interferes with genuine scientific endeavor. After all, some very good science has developed from conjecture about what might be the logical outcome of certain actions. Solid research based on sound scientific principles can resolve supposition by either proving or disproving the underlying theory; either way, an answer to a question is found. Cooper cites an example wherein a conventional Internet theory was debunked by research recently: "One guess we had was that two out of three 'women' in chat rooms were actually men posing as women. The research showed that people usually lie about their age, but rarely about their gender."
Developing a standard definition of "harmful matter" is critical, Cooper says, not only for the scientific community, but also for the legal community and society as a whole. He says those involved in sex research have for some time advocated the development of a common lexicon based on scientific data, not societal mores. For example, the term "online sexual problems" comprises a very broad category of symptoms. "Online sexual compulsivity," on the other hand, is a much more precise term that can be narrowed even further to describe substitution of the Internet for a flesh-and-blood partner and "addiction" to Internet porn. Cooper says jeopardizing real-life relationships and getting into trouble with the law because of Internet use often are symptoms of online sexual compulsivity.
Research indicates that 8.5 to 15 percent of adult Internet users have sexual problems related to the Internet, Cooper said. "But that misses the point," he adds. "That means that 85 percent of them don't. Of course, that makes it harder to make a case for censorship."
That is not to say that there should not be considerable concern about protecting vulnerable others from explicit content of all kinds on the Net, Cooper says. Minors, the mentally ill, and the mentally retarded, for example, are less able than "normal" adults to make clear and informed decisions about what they view.
Conscientious Objections
Still, the question remains: What exactly is material that should be considered "harmful" to the vulnerable? Of course very few rational people would defend actual child pornography as anything but harmful to the children involved. Other than that one point of widespread consensus, though, the debate is as heated as it is constant.
Social conservatives believe they have the definitive answer, but employing their definition might very well take all pornography away from those of legal age who desire to view it. At least in the U.S., their proposed approach composes what many view as an extreme violation of Constitutional guarantees.
Primarily, organizations like Focus on the Family (www.family.org) and Morality in Media voice concerns that children learn to model their behavior on what they see in the world around them. Since pornography is easily available on the Internet, they say, parents and children are being deprived of an essential bonding and training experience that ideally would allow the children to grow up to become "sexually responsible." Much of what they quote is from the Meese Commission report, which has been criticized as a right-wing government's attempt to legitimize its societal agenda by discrediting an earlier Presidential commission's report on pornography that wasn't negative enough.
For example, Victor B. Cline, Ph.D., a licensed clinical psychologist in Salt Lake City, Utah, lays out an extensive essay about porn's negative effects on adults and children on the Morality in Media Website (www.moralityinmedia.org). In it, he concludes that "In my clinical practice, I have treated both children and adults who have been unequivocally and repeatedly injured by exposure to pornography." Citing Meese Commission findings that 91 percent of the males and 82 percent of the females [in a sample of 600 American high school students] admitted having been exposed to X-rated, hardcore pornography, Cline wrote that two-thirds of the males and 40 percent of the females reported wanting to try out some of the behaviors they had witnessed, and, among high school students, 31 percent of males and 18 percent of the females "admitted doing some of the things sexually they had seen in the pornography within a few days after exposure." [Emphasis included in original document.]
"In a society where some types of pornographic material are protected by the Constitution and obscenity laws go unenforced, some individuals may choose to immerse themselves in pornography," Cline writes. "These individuals should be made aware of the health hazards involved. This kind of knowledge is most important for parents, since most sexual and pornographic addictions begin in middle childhood or adolescence, most of the time without the parents' awareness or the children have an insufficient understanding of the risks involved."
The Government Weighs In
The legislature and the courts, too, have attempted to define "harmful matter" with varying degrees of success, and their definition continues to change. Barton Aronson, a FindLaw (www.findlaw.com) columnist and a prosecutor in Washington, D.C., wrote in an April 19 column on CNN.com, "For much of American history, censorship laws were justified on the ground that explicit speech was harmful to children. However, in the late 1950s, Justice Felix Frankfurter dramatically recast the terms of the debate when he ruled on behalf of the Supreme Court in Butler v. Michigan that the law could not 'reduce the adult population... to reading only what is fit for children.' Governments, the Court recognized, have a vital interest in protecting children. ... Nonetheless, the First Amendment bars the state from using that interest as a blanket justification for censorship."
Fifteen years later, in Miller vs. California, the Supreme Court defined obscenity and said that category of speech falls outside Constitutional free speech protections. The definition still stands in regard to adults, but the Miller decision did not address minors in any way. In subsequent decisions, the court has held that additional standards for "patently offensive" material can be applied when a case involves minors, but those standards cannot be applied to adults.
That's when the Federal Communications Commission jumped into the fray. Because radio and television are widely accessible by everyone of any age (in other words, not limited to those who choose to purchase adults-only printed material), the federal agency that regulates the airwaves prohibited the airing of "indecency:" basically, anything describing or depicting explicit sexual or excretory activity. "In the early 1970s, the Supreme Court [in a case known colloquially as 'the Carlin Decision' because it revolved around a radio station's broadcast of George Carlin's 'Seven Dirty Words' routine] blessed this distinction between the airwaves and everything else," Aronson wrote. "Finding that the airwaves were somehow different - in part because they were public, in part because they were pervasive in American life - the Court allowed the FCC to apply the indecency standard to prohibit on television and radio what would otherwise be permissible in print." Subscriber-based cable television is not so regulated.
