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DR HELEN PRINGLE: SUBMISSION

Senate Environment and Communications References Committee Inquiry, 2016 Harm being done to Australian children through access to on the

Introduction

The main recommendation of this submission is that government measures in understanding and responding to pornography and its harms to children should be formulated as part of a broad-based approach that addresses Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG). The approach recommended here is on the of the strategy adopted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in England, and set out in the Equally Safe strategy of the Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba.1 I acknowledge that pornography and associated practices also do harm to boys and young men (as the mother of a son, I am acutely concerned with such risks and dangers), and I have no wish to neglect, or counsel neglect of, the problem of violence to boys and young men, whether it be perpetrated by boys or girls, men or women. However, the need for a comprehensive strategy in terms of VAWG arises because of the systematically gendered patterns of sexual and violence in our society, and the role of pornography and the industry more broadly in constructing and reflecting those patterns.

My submission to this Inquiry focuses on the impact of pornography on the autonomy, equality and dignity of children, and of other parts of the like prostitution with which it is intertwined. I understand and respect the framework of ‘public health and morality’ within which the questions of this Inquiry are often placed. However, my response in this submission to those questions is more oriented to the ways in which the sex industry reflects, constructs, normalises and even valorizes and systemic inequality on the basis of sex or . In accordance with this perspective, I understand harms of violence to children in alignment with the broad gender-based terms of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women viz. ‘For the purposes of this Declaration, the term “violence against women” means any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.’2

Throughout this submission I understand pornography not as a harmless ‘fantasy’ but in terms of practices of subordination of women and girls, practices that often lead to or are associated with other forms of ‘acting out’ violence and abuse against them. Pornographic ‘objects’ take different forms, and different people adopt different practices in their making, use and consumption, which do not affect everyone in exactly the same ways. But pornographic objects and practices all find a place within a regime of the subordination of women, which reproduces gender inequality. Rather than expressing choice, power and agency for women, pornography forms part of systemic gendered inequalities of power. Just as the forms it takes are varied, so also its harms range across physical, sexual and psychological areas, and its effects are not constrained to ‘private life’.

1 See respectively Crown Prosecution Service (UK), Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/equality/vaw/, and Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba, Equally Safe: Scotland's Strategy for Preventing and Eradicating Violence against Women and Girls, http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2014/06/7483/downloads. 2 UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, 20 December 1993, A/RES/48/104, Article 1, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm. 2

What to do about pornography in a democracy is a serious matter involving reflection on what the meaning and significance of harm and freedom. However, as I note below, the topic is frequently seen as something to be laughed and joked about, rather than raising questions of individual and collective harms of subordination, abuse and violence.

In regard to the position from which I am making this submission, I write as a woman with academic expertise in human rights principles and practices, particularly as they bear on the freedoms and securities of women and children, and as they concern freedom of expression and democratic participation. I hold a BA (Hons) from the Australian National University, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. My academic training is in political philosophy and its history with a focus on questions of justice. I research and teach across these areas at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and am the recipient of multiple teaching honours and research awards (at UNSW, state and commonwealth levels). I serve on the executive committee of the UNSW Gendered Violence Research Network. The perspective expressed in this submission is not that of UNSW.

My submission is in broad agreement with the submissions made to this Inquiry by Dr Maddy Coy and Dr Miranda Horvath, Dr Meagan Tyler, and Dr Caroline Norma, with whom I have worked closely. I am a joint Coordinator with Dr Coy and Dr Tyler of the Nordic Model Information Network, a global alliance of researchers on prostitution and the sex industry, trafficking, and other forms of violence against women and children, which supports the ‘Nordic Model’ as a step to the abolition of the prostitution system. What this means and entails is set out, in brief, in our submission to the European Parliament in support of the Honeyball motion of 2014,3 and has been developed in submissions to the UK and Scottish parliaments on proposed prostitution law reform.4

For reasons of length of the submission, I have not provided multiple sources for the claims made in this submission, either those I support or those that take an opposing point of view to mine. I would be pleased to provide to the Inquiry further detailed sources for any claim I have made or disputed.

1. Trends of Online Consumption of Pornography by Children and their Impact on the Development of Healthy and Respectful Relationships

1.1 Children’s Contact with and Access to Pornography

I wish to emphasise here, with great respect, what I see as some limitations of the scope of the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference. The Inquiry’s focus on the specific area of children and pornography is timely and necessary, but I would ask that a wider context be also held in mind in the deliberations of the Committee. I say this is in line with my main recommendation of the adoption of a comprehensive strategy on VAWG that would include pornography as an area of concern about violence and abuse against women and girls.

3 European Parliament Resolution of 26 February 2014 on Sexual Exploitation and Prostitution and its Impact on Gender Equality (2013/2103(INI)) [Honeyball motion], http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P7-TA-2014-0162&language=EN&ring=A7- 2014-0071. Our Submission in Support of Mary Honeyball’s Report on Sexual Exploitation and Prostitution and its Impact on Gender’ can be viewed at http://spaceinternational.ie/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/FINAL-Honeyball- support-letter.pdf. 4 Nordic Model Information Network (NMIN), Submission to the Consultation on the Prostitution Law Reform (Scotland) Bill, November 2015, and Submission to the Home Affairs Committee Prostitution Inquiry, February 2016, http://catwa.org.au/?q=node/72. 3

