The Guardian newspaper in the UK published a story last week:
“Last month, the children’s commissioner for England published a report on the effect of porn on young people, reviewing 40,000 pieces of research, and found a correlation between violent pornography and those who commit violent crimes”
Pretty worrying, eh? Until you pull out the report and have a look at it. They actually reviewed 276 papers, not 40,000 – and they found that:
“we do not know whether exposure to or accessing pornography causes attitude or behavioural change”
It’s not quite the same story, is it?
Journalism is a genre. It tells particular kinds of stories in particular ways. That’s not a bad thing – that’s what a genre is. It’s good for audiences because it means that they know what they’re going to get and they can choose their entertainment consumption appropriately. One key rule for journalism is “If it bleeds it leads” – violence is popular. Add to that the sexiness of sex and you can see why journalists love stories about how dangerous pornography is – sex and violence all at once.
As a pornography researcher I’ve been interviewed for newspaper stories dozens of times. And you quickly realise that journalists have already written the story before they ever pick up the phone. What they want from the ‘experts’ is a quote that will say what they want to say, from somebody with ‘Professor’ in front of their name.
I was interviewed by a leading Australian newspaper just last week about whether young women could be harmed by uploading sexy photographs to Facebook. Well, no, I said. We have to avoid the kind of “slut-shaming” sexism where we condemn young women for exploring their sexuality, while we forgive young men their nudie runs because it’s “all good fun”. Oh, said the journalist … so do you know about any young women who have been harmed by doing this? Well, no, I don’t. We just ran focus groups with 89 young people aged 14-16 to find out what they know about sex and how they know it, I told her, and not a single one raised the harms they’d encountered from social media. They were concerned about how to ask people out, or the fact that they couldn’t talk to their parents about sex, or whether masturbation was only for “desperate” people. Those are the real concerns for young women as they develop sexually.
So – the journalist finished the interview – can you give me any names of anyone who can tell me about how these pictures damage young women’s sexual development? …
I wasn’t quoted.
One thing the report for the children’s commissioner did find was that many of the adults who work with young people are worried about the damaging effects of pornography on young people. Of course they are – they’re reading newspaper stories about it all the time. Just remember, next time you read in the media about how some recent report has proved that pornography is dangerous – that’s the story that journalism likes to tell. Have a look at the research yourself and might find that it’s a different story.
Professor Alan McKee is on the editorial board of Porn Studies, the journal discussed in the Guardian article
I think it may be time to turn the tables on the journalists – the next time you are interviewed, you could possibly interview the interviewer – and then publish the story as a rebuttal to their published story. If they are so eager to slut-shame the world, perhaps they need to be truth-shamed.
It’s not fair that journalists get to outright lie and not get called on it by name. Their reputations escape unscathed and they go on to perpetrate more falsehood in the mind of the public.
My dad studied journalism and used to frequently quote, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” as the motto for the profession. Needless to say, he never took it up as a career.
Upon reading some of the report myself, it is clear the journalist got some of their facts wrong. I didn’t find a correlation between violent pornography and those who commit violent crimes in this piece of research. And it was only 276 papers used in the formulation of the research, although they did start with 41,000 and eliminated according to their research criteria.
However, I did find a bit more to it than, “we do not know whether exposure to or accessing pornography causes attitude or behavioural change”. The full quote, under Finding 11 in the report, says: “We are able to link certain behaviours and attitudes with exposure to pornography, and we can predict certain others, but we do not know whether exposure to or accessing pornography causes attitude or behavioural change, nor whether the attitudes children and young people hold before access or exposure to pornography may make them more likely to seek out pornography”.
The researchers list 11 points under the heading “What Do We Know and Are Confident About?” in their “Discussion and Conclusions” section, including:
• “Access and exposure to pornography are linked to children and young people’s engagement in ‘risky behaviour’ (defined in the executive summary as engagement in sexual behaviours such as oral sex, anal sex and sexting)
• “Children and young people learn from and may change their behaviour because of exposure and access to pornography” and
• “There is a link between violent attitudes and violent media.”
I have to say as a teacher of high school students and a future parent, I am concerned about these findings, and not because I’m reading articles about porn’s negative effects in the papers (sensationalised as they may be). According to this research, children do learn from pornography. But it’s not the place of the porn industry to teach my child about sex, to mold his beliefs or set up an example to which he should aspire – especially when viewing porn is linked to engagement in risky behaviour, or violent attitudes.
As a parent, it is my job to teach my child about sex, to help him form his beliefs about sexuality and to set a positive example about what love is and what a good relationship looks like. I wouldn’t leave it to the porn industry because they don’t care about my child, what he learns from them or the consequences of his sexual choices. But I do.
If I can do my job well, then hopefully when he is one day exposed to pornography, it will be as Professor McKee has written and will not cause attitude or behavioural change. But it won’t be because pornography itself has no effect – it will be because he already has healthy expectations and beliefs in place.