Tim Worstall

The Violent Porn Debate

Not sure about this at all.


Jane Austen seems an unlikely standard-bearer for those who defend the right
to look at images depicting women being tortured and raped.


The novelist was quoted during a conference at Durham University this week,
which debated proposed legislation that would make possession of “extreme
pornography” a criminal offence carrying a three-year prison sentence.


The decision to introduce a new law followed a long campaign by a mother whose
daughter was killed in 2003 by a man who was said to have been a obsessive
viewer of violent porn sites.

The presumption always has to be that you are allowed to do something, possess something, unless it is possible to show that your doing so causes direct harm to another. Now here they are suggesting not just that actual violent porn (like the actual images of a strangulation) should be illegal to possess but also those acted out, whether fakes or fantasies.

Which leads to a question. Does the existence or possession of such lead to direct harm to anyone? Yes, I can see the correlation here between the murderer and his consumption of such images, but where’s the causation?

Didn’t I see somewhere that consumption of porn lowers the incidence of rape? If this is true shouldn’t we be making such images legal to produce (which they are currently not) as well as keeping possession legal?

In

13 responses

  1. IanP Avatar
    IanP

    next will come the burning of the books !!!

    Reply
  2. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    We won’t be burning books: old technology. Instead next will come the blocking of web sites..
    .. which is already upon us.

    Reply
  3. Lysias Avatar
    Lysias

    You’re wanting to eat your cake and have it there. If there isn’t a causal connection between violence and porn there isn’t a causal connection between porn and the absence of violence.
    Tim adds: Not quite what I said. If there is a causal link (which I’m not sure about) which way does it operate?

    Reply
  4. yellerKat Avatar
    yellerKat

    A friend had (1) guitar lesson from the bloke in question in 2001 and was so creeped out (friend was male, btw) he never went back.

    Reply
  5. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    If I could seriously believe that banning pictorial pornography could be relied on to significantly reduce the incidence of rape and sadistic homicides then I’d be inclined to support such bans. The trouble is that it’s not as simple as that.
    There have been umpteen academic studies seeking definitive proof of connections between pornographic images and literature and corresponding crimes but all have run into the problem of a long popular tradition in Japan, going back to the 19th century, of graphic porn which still flourishes:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunga
    And famously Japan – whatever the suicide rate there – has low rates of crime and rape by the standards of other affluent countries. The only robust conclusion seems to be that the incidence of crimes (and suicide) crucially depends on prevailing national cultures as well as law enforcement policies, conviction rates and sentencing.
    In Britain:
    “An investigation shows that conviction rates for many of the most violent crimes have been in freefall since Labour came to power in 1997 and are now well below 10 per cent. The chronically low figures for convictions come at the same time as reports that violent crime is increasing. An analysis of Home Office figures reveals that only 9.7 per cent of all ‘serious woundings’, including stabbings, that are reported to the police result in a conviction. For robberies the figure falls to 8.9 per cent and for rape, it is 5.5 per cent.”
    http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1784623,00.html
    “Conviction rates for serious offences such as wounding and rape are too low, the Attorney General has admitted.”
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5025924.stm
    The evidence rather suggests that instead of banning pornographic images, it makes better sense to focus on rectifying the appalling low conviction rate for rape in Britain.
    Btw, as for homicides:
    “Cases of murder and manslaughter have risen by almost a quarter since Labour came to power, Home Office figures have revealed. Since 1997, the number of homicide victims, including solved and unsolved cases, has averaged 737 per year. In the period from 1990 to 1996, the average was 601. The number of homicide victims has averaged 737 per year since Labour came to power.”
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/09/ncrime09.xml

    Reply
  6. Little Black Sambo Avatar
    Little Black Sambo

    Which might mean that pornography is socialized in Japan in such a way that it does little harm – which might not be the case here.

    Reply
  7. Not Saussure Avatar
    Not Saussure

    it makes better sense to focus on rectifying the appalling low conviction rate for rape in Britain.
    How do we do that, then? Only prosecute when the evidence is pretty damning, or alter burden of proof, or what?

    Reply
  8. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    “How do we do that, then? Only prosecute when the evidence is pretty damning, or alter burden of proof, or what?”
    A good question. I’m sure the Crown Prosecution Service wishes it knew the answers – I don’t and don’t claim to.
    What I’m saying is that banning internet porn is very likely to be ineffective in preventing rape or sadistic homicides and – more importantly – will likely lead to wasteful use of policing and prosecuting resources diverted to enforce such a ban.
    I suspect another scam: some political or policing lobby is pressing for the ban to attract taxpayers’ money from the exchequer and/or to divert public attention from the Blair gov’t’s failings in stopping the rise in violent crimes. Increasing the convictions for rape is far more professionally challenging than conducting searches of the internet for porn to ban. Also, any critics of the scam can be conveniently dubbed preverts and porn addicts.
    It happens that I switched my ISP shortly before Christmas. The new ISP – unlike my previous ISP – is demonstrably successful in filtering out spam from my postbox, including porno spam. I much prefer it that way – and avoiding porn on the internet isn’t difficult, contrary to some prevailing mythology.