The Inquiry limits itself to harm to children in and from online consumption of pornography. This is completely appropriate as the internet is now the most inexpensive, convenient and accessible way to access ready-made pornography for use, especially by children. However, I believe it is a mistake to consider the questions of online usage without keeping in the picture, so to speak, the way in which ‘pornography is everywhere’.5 That is, pornography is not only available from dedicated pornography sites and online social media such as FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter etc., but in traditional objects such as men’s and lads’ magazines and books, public advertising, television, music and so on.6 Acts and practices of sexual violence and of harassment in the street, workplace and recreational spaces like sporting and entertainment clubs also often take a pornographic form.7

Second, the limitation of the Inquiry’s scope to focus on children’s consumption of pornography should not lead us to lose sight of the way in which pornography is for the most part made, distributed, and sold for profit by adults. Although many writers have drawn attention to the growing market share of ‘amateur’ pornography, the controllers of pornography markets are for the most part adults (adult men) with connections to other parts of the sex industry. For example, the business interests of Adultshop’s Malcolm Day and Dean Shannon have spanned websites such as as well as adult sex shops, and Day’s company Delecta also had plans to expand into the running of a mega-brothel in Camperdown.8 The pornography that children commonly access on the internet is not substantially different from what adults access, and even so-called ‘’ is available through highly organized and money-making corporate ventures.9 The ‘harm’ done to children through or related to the consumption of pornography is not disconnected from that done to adults, in other words.

Following on from this point, children do not always access pornography on their own. Adults are often responsible for introducing children to pornographic objects and practices, whether through sharing their

5 The reference is to the title of the report by Miranda A.H. Horvath, Llian Alys, Kristina Massey, Afroditi Pina, Maria Scally & Joanna R. Adler, ‘Basically... porn is everywhere’: A Rapid Evidence Assessment on the Effects that Access and Exposure to Pornography Has on Children and Young People (London: Office of Children’s Commissioner, 2013), https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/publications/basicallyporn-everywhere-rapid-evidence-assessment- effects-access-and-exposure. 6 On advertising in Australian public space, see Lauren Rosewarne, Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007); Helen Pringle, ‘What is the Billboard Doing? Reactions to Calvin Klein’, On Line Opinion, 24 November 2010, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11279; and Helen Pringle, ‘Wicked Slogans Aren’t Just Harmless Fun’, The Drum, 16 July 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07- 16/pringle-wicked-slogans-arent-just-harmless-fun/5598858/. On advertising more generally, see the groundbreaking reports by Emma Rush & Andrea La Nauze for the Australia Institute: Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in the Media (2006), www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP90.pdf, and Letting Children be Children: Stopping the Sexualisation of Children in Australia (2006), www.tai.org.au/documents/dp_fulltext/DP93.pdf. On music videos, see Maddy Coy (for EVAW Coalition, Imkaan & Object), Pornographic Performances: A Review of Research on Sexualisation and Racism in Music Videos, Short Briefing Paper on Sexist-Racist Content in Music Videos (2014), http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/resources/66/pornographic-performances-a-review-of-research-on- sexualisation-and-racism-in-music-videos#sthash.r8BGnv27.dpuf. 7 On pornography in the workplace, see Helen Pringle, ‘Pornography: Who’s Sleeping with Whom?’, On Line Opinion, 8 September 2011, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12579; Helen Pringle, ‘The Making of Women’s Un-freedom: as Harm’, in Freedom Fallacy: The Failures of Liberal , ed. Miranda Kiraly & Meagan Tyler (Melbourne: Connor Court Publishing, 2015); and Helen Pringle, ‘The Pornification of Julia Gillard’, in Bewitched and Bedevilled: Women Write the Gillard Years, ed. Samantha Trenoweth (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2013). 8 Neale Prior, ‘Business Day Crew Set Up Maddox Porn Play, Court Told’, West Australian, 7 March 2014, https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/21862904/day-crew-set-up-maddox-porn-play/, and ‘Naked Ambition: The Business of Pleasure’, 24 October 2011, http://www.executivestyle.com.au/naked-ambition-the-business-of-pleasure- 1mfba. 9 See Gail Dines, ‘Exposing the Myth of Free Porn’, ABC Religion and Ethics, 21 December 2011, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/12/21/3396048.htm. 4 own use of it, or through encouraging its use among children, or simply through casual exposure of children to pornography used by adults in the home or elsewhere. I am not speaking of dysfunctional families or fathers here, but rather of families in which ‘normal’ patterns of male entitlement and hierarchy are in place. As we know from the proceedings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child , and from previous similar inquiries, risks to children of exposure to pornography are also posed by religious figures, teachers and other adults with the responsibility of caring for children.10 That is, children often access pornography through the internet or otherwise through the mediation of adults, often in a coercive context, in which adults use pornography to give instruction to children on how to perform sexual acts, in the course of what is known as ‘grooming’ for sexual predation.

The widespread use, citation and apparent acceptability of pornography throughout society can be seen in the context of these considerations as a form of ‘social grooming’, where pornography and use is treated and spoken of as cool, exciting and/or expected – and as ‘harmless’. In contrast, a primary concern that guides my submission is the need to take the question of pornography seriously, that is, all pornography. Its consumption is no ludic pastime, somewhere outside of social relations and not existing in the ‘real world’ (as its defenders often seem to imply). It is, indeed, everywhere.

