December 17, 2013 by Alan Martin – LINK TO ORGINAL ARTICLE
Last week, it was announced that the UK’s long promised internet filters would begin with new customers to BT. With British public opinion split on the necessity and practicality of opt-out censorship, its impact is yet to be seen. But what do we know about child development and the effects of pornography on the brain?
Janice Hiller is a clinical psychologist who has specialised in psychosexual issues for the past 15 years. Neurologically, she says, teenagers and pre-teens are significantly more likely to have their world views and attitudes shaped by surrounding stimuli: “At age 10 they have more neural connections than adults and if there’s sexualised images and languages around them, that’s what they’ll absorb,” she tells me. “If they’re looking at pornography on the internet, their brains are going to be highly sexualised and that predisposes towards some kind of problematic maladaptive behaviour in adult life”.
Though a predisposition is far from a guarantee, she points out. “The neural pathways set up by exposure to sexual material may become embedded, although this does vary from person to person of course. There is a certain amount of neural plasticity so one cannot say that sexual images will be ‘hard wired’, but avoiding the risk to children by protecting them does seem to be very important.”
Paula Hall, a therapist specialising in porn addiction and current chair of ATSAC agrees: “Psychologically they’re more susceptible, they’re not as set in their ways, but adolescent brains are much easier to programme and to learn things. They’re pruning neural pathways, which is why their sexual tastes can be much more hard wired into their brains by looking at porn than an older guy.”
There’s evidence that sexual attitudes can be altered later than this too. In a 1981 experiment by Malamuth and Check, a group of undergraduates were shown a cinematic film tangentially featuring violence against women and later administered a survey seemingly unconnected to the movie. The men (but not the women) shown the film had markedly higher scores in acceptance of the use of aggression against women in both sexual and non-sexual encounters than the control groups. These results were replicated in a similar 1995 study by Weisz and Earls where men (but again, not women) shown a similar film were more likely to accept rape myths and be less sympathetic towards the accuser in re-enacted rape trials.
One important thing to note here is that the evidence gathered on children is in the form of surveys and anecdotes, separate from the more empirical research carried out on adults: the reasoning for that is the huge number of ethical alarm bells testing porn on children would set off. But hidden away in that observation is something slightly more concerning for those worried by porn’s impact: free streaming pornography really exploded in 2006 with the launch of YouPorn, meaning that seven years of fast broadband and all-you-can-eat porn is culminating in the first generation of teenagers weaned on an incredibly varied smorgasbord of sexually explicit content entering the adult world.
It remains difficult to unpick the sticky world of correlation and causation, of course. Wired.co.uk heard many anecdotes from teachers about noticeable increases in overt sex talk and objectification in recent years, but there are a wide range of other factors that are or could be at play. These include parenting techniques, the quality of sex education and, potentially, hormones present in meat, dairy and drinking water.
Whether or not these limitations are valid, the government has announced it will act. “They’re getting distorted ideas about sex and being pressurised in a way that we’ve never seen before, and as a father I am extremely concerned about this,” David Cameron said in a speech earlier this year. There’s plenty of scepticism in the tech community that these filters can work at all, and more concern about the fine detail. If a filter is too lax, it negates the point in having them in the first place, but if it’s too severe then it will lock out porn but do a lot of collateral damage too. Context is everything, and legitimate searches for sexual health questions could be blocked by an overly-puritanical filter. The chilling anti-child porn warning ads Google served in relation to researching this article proves that even the world’s most sophisticated search engine struggles with contextual meaning.
There is also a risk that parents could assume that the government has taken action to protect their children, so they don’t have to. Singer and Singer in 1986, and Peterson, Moore and Furstenberg in 1991 found that parental supervision and discussion can negate the effects of media influence by aiding with critical thinking, but as porn is a secretive, solo activity, there’s no other voices to critique the realism on display. And should children discuss it amongst themselves, they’re less likely to find dissenting voices through peer pressure and inexperience.
Perhaps most importantly, the porn industry is a pretty easy target, and there are questions about how much impact targeting a single area like this will have when sexualised imagery — away from the cognitively separate fantasy land of porn — is everywhere. Magazines, tabloids, advertising, TV shows, movies, music videos and many other areas shape our world view and these are much more deeply ingrained than a porn habit. In the case of music videos, the evidence of their influence on sexual attitudes goes back over two decades: a 1987 study of 457 college students by Strouse and Buerkel-Rothfuss found that among females, consumption of MTV was the single most powerful predictor of attitudes towards sex and relationships, as well as the number of sexual partners, and obviously the likes of White Snake’s ‘Here I Go Again’ video from the year of the study are positively tame compared to current favourites. Studies suggest TV can have a similar influence, and social media is another factor. As one teacher put it to me: “Facebook, Youtube and Twitter do more to distort our youth’s perception of sexuality than internet porn ever will. Porn is still seen as taboo, but ‘sexy selfies’ of teens and preteens are commonplace.”
Is this a case of changing attitudes, or just new technology making personal expression easier? Hall notes that for some, technology makes extreme behaviour that much easier: “Once there were a few small ads for prostitutes and you’d have to go to a payphone with your 10p, now you can get 5 minutes free chat, book online and find the nearest one with your SatNav.” This is a clear generational shift: “I had a young guy on a treatment programme in stitches about the idea of older guys going to shops and buying porn magazines.”
Like everything in society, sexual attitudes aren’t static. Lest we forget in the past 200 years novels, telephones, dancing, rock music and many other things have been accused of having a corrupting influence upon youth. In 1816, The Times of London said of the waltz “we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion”. Nearly 200 years separate that and the earlier quote from David Cameron, but the concerned father motif remains. Internet pornography has the advantage of coming in a more scientifically enlightened time where there is enough evidence for some, but just as it’s possible that books and the waltz influenced some for the worse it’s hard to know exactly how widespread the problem is. Hall notes “If you watch violent porn and have a history of violence there is much more chance of you committing a violent sex crime”, but emphasises that “It doesn’t automatically lead to that though, and scaremongering about porn isn’t helping address the serious issues.”
Even if we imagine that the solutions to all these philosophical, technical and practical problems have been outlined in a paper in Whitehall somewhere, success in a field as nebulous as this is pretty much impossible to measure in any meaningful, non-anecdotal way. There is enough research to suggest that pornography in teens still undergoing neural pruning can lead to issues later in life for some, but just as prohibition in alcohol and cigarettes has never been effective, it’s going to need more than an opt-out filter to solve. Hall is sure that a filter, though welcome, will not work for those determined to break it and education is required: “I’m absolutely not anti-porn. I wouldn’t want to go back to the Victorian era: I think it’s important that we educate young people that sex is fun, sex is enjoyable, sex is okay — but it’s vital they realise it’s not necessarily harmless fun.”
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