    Reply
  9. Not Saussure Avatar
    Not Saussure

    To my mind, we in fact have pretty good evidence that exposure to, or at least the availability of, violent porn doesn’t, in fact, have much effect on people’s behaviour — if it did, we’d presumably have seen a large rise in sexual violence in the UK over the last 10 or 15 years as more and more people have started using the internet regularly and, thus, enjoyed far freer access to such material than previously they had. As far as I know, that hasn’t happened.
    The instant case, of Graham Coutts, is very interesting. I must say I hadn’t realised until I read the House of Lords ruling that overturned his conviction that it would be perfectly reasonable to reach the conclusion (this wasn’t put to the jury, and the Lords thought it should have been) that the young lady’s death was the result of consensual asphyxial sex that went horribly wrong, justifying a verdict not of murder of manslaughter by negligence (see Lord Hutton’s discussion in paras 32 and 33 in particular).

    Reply
  10. Marcin Tustin Avatar
    Marcin Tustin

    Lovely, so the taste of the state gets to dictate what you can and can’t look at. Is there a white paper yet? I assume that this can be drafted coherently, but why are they doing this? The mother of a victim has a bee in her bonnet that the particular facts of her daughter’s case are universal. They’re not. There’s absolutely no evidence that consumption of pornography causes problems to anyone. Given that this has been studied fairly extensively, if there is any harm it’s likely to be mild and marginal.

    Reply
  11. john cramer Avatar
    john cramer

    1. Don’t certain groups say that everything that men do is violent – especially if they do it to women.
    2. Since they started showing nekkid womin on TV and the screen – the birth rate has fallen but life expectation has risen.
    Well ?

    Reply
  12. Mukkinese Avatar
    Mukkinese

    Firstly this is not a defence of violent pornography, rather an attack on bad law.
    But who exactly is being protected here?
    Women?
    The government readily admits that it cannot supply any evidence that looking at such images causes anyone to commit crime. Research into this area has been ongoing and in-depth for decades and not one study has shown evidence that viewing such images causes a behavioural change in the viewer. The Home offices own Royal commission, chaired by Professor Bernard Williams clearly states as much.
    The actors/models who make this pornography?
    They are protected from coercion and abuse by the laws of the countries in which they live and work and it is difficult to see how this law will affect them in any way.
    Children?
    Since the sites are based abroad and the UK is a minor part of their worldwide market, banning ownership here will not affect the availability of these images online. We know very well that the only way to protect children from harm online is for parents to closely monitor their child’s internet activity, what site they visit and who they are talking to online and stop treating the internet like an ‘electronic nanny’.
    Society?
    We are not talking about publishing and distributing images with this law, as has been stated it will not affect the production of these images in any way. This law is about what an individual looks at in the privacy of their own home. So the Government is saying it will lock you up with real criminals in order to protect you from yourself? Essentially, they are making ‘bad taste’ practiced in private, a crime, punishable by up to three years imprisonment.
    Let’s be clear here; it is the norm that this material is acted out fictional scenes, just like a thriller or horror movie, except with explicit sex. It is possible that there are some people who do abuse adults, film that abuse and put it online (such as terrorists-which this law will not affect), but A; why would a commercial site owner put evidence of themselves commiting such crimes online and B; take the risk of really hurting people when it is safer, legal and perfectly moral to pay actors to act out these scenes? No one has to date, shown a single adult porn site where people are really, seriously hurt. The difficulty in finding such sites shows that they are not the norm, but rarities.
    We hear anecdotal evidence that the police arrest criminals for sex offences and find stashes of violent porn. From this they conclude that the porn made the criminal, instead of more sensibly, the criminal seeking out the porn. I’m sure that many dentists look at porn, they are only human after all, – does that mean that porn makes people become dentists? The argument is irrational. Those who are predisposed to violent behaviour will find their excuses in many places, Sutcliffe got his from the Bible, let’s ban that, Brady got his from holocaust images, let’s ban them. The list of potential ‘triggers’ would be endless.
    Either someone is criminally insane, in which case we cannot predict what will trigger their violence or someone is a rational functioning adult and we should not be giving them excuses, but making them responsible for their own actions.
    In order to police this law, they will have to be far more intrusive than they have been to date. If this law is passed, we can all say goodbye to any illusion that what we do in our own bedrooms is in any way just our private business and no one else’s.
    We must make no mistake in what is happening here. This proposed law sets a massive precedent; the Government is proposing to lock you up for looking at images in the privacy of your own home and they are doing so without being able to supply any evidence that looking at these images causes any harm whatsoever.
    Sorry for the long post.

    Reply
  13. Valintino Avatar
    Valintino

    Hello, Your site is great. Regards, Valintino Guxxi

    Reply

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