Another form that access to pornography associated with the internet takes among children is initiated, disturbingly, by children themselves. Children themselves make and circulate pornography at the edges of the global market. Sext-, a kind of low-grade pornography, are probably the most well-known example of such practices. A more disturbing practice is the making and circulation for upload, sale or swap of images and videos, often with no semblance of agreement or consent by the subjects of the images. An example is the videotaping for the purposes of circulation on the internet and other forums of the sexual humiliation of girls and women with disabilities. A notorious incident in Werribee in 2006 involved a gang of twelve young boys calling themselves the ‘Teenage Kings of Werribee’, who made a dvd in which they urinated on a girl with intellectual disabilities and set her hair on fire in the course of sexually assaulting her. In the dvd, one of the boys laughs to the camera: ‘What the , she’s the ugliest thing I have ever seen.’ The boys then posted segments of the dvd on under the title .11 A detective from the Victorian sexual crimes unit noted at the time, ‘We have taken a statement from the girl and she states quite categorically that she was not a willing participant on what occurred on that particular occasion and that confirms the basis of the offence.’12 In April 2007, eight of the young men involved in the incident appeared in the Melbourne Children’s Court charged with assault, manufacturing and procuring by intimidation. The boys’ main reaction was and continues to be laughter: in 2009 one of the boys who had not been charged posted a rap song on youtube which named the victim and laughingly reiterated the elements of the crime while criticizing the ‘ who judge us’ and saying that they could all ‘get ’.13

10 See Jeremy Prichard & Caroline Spiranovic, Child Exploitation Material in the Context of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2014), www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/policy-and-research/published-research. 11 The dvd also included other incidents such as dropping flares on a homeless man and throwing eggs at taxi drivers: Daniella Miletic, ‘Outcry over Teenage Girl’s Assault Recorded on DVD’, Age, 25 October 2006, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/10/24/1161455722271.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1. See also Katharine Quamby, ‘Media Reporting and Disability Hate Crime’, in Disability, Hate Crime and Violence, ed. Alan Roulstone & Hanna Mason-Bish (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 73-74. 12 Daniella Miletic, ‘ Probe over Sex Attack DVD’, Age, 25 October 2006, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/10/25/1161699379876.html. It is unclear to me what if any significance consent bears in assessing the harm of acts of ritual humiliation of others. 13 Anthony Dowsley & Kelvin Healey, ‘Werribee Sex DVD Ringleader’s Hate-Filled Rap Song on Web’, Herald Sun, 13 April 2009, http://web.archive.org/web/20090413190710/http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25325367- 661,00.html. 5

Other cases of ‘home-made’ humiliation videos involve collective on unconscious or intoxicated girls, as for example the ‘GoPro’ incident in Sydney of May 2015.14 Such cases indicate that some young people are not merely recording the commission of sexual assault, but are apparently committing sexual assault in order to construct an artifact that can be circulated or posted online. These collective practices of assault as a project in the creation of pornography are very different from the archetypal pattern of consumption in the past, that is, a lone boy masturbating in a darkened room to a men’s magazine. In general, access to and use of pornography by young people is now more likely to be collective in form, a pattern that is disturbingly similar to the creation and use of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, which were not records of torture as much as the staging of torture in order to circulate the images on the internet and elsewhere. Pornography now increasingly takes the form of public collective entertainment more than private individual titillation.

1.2 Main Trends in Online Consumption

It is often claimed that it is difficult to measure trends in online consumption of pornography because of different understandings of the term. In a legal sense, I define pornography as a form of sexual vilification, along similar lines to racial or homosexual vilification provisions as set out in the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act, where vilification is a form of subordination and discrimination. That is, material falls into the definition of pornography not because of what it is but what it does, or what people do with it. However, for the purposes of this submission on harms to children, I am using the term in a much broader and vaguer way, to cover a wider area of sexually explicit material: very simply, the material that children encounter on the Internet when they use the search term ‘pornography’ or ‘porn’.

It is uncontested ground between defenders and critics of pornography alike that the pornography industry is expanding at an exponential rate, and that pornography markets are now most commonly accessed through the internet. The traffic to is illustrative here. is part of a network of sharing sites by , which also includes etc.; these sites do not for the most part require payment by users for access, and are in part for that very reason very popular with young people seeking to access pornography. is the largest pornography site on the internet. The following Tables map various aspects of traffic to in 2015.15 It should be reiterated here that sites like make no distinction between pornography for adults and pornography for children or young people: such sites often make a ritual nod to community sensibilities by saying that they do not support the viewing of pornography by children, but they make little or no serious attempt to screen children out from access to their websites. Hence it can be assumed that the following figures apply in broad terms to children as well as to adult viewers of pornography.

Table 1 ( Top 20 Countries) provides a picture of the proportion of users globally, with Australia ranking 7th in the world in terms of traffic, well above other countries with far greater populations. We may find that other countries have greater rates in relation to other points of access to pornography of course, but the Table certainly indicates that Australia is, and is recognized as, a leading pornography market in global comparisons. Table 2 (Top Searches of 2015) provides an indication of the general

14 Lucy Mae Beers, Cindy Tran & Daniel Piotrowski, ‘The Way He Gets on with Girls... Why Would He Waste his Time?': Father Defends His Son Who Police Say “Encouraged” Five to Gang Rape a Girl, 16, as He Filmed on His GoPro Camera’, Mail Online, 16 October 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3274025/The-way-gets-girls- waste-time-Father-defends-son-police-say-encouraged-friends-gang-rape-unconscious-girl-16-filmed.html. This practice is not restricted to Australia of course, the most notorious example being the Steubenville incident in Ohio: see Juliet Macur & Nate Schweber, ‘Rape Case Unfolds on Web and Splits City’, New York Times, 16 December 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/sports/high-school-football-rape-case-unfolds-online-and-divides-steubenville- ohio.html. 15 6 categories of pornography searched for. Again, there is little reason to suppose that these categories are different for adults than for children and young people, at least in broad terms.