Even with the efforts of commissions empanelled by two presidents in the late '60s and mid-'80s (which, coincidentally, could not agree on whether porn was harmful to adults or children), legal efforts to define "harmful matter" took a back seat to other concerns until the mid-1990s, when the advent of the Internet once again thrust the specter of irreparable damage caused by exposure to pornography to the forefront of the public consciousness. The Internet made it all too easy for anyone of any age to access indecent - and possibly obscene, at least in some schools of thought - imagery anytime, anywhere. Responding to a surge of "save the children" messages and taking cues from the U.S. high court and the FCC, Congress attempted to define "harmful matter" with regard to minors. The federal Child Online Protection Act (COPA) and the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000, which established guidelines by which publicly funded institutions could continue to receive funds, contain the most cogent definition to date:
[A]ny communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or that -
A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest;
B) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, or actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and
C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors." 47 U.S.C. s. 231(e)(6) . [Emphasis added.]
"The current test was taken from the original Miller Test, with which we are all familiar," says Lawrence Walters (www.lawrencewalters.com), a partner specializing in Internet law with the firm Weston, Garrou & DeWitt. "There are variations on the theme, but the test is pretty similar at both the state and federal levels. It is generally understood that all hardcore erotica will be considered harmful to minors. Beyond that, it will be up to the personal predilections of the particular jurors in any given case."
Walters, whose office is in Florida, said Florida's state statute is very similar, except for subsection B, which states, "is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors." [Emphasis added.]
Texas has an even broader definition, which gives some concrete examples of what is considered "harmful:"
(1) The unlawful sale, exhibition, rental, leasing, or distribution of material harmful to minors is the intentional sale, allocation, distribution, advertisement, dissemination, exhibition, or display of material harmful to minors, to any unmarried person under the age of seventeen years, or the possession of material harmful to minors with the intent to sell, allocate, advertise, disseminate, exhibit, or display such material to any unmarried person under the age of seventeen years, at a newsstand or any other commercial establishment which is open to persons under the age of seventeen years.
(2) "Material harmful to minors" is defined as any paper, magazine, book, newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, composition, publication, photograph, drawing, picture, poster, motion picture film, video tape, figure, phonograph record, album, cassette, compact disc, wire or tape recording, or other similar tangible work or thing which exploits, is devoted to or principally consists of, descriptions or depictions of illicit sex or sexual immorality for commercial gain, and when the trier of fact determines that the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work or thing is presented in a manner to provoke or arouse lust, passion, or perversion or exploits sex.
(3) For the purpose of this Section, "descriptions or depictions of illicit sex or sexual immorality" includes the depiction, display, description, exhibition or representation of:
a. Ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual, simulated, or animated, whether between human beings, animals, or an animal and a human being;
b. Masturbation, excretory functions, or exhibition, actual, simulated, or animated, of the genitals, pubic hair, anus, vulva, or female breast nipples;
c. Sadomasochistic abuse, meaning actual, simulated, or animated, flagellation or torture by or upon a person who is nude or clad in undergarments or in a costume which reveals the pubic hair, anus, vulva, genitals, or female breast nipples, or the condition of being fettered, bound, or otherwise physically restrained, on the part of one so clothed;
d. Actual, simulated, or animated, touching, caressing, or fondling of, or other similar physical contact with, a pubic area, anus, female breast nipple, covered or exposed, whether alone or between human, animals or a human and an animal, of the same or opposite sex, in an act of apparent sexual stimulation or gratification; or
e. Actual, simulated, or animated, stimulation of the human genital organs by any device whether or not the device is designed, manufactured, and marketed for such purpose
"In Texas, you can view all the smut you want, so long as you're married," Walters notes. "If you're single, you can't even view... 'simulated... female breast nipples.' So much for National Geographic [traditionally, the "naked women book" of choice for male adolescents]. Certainly, some of these definitions are overbroad, but have not been challenged."
In contrast, Canada makes no distinction between online and offline content. Under the Criminal Code of Canada (child is defined as younger than 18):
* For the purposes of this Act, any publication a dominant characteristic of which is the undue exploitation of sex, or of sex and any one or more of the following subjects, namely, crime, horror, cruelty and violence, shall be deemed to be obscene.
* Every one who, in the home of a child, participates in adultery or sexual immorality or indulges in habitual drunkenness or any other form of vice, and thereby endangers the morals of the child or renders the home an unfit place for the child to be in, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
The Canadian government then considers itself to be pretty clear about what law enforcement will and will not tolerate in both the real and virtual worlds.
That's all well and good, as far as it goes. At least there's a point of reference for porn purveyors who desire to stay out of legal hot water. It doesn't answer the central questions posed by many researchers, social liberals, and free speech advocates very well at all, though. Those questions are, "Does pornography really harm kids? Is harm, if it exists, dependent upon other environmental factors, or does it simply result from exposure to things young minds might not be prepared to handle in an emotionally and psychologically responsible way? What can parents, communities, porn merchants, researchers, and others do to mitigate that harm, if it exists, or should they even try to shelter children from something they'll eventually come across anyway?"
We'll take a look at those questions in our next issue.