Table 1 Table 2

Table 3 Table 4

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Table 3 indicates top gaining searches on in 2015, and Table 4 sets out top searches and top gaining searches on by Australian users in 2015. The themes in top searches show a disturbing trend in regard to the sexualisation of relations between family members (‘step mom’, , ‘mom’, ‘step sister’), and an emphasis on sexualized intrusion in women’s spaces and privacy (‘step mom shower’, ‘step sister caught’). Other searches of particular concern for this Inquiry are ‘babysitter’ and ‘teacher student’.

The searches on noted in these Tables do not necessarily give a full and accurate picture of the material that is accessed through those terms. There is a wide variety of of pornography available on the site. Abigail Bray provides a devastating analysis of one particular displayed on , entitled 16 This popular category and its variants feature sexual humiliation videos of intoxicated or unconscious young girls, a phenomenon noted above in this submission. There is some debate about whether children are now accessing more ‘hardcore’ material than previously, and further research on this topic is to be welcomed. The evidence from corporate producers of pornography themselves suggests a trend in mainstream pornography’s becoming more ‘hardcore’. For example, research by Dr Meagan Tyler involving analysis of the pornography industry’s leading trade magazine found that ostensibly ‘mainstream’ pornography is becoming markedly more extreme and more openly degrading to women.17

Part of the difficulty in making an accurate assessment of the character of the material that is accessed by children (or by adults) lies in the use of different definitions and understandings of pornography. For example, some researchers define ‘violence’ (and ‘aggression’) so narrowly that their research finds that there is almost none of it on pornography sites.18 A narrow definition of ‘violence’ often turns not on whether violence is done per se, but on whether there is a semblance of consent by the ‘actors’ to that violence (or rather, whether there is an absence of non-consent). As noted above, I use the broader human rights-based understanding of violence and of its potential harms exemplified in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women.

It is also commonly as a defence of pornography that there are so many different types of it, and that not all are violent or subordinating. This kind of defence of pornography is risible: it is simply ludicrous to dismiss or belittle concerns about access to pornography by children or by adults on the ‘bleeding obvious’ basis that there are many different kinds of pornography, that children and adults access and use it in different ways, and that it does not affect all of them the same way. A defence of cigarettes or cigarette advertising along similar lines would be dismissed out of hand.

More detailed research in this area of access to ‘hardcore’ pornography is needed, as also noted in the report for the UK Children’s Commissioner,19 but the evidence we already have of what is freely available for children to access on the internet is of great concern to anyone concerned with VAWG. The evidence of early and repeated exposure of boys, and to a lesser extent, of girls in Australia to pornography, from soft to hardcore, is also uncontested ground between defenders and critics of pornography.20

16 Abigail Bray, ‘Merciless Doctrines: Child Pornography, Censorship, and Late Capitalism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37.1 (2011), 144-146. 17 Meagan Tyler, ‘Now That’s Pornography! Violence and Domination in Adult Video News’, in Everyday Pornography ed. Karen Boyle (London: Routledge, 2010). 18 See Alan McKee, ‘Methodological Issues in Defining Aggression for Content Analyses of Sexually Explicit Material’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44.1 (January 2015), 81-87. 19 Horvath et al., ‘Basically... porn is everywhere’, 8-9. 20 Michael Flood provides a good survey of age of access of young people in Australia, in ‘Exposure to Pornography among Youth in Australia’, Journal of Sociology, 43 (2007), 43-60. See also Maree Crabbe & David Corlett, ‘Eroticising Inequality: Technology, Pornography and Young People’, Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria Quarterly, 3 (Spring 2010), 1–6. 8

I recommend that a similar assessment as the report for the UK Children’s Commissioner be done in Australia, with a wider mandate in terms of evidence of usage by young people on the internet.

1.3 The Impact of pornography on children

The report commissioned by the English Office of the Children’s Commissioner as part of its inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups is the most reliable up-to-date source on the impact of pornography on children.21 This report involved English children, but there is little evidence to suggest that the findings are radically different from the situation in other developed nations like Australia. The report is cautious in its findings, but provides enough evidence and analysis for grave concerns about the impact of early and repeated exposure of boys in particular to pornography, and how this relates to patterns of sexual inequality and violence against girls and women.

My own research can add little to the kind of data collection that was undertaken for the report. What I can bring to bear in terms of assessing the impact of pornography on children is my research and analysis of criminal prosecutions of young people for pornography. This is an area in which little research has been done, and the valuable evidence that prosecutions provide of pornography use by young people has not been drawn on in any depth in Australian scholarly or government research.

I use here the account of the prosecution of a student at my own university as an example of the impact of pornography on boys. Marcus was prosecuted for crimes committed as a young adult, but he had begun accessing pornography on the internet by the age of 10. I am not claiming that Marcus’ story of pornography consumption is ‘typical’. It is not. Marcus’ accessing of pornography seems to fit the traditional mode of the ‘lone ranger’ viewer of pornography rather than the collective access increasingly familiar (as noted above). However, Marcus’ story is an exemplar of the increasing dangers and risks in access to pornography on the internet. This account is drawn from open court documents (available on austlii) that record Marcus’ prosecution and conviction for possession of ‘child abuse materials’ (child pornography).22

What attracted Marcus in accessing pornography was not just cruelty but sexual cruelty. The psychological report prepared for the court noted that Marcus ‘displayed little insight and little affect regarding the charges’, possibly because he had been viewing pornography for nearly a decade by the time he faced court. The court psychologist indicated that Marcuse was not a pedophile in the sense that he had abused or even wanted to abuse children whom he knew. He didn’t make images by recording abuse of children,

21 Horvath et al., ‘Basically... porn is everywhere’. 22 Puhakka v R [2009] NSWCCA 290, http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/sinodisp/au/cases/nsw/NSWCCA/2009/290.html, discussed in Helen Pringle, ‘Civil Justice for Victims of Child Pornography’, in Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry, ed. Melinda Tankard Reist & Abigail Bray (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011), 212. For the definition of ‘child pornography’ at issue here, which offers no defence of ‘consent’, see UN General Assembly, Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, and Child Pornography, 16 March 2001, A/RES/54/263, 2(c), https://treaties.un.org/doc/source/docs/A_Res_54_263-E.pdf. 9 rather he simply downloaded and viewed them. And he didn’t act them out, at least in the sense of physically assaulting actual children.

Indeed, some writers argue on the basis of cases like that of Marcus that his crime was at least relatively ‘victimless’: simply watching, reading, or masturbating to pornography of any kind is claimed to be in this way of thinking comparatively harmless, that of itself does not harm an identifiable victim.23 And it is true that some of Marcus’ cache of materials comprised cartoon or virtual pornography that was produced without any original abuse of identifiable children.24

Marcus’s case is not ‘typical’ of children’s access to pornography, but in fact it is not that exceptional in court annals. The myth that such offending is rare is quickly dispelled by the other cases cited by Judge Blanch in terms of his appropriate sentencing. Two recent cases, one Australian and the other from England, further illustrate this disturbing trend.

Like Marcus, Matthew is classified as a ‘non-contact offender’, which means he did not actually assault children physically, but rather incited and/or encouraged their rape and murder by others. Matthew had told police he was not a paedophile but that he felt ‘power within the community’ through his actions; in order to gain further respect, Matthew often assumed the identity of an American paediatrician with access to children. Matthew did act as a babysitter for families in his neighbourhood.

23 For example, see Amy Adler, ‘The Perverse Law of Child Pornography’, Columbia Law Review, 101.2 (March 2001), 210-273, or Rachel Aviv, ‘The Science of Sex Abuse: Is it Right to Imprison People for Heinous Crimes They Have Not Yet Committed?’, New Yorker, 14 January 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/the-science-of- sex-abuse. Both dispute the seriousness of downloading and possession of pornography. 24 See Helen Pringle, ‘Cartoon Wars: The Interpretation of Drawn Images’, in Re-mapping the Future: History, Culture and Environment in Australia and India, ed. Raelene Frances & Deb N. Bandyopadhyay (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013). 25 Chris Johnston, ‘Shocked Judge Says It Seems Pornographer Matthew Graham is 'From Another Planet' Age, 18 February 2016, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/shocked-judge-says-it-seems-as-if-child-pornographer-matthew- graham-is-from-another-planet-20160218-gmxhwh.html#ixzz41Z2m8HHL; Chris Johnston, ‘Judge Asked to Peer into the Abyss as “” Paedophile Matthew Graham Fronts Court’ Age 3 February 2016, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/judge-asked-to-peer-into-the-abyss-as-hurtcore-pedophile-matthew-graham- fronts-court-20160203-gmkm6u.html#ixzz41Z3VcvCB; and Chris Johnston & Nino Bucci, ‘How Matthew David Graham’s “Hurtcore” Paedophile Habit Began on the ’, Age, 9 September 2015, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/how-matthew-david-grahams- hurtcore-paedophile-habit-began-on-the-dark- web-20150909-gjhz43.html.

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The similar case in England involved a student at Eton, Andrew Picard, who was found to possess on his computer over 2,000 pornographic images of children as young as 2, including images of torture-rape and bestiality, some of which he made himself. At the age of 17, Picard was apprehended by an undercover officer in a Skype chatroom for teenagers when he messaged the officer, ‘Do you want to see pics of boys and girls your age ?’. Picard boasted of having hundreds of such images and shared with the officer indecent images of a boy aged 10, and girls aged 8 and 14.27

Clearly, these three cases are not typical of the way most young people access pornography on the internet. What the cases do all illustrate however is the desensitising of children and young people to cruelty and degradation through early and repeated exposure to pornography, and in particular desensitisation to sexual cruelty to girls. Although extreme cases, they are now not so far from the mainstream as illustrations of an important trend in the consumption of pornography. At the same time as pornography use has become more mainstream, openly and collectively practiced, mainstream pornographic ‘objects’ have become more hardcore. As Rebecca Whisnant and Gail Dines note, this is no longer your father’s that is in in question. What boys get off on these days in accessing pornography is not a glossy picture in a magazine of a blonde girl with her finger in her mouth and a faraway look in her eyes.

These cases I have noted could be dismissed as atypical, as outliers, and their citation in the Inquiry’s discussion as misleading. A handful of cases do not make a ‘pattern’. However, they are indicative of emerging patterns of use of ‘hurtcore’ and torture pornography more generally. For children growing up today, it is almost impossible to avoid contact with what was formerly unimaginable. The Internet plays an important role here, through facilitating sheer accessibility and anonymity of that access, and the avoidance of the need for adult surveillance of access that came into play in purchasing a magazine in a newsagency for example.

A recent study by David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the effects on readers of literary fiction found that spending only a few minutes reading a work of literature could increase the empathy of adults.28 It would be implausible then if spending only a few minutes in the company of Max Hardcore did not have stunting effects on the development of empathy. By empathy I mean the capacity to recognize another person as an end in herself, not as a means to our own ends or as an object. The development of empathy in citizens in this respect is indispensable to a democracy based on sexual equality and the equal dignity of all regardless of their sex or gender.

1.4 What are children learning from pornography?

Some writers think that the greater accessibility of pornography to children and young people is not necessarily a bad thing, because pornography, it is argued, acts as a form of sex education. That is exactly what pornography does. Marcus for example had learnt about sex from the Internet. The type of sexually explicit material that is easy to find on the internet educates boys, and girls, about what sex is, how they should do it, what they should expect their partners to do, and what they should expect it to be like. My primary concern in this context is not about purity or virginity or anything else along such lines. Rather,

27 Siobhan Fenton, ‘Eton Pupil Andrew Picard Spared Jail after Creating and Sharing Thousands of “Appalling” Child Abuse Images’, Independent, 26 February 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/eton-pupil-andrew- picard-convicted-of-creating-and-sharing-child-abuse-images-a6896966.html. 28 David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, ‘Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind’, Science, 342.6156, 377-380, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2013/10/02/science.1239918.full.pdf. 11 what pornography does is to give sexual domination over others a kick, to make it erotic. That is, in my view, when boys masturbate, individually or collectively, to pornography, they are getting off on inequality. There is no question that pornography teaches – and one of its primary lessons is that inequality and dominance are natural, exciting, and indeed, cool.

It is ludicrous to think that young people do not learn from and imitate what they see. The billion dollar advertising industry is built on the notion that adults as well as children will imitate what they see, that they try to act and be like what is presented as beautiful, as attractive, as cool, as sexy. If there is any doubt that children imitate what they see, , say ‘Baby Hit Me One More Time + a child’s age], and watch the videos of toddlers imitating Brittany Shields, first with their bodies and later also with their voices singing along and slapping themselves. Young people today are more likely to have pornography before they have sex. The median age of first encounter with pornography in Australia is 11, the median age of having sex with another person is 16. Young people today usually have sex with or via an image long before they have sex with another person.

Young people’s understanding and experience of sex, but also their understanding of gender and sexuality more broadly, are increasingly shaped by what they or their peers observe in pornography. Sex is no longer hidden away. Many of my academic colleagues who defend pornography appear to think of our society as sexually repressed and puritan, populated by Helen Lovejoys. Perhaps it was so in the 1950s, although I doubt it, but certainly it is no longer. It is not an exaggeration to say that we now live in a porn culture. By porn culture, to use a term popularized by Gail Dines, I do not simply mean a sexualized culture, but rather a culture where the way our lives are sexualized is through a porn aesthetic, in which boys are allocated a very different role in sexual relations from girls. There are many different genres of porn (disability porn, fat porn, schoolgirl porn, women who look they are in charge porn, and so on). However, I think the dominant message of pornography is ‘the man’s got to have it’, with aggression or forcefulness by the man and his penis (or increasingly, objects), and subservience by the woman (or sometimes the man) who is penetrated in one way or another.

Such a message reflects social patterns of dominance and subordination, but it also forms society and how we understand who we are in it. Pornography is performative in that sense: it performs sex and it performs sex as inequality.

I have nothing against sex (that I should even feel the need to say so is remarkable!), I do not think it is evil or sinful, or that people should only do it when they want children. Moreover, I don’t know anyone who thinks that. And sexual curiosity and experimentation are quite unremarkable if often wonderful parts of growing up. But pornography does not foster sexual curiosity or intimate exploration. It fosters instead a monological model of sex, based around inequality between boys and girls. Young people’s expectations and practices are increasingly shaped by an image of sex that is deliberately painful or violating. The sexual ‘scripts’ that young people are learning today are not ones that place a high value on respect, mutuality, communication, tenderness or equality. And these are the experiences and way of life and love that Marcus and boys like him have lost – to his cost and our shame.

1.5 Is pornography harmful to children and young people?

I have stressed the normalisation of pornography and its open consumption throughout our society. This is not simply sexualisation, but more , or more elegantly, the creation of a porn culture. Many writers who are supportive of pornography make the point that not only does it serve as a form of sex education. They also argue that it is harmless, apart from certain very extreme or non-consensual forms which are few and far from the mainstream. The argument of such defenders of pornography is that in order to prove harm by pornography, one must show a direct, one on one, causal relationship between consumption of a pornographic object and the commission of an act of gross sexual violence. However, it is 12 simply not the case that in order to ascertain the formative and performative harms of pornography, we would need to establish that kind of causal relationship.

Similarly, the point is often made that pornography reflects rather than constructs social and sexual relations, and continuing from this, that it is ‘fantasy’ which exists somewhere but not in the real world. These contentions about what would count as harm in the context of pornography are simply outdated and misleading. When we understand and address pornography in a human rights context, in terms of violence against women and girls, the question of harm is connected to pornography’s connotations of sexual violence and subordination.

The argument that pornography is harmless tends to draw on the older category of ‘’ with which pornography is often confused. It is perhaps useful to give an example of a case concerning obscenity to measure the distance between these two terms. In the 1956 High Court case of Transport Publishing Co Pty Ltd v Literature Board of Review 99 CLR 111 (1956), the Court addressed the question of ‘objectionable literature’ in regard to the Objectionable Literature Act 1954 (Qld), which defined ‘objectionable’ in relation to literature to mean (i) unduly emphasises matters of sex, horror, crime, cruelty, or violence; or (ii) is blasphemous, indecent, obscene, or likely to be injurious to morality; or (iii) is likely to encourage depravity, public disorder, or any indictable offence; or (iv) is otherwise calculated to injure the citizens of the State of Queensland. The titles of the magazines examined included Real Love, Romance Story, Real Story, Real Romance, Love Experiences, of which the objectionable aspect was ‘an ardent passion’ and kissing between the characters. Both the material examined and the category used to understand it are far removed from contemporary material on the internet, and from the category of ‘pornography’ as used in both narrow and wider senses in this submission.

A prominent defender of pornography, Alan McKee, has recently characterised pornography as entertainment, as if to correct any ascetic or puritan approach to sex, and as this characterisation lifted the genre and its artifacts out of the realm of critique as well as of censure.29 It is true that a common reaction, especially in collective activities, to pornography, is laughter. An example here is a notorious video called , actually a trailer for a Brazilian film called , which was made and posted online in 2007. After the trailer/video was posted, it became a viral practice to play it for a group of people, in order to video their reactions, with the reaction video in turn then posted online. There are now around 1.8 million videos on this search term, some being remakes or parodies of the original trailer. The reaction videos have large numbers of views, 25 million in one case. The viewers who post their reaction videos are often very young; I have seen videos posted by 5-6 year old children.

I’m not sure how popular was this practice of reaction videos before the posting of this particular trailer, but at any rate this is a really new phenomenon in the consumption of pornography: the process of videoing oneself watching pornography, and then posting that video on youtube or other services. It really was not technologically possible, at least as a kind of ‘democratic’ process, until maybe ten years ago. It’s a way in which the collective habits, practices and lives of people are molded and formed by pornography, from a disturbingly early age. In particular, I find the laughter in the videos shocking – that is, the apparent refusal to be shocked or disturbed by what they see, and laughter at their own reactions of disbelief or distaste. The script for these reaction videos is very clear-cut: it is not cool to stay serious, one must laugh at oneself and at others for any residual sense of shock or disturbance. The ‘scripted’ reaction to pornography here is laughter. Far from being an individual pursuit, this practice is a rehearsal of consuming porn objects that is repeated over and over again with very little variation. There is nothing individual or even spontaneous about it.

29 Alan McKee, ‘Pornography as Entertainment’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 26.4 (2012), 541- 552, and Alan McKee, ‘The Importance of Entertainment for Sexuality Education’, Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 12.5 (2012), 499-509. 13

What does this laughter signify, and why should it be of concern to us? A typical practice of using is for young men (sometimes girls) to watch it in a group, and film themselves watching it, then upload the video of themselves as watchers to youtube. The young watchers do not collectively masturbate, or achieve , rather they laugh. And they set in train an infinite laugh, that is, the viewers of youtube laugh at them laughing. My conclusion is that pornography has more to do with humiliation and even cruelty than with sex, and that children’s laughter at this spectacle of cruelty should concern us even more perhaps than children ‘getting off’ sexually on pornography. This example parallels the making for use of amateur videos involving the sexual humiliation and assault of young girls noted above, where the making and use are not purposed for sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction, but for the humiliation of girls.

Let me conjecture that the laughter of pornography by children as well as adults is at least in some cases akin to the laughter of cruelty that greets dwarves in a circus, or the throwing of dwarves as part of revels in the pub. The notion of ‘putting on a show’ with its overt sexual overtones runs throughout the way in which a socially created deformity or disability becomes a source of mirth and a site of entertainment. When women form the spectacle in pornographic videos, they fill that space of the dwarves, laughed at and mocked.

There is immense pressure in our society for people not to react to pornography as if it raised serious questions, but rather to laugh it off, and to laugh off their own reservations. Pornographic laughter is also used against those who voice concerns about any kind of demeaning treatment of women and girls, whether in entertainment, advertising or political discourse. That is, the response is that pornography is all just one big joke — and that women, in particular, need to stop taking things so seriously. The self-styled humourist, Ben Pobjie, for example, wrote in the left-wing magazine, The King’s Tribune: ‘There are many reasons a person might be weird enough to not like pornography. For example, that person may be suffering from nervous hysteria and just need a good finger or fire-hose-induced orgasm to set things right’.30 Complaints about the pornographic depiction of women become the occasion for further mocking laughter and derision. Images and themes drawn from the pornography industry are increasingly used to belittle women and denigrate their standing through making them figures of fun. The use of gender (or racial) stereotypes is often excused in this way, giving the mistaken impression that it can’t be discrimination if it is a sleazy joke.

It is not surprising in this context that children respond to questions that they are not overly worried by pornography. It is common in some academic circles to point out that children recover quickly from pornography, and indeed, laugh at it. This is cause for concern, not for reassurance. A recent report of a study by Australian researchers found that children were largely not ‘bothered’ by viewing pornography.31 It would be surprising if a report found otherwise in a context where concern for the impact of pornography is an indication to many academic researchers, as well as more broadly, of being gripped by a ‘moral panic’, of being a Puritan or a Helen Lovejoy, that is, decidedly ‘uncool’. Pornography has largely succeeded in characterizing any opposition to or even concern about its impact as delusional. Moreover, the defenders of pornography often claim that apparent concern for children as affected by pornography is the wedge by which pornography more generally is now opposed, that is, that children are being used as ‘human shields’ for an entirely different agenda around ‘a new puritanism’. Robbie Swan of the lobby for the sex industry, the Eros Association, has set this argument out very clearly in noting, ‘Most of the religious rhetoric directed at the sex industry during the 1990s concerned a loss of innocence and the “harm” done to children by pornography and commercial sex.’32

30 Ben Pobjie, ‘Porn. Don’t knock it “til you’ve tried it”’, The King’s Tribune, 5 January 2012. 31 Leila Green, Danielle Brady, Kjartan Olafsson, John Hartley & Catharine Lumby, ‘Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and their Parents’, Cultural Science, 4.1 (2011), 1-73. 32 Robbie Swan, Correspondence, Quarterly Essay, no. 52 (2013), 81. A representative article making broadly similar arguments is Catharine Lumby & Kath Albury, ‘Too Much? Too Young? The Sexualisation of Children Debate in 14

Robbie Swan concludes his remarks: ‘the repression of sex is decidedly unhealthy. At an individual level, New Scientist’s 2004 report on the sex lives of 30,000 men showed that the more frequently men ejaculated, whether through sex or , the less prostate cancer they developed in later life…. at an official and institutional level, comes with serious consequences for the whole community. As far as human needs go, sexual desire is up there with hunger and the will to survive. When it hits a man in the groin, it easily trumps a 2000-year-old Abrahamic belief system centred somewhere in the frontal lobes of the cortex.’ 33 This ludicrous statement about the inevitability of an insistent male sexual desire at the heart of pornography and modern sexual practices more generally is completely at odds with modern understandings of sexuality as historically constructed. As the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women notes, ‘violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women, and … violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men’.34

It is crucial to listen to what children (and others) say about pornography and how they feel about it. However, it is also crucial to listen to what children are able to say about pornography, that is, the constraints within which they can speak and be heard with credibility and acceptance. Aesop tells the story of the fox who declared that some grapes were sour because he was unable to reach them. Without a vocabulary to express one’s feelings, and without a context of acceptance of those feelings, what children and others say about what they feel will differ decisively.

It is for this reason that the adoption of a VAWG strategy for understanding pornography becomes an urgent task – not merely because it enables us to understand pornography and how it works today more fully and accurately. Such a strategy also provides a different framework for speaking and for listening to what children, and especially in this context girls, feel about pornography.

2. Current methods taken towards harm minimisation in other jurisdictions, and the effectiveness of those methods

The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) strategy on VAWG that I noted above has been in place for too short a time to gauge its effectiveness fully and systematically. The CPS strategy, it should be noted, is not oriented to achieving ‘harm minimisation’ or ‘harm reduction’, but to reaching goals of equality and dignity among all citizens, and with respect to children and young people. Because the strategy makes links between different forms of violence against women and girls, it requires a suite of measures (and research) across a broad front, covering nine major areas: domestic violence; forced marriage; honour-based violence; female genital mutilation; rape and sexual offences; prostitution; trafficking; child abuse; and pornography. There is no short-term ‘fix’ possible in relation to these areas, and their interconnections. But a measure of boldness is called for given the scale of the problem/s being addressed.

I would recommend legislative provision for the availability of civil remedies for harm through pornography. A model of how this would work is action under anti-discrimination legislation against harassment in the workplace, where the display or other use of pornography in the workplace has been such as to create a cause of targeted harassment or more broadly of a ‘hostile working environment’ for

Australia’, Media International Australia, 135 (2010), 141-152. 33 Robbie Swan, Correspondence, Quarterly Essay, no. 52 (2013), 83. 34 UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, 20 December 1993, A/RES/48/104, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm. 15 women. This model has been found by US courts over a long period not to endanger the principle of freedom of speech as interpreted by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. Similarly the establishment of a claims process for restitution for sexual violence restitution on a meaningful level has been available to victims of pornography in a provision of the US Violence against Women Act of 1994, particularly in regard to the harm of child pornography, and the provisions has been found not to transgress that principle of the freedom of speech.35

3. Identification of any measures with the potential for implementation in Australia

The measures I have recommended have immediate potential for implementation in Australia. In terms of reconsidering the seriousness of pornography. it is important that penalties even for viewing, downloading and possession be set at a high level so as to lead perpetrators to reconsider their actions, but also to impress upon children and others that this is considered a serious matter. There is a need for legal formulations of pornography (or child abuse materials) to be reconsidered, and the sentencing guidelines on pornography use to be reconsidered.36

Recommendations

1. That government measures in understanding and responding to pornography and its harms to children should be part of a broad-based approach that addresses Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG), on the model of the strategy adopted by the CPS in England, and the strategy of the Scottish Government/Riaghaltas na h-Alba.

2. That a similar rapid-evidence assessment as that commissioned by the UK Children’s Commissioner be completed in Australia, with a wider mandate in terms of the collection of evidence of consumption of pornography by young people.

3. That legislative provision be made for the availability of civil remedies for harm through pornography, and that other measures of penalty enhancement be considered for crimes involving pornography.

35 See Helen Pringle, ‘Civil Justice for Victims of Child Pornography’. The relevant provision is in the process of reformulation after Paroline v US 572 US _ (2014), http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-8561_7758.pdf. 36 See for example, Pierrette Mizzi, Tom Gotsis & Patrizia Poletti, Sentencing Offenders Convicted of Child Pornography and Child Abuse Material Offences, Monograph no 34, Judicial Commission of New South Wales (2010).