Pornography and Children

10 March 2016 Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications Harm being done to Australian children through access to pornography on the Internet Written submission prepared by: Dr Meagan Tyler Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow RMIT University, Melbourne Thank you for the opportunity to submit to this inquiry. I have been involved in researching pornography, the pornography industry, and violence against women for the last ten years. In this time, I have published numerous journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters on these topics and am now an internationally recognised scholar in the fields of gender inequality and sexuality. There are several reasons why I wish to submit evidence to this inquiry and they all fall under ‘any other related matters’ in the terms of reference. A summary of these points is below, followed by a more thorough explanation with relevant citations. Summary • The increasing consumption, and the acceptability of the consumption, of pornography in the West marks a significant cultural shift in sexual attitudes and behaviours. • Although the impact of this shift is debated by experts in the field, there is general agreement that some level of ‘pornographication’ is occurring. In other words, pornography is becoming more mainstream and a largely accepted part of popular culture in places like Australia. • It has become apparent through a variety of academic studies that even mainstream commercial pornography now frequently includes violent and degrading practices and these are most commonly committed against women. • Therefore, we must consider ‘pornographication’ as mainstreaming the eroticisation of violence against women and gender inequality. • We cannot separate children’s exposure to pornography from this culture of ‘pornographication’ in which it is increasingly acceptable to consume images of eroticised inequality and violence. • RECOMMENDATION: Efforts to address children’s exposure to pornography should be tied to broader measures aimed at combatting gender inequality and violence against women and girls. 1 Pornographication, changing patterns of pornography consumption, and impact The pornographication of culture in the West is becoming an increasingly acknowledged trend in both the mass media and the academy (e.g. Dines 2010; McNair 2002, 2010; Paul, 2005; Tyler, 2011). For more than a decade, cultural commentators, journalists, and academics have been noting changes in the accessibility and acceptability of pornography consumption, as well as the ways in which pornography and pornographic imagery are blurring into popular culture. This normalisation of pornography is a significant cultural shift. Changes in technology, particularly the ease of access to information via the internet, has seen pornography become a ubiquitous part of life for many people in the West. Only a generation ago pornography had to be sought out and paid for but it is now common for pornography to be consumed for free, at home, most often on a mobile device (Ungerleider, 2015). As Owen and colleagues (2012, p. 99) explain: “Internet- enabled devices have indiscriminately allowed people of all ages to encounter, consume, create, and distribute sexually explicit content, and a growing body of data reveal these phenomena are increasingly common for adolescents worldwide.” We also know that boys and men are significantly more likely than women to seek out pornography to consume (Flood 2007; Lim et al. 2016), so there is a gendered dimension to these changing patterns that cannot be overlooked. In terms of Australian data, Flood’s (2007) study on ‘Exposure to pornography among youth in Australia’ is one of the most cited. Flood found that “three-quarters of 16- and 17-year-olds have been exposed accidentally to pornographic websites, while 38 per cent of boys and 2 per cent of girls have deliberately accessed them” (p. 45). Another 2006 study (Fleming et al. 2006) of 13–16 year olds in Australian schools found that 93 per cent of male students and 62 per cent of female students had seen pornography online. However, these studies are now quite old and, especially given rapid changes in internet access and mobile technology since 2006/2007, show a need for more research in this area. We have every reason to believe these numbers would now be higher. 2 Flood (2009, p. 384) has also found that: “Exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships. And, especially among boys and young men who are frequent consumers of pornography, including of more violent materials, consumption intensifies attitudes supportive of sexual coercion and increases their likelihood of perpetrating assault.” In addition, there is some self-reporting from young adults about behaviour change (e.g. ‘sexting’, or the sending of sexually explicit images and texts via mobile phone) as a result of individual and peer-group consumption of pornography (Walker et al., 2015). Although it should be noted that some young people themselves are very critical of the trend towards the ubiquity of pornography (Walker et al., 2015). The violent content of mainstream pornography My own research (Tyler 2010, 2011) regarding pornography production, has shown violence to be considered common and acceptable by many in the mainstream, commercial pornography industry in the United States (US). Indeed, the leading US pornography industry magazine Adult Video News has openly acknowledged that extreme and violent pornography has become the norm since the mid-2000s (Tyler, 2011, p. 55-58). Bridges and colleagues (2010) have also found very high rates of violence and aggression in US pornography. In their analysis of 304 scenes in mainstream, commercial pornography: “88.2 per cent contained physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7 per cent of scenes contained verbal aggression…Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female” (p. 1065). This is in contrast to previous research conducted in Australia, notably The Porn Report (Lumby et al., 2008), which suggested that violence in mainstream pornography available in Australia (again, mostly produced in the US) was extremely rare. It should be noted, however, that this Australian research was conducted specifically on videos of pornography, produced mostly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that had passed film board classification. That is, the pornography investigated in The Porn Report 3 bears little resemblance to the contemporary mainstream porn easily accessed on the internet today. given the normalcy of violence against women in contemporary commercial pornography, I have argued (Tyler 2011) that pornographication must be seen, at least in part, as the mainstreaming of eroticised violence against women. Others, including Crabbe and Corlett (2010) have argued that, at the very least, pornography should be seen as eroticising gender inequality. Further, they state that pornography is “both a reflection and an amplification of the hostile attitudes and behaviours towards women seen in broader society. Porn is an effective tool for the promotion of misogyny” (p.3). Connecting adult consumption of pornography to children’s exposure and harms It is important to take into account the context of the trend towards pornographication and the high visibility of violence against women in pornography when considering potential harms to children regarding exposure to pornography. It is not enough to consider children’s exposure to pornography simply as one of inappropriately early sexualisation, it must be understood within the cultural context of the normalisation of violent and degrading pornography that is increasingly consumed by adults (see also: Tyler & Quek, forthcoming). There is also a need to understand the gendered nature of children’s exposure to pornography. As Flood (2009) suggests, boys are receiving messages about enacting abusive behaviour on women and girls as acceptable, while girls are receiving messages that tell them to expect abuse as normal sexual interaction. As noted above, adolescents themselves are often critical of this culture of normalised pornography that they are surrounded by, a culture created by adults. The tired old defences of pornography as harmless or “just a bit of fun” have little to do with either the modern, commercial pornography industry, or the lived experiences of women and young people in societies characterised by pornographication. We know that adult consumers of pornography often report acting out what they see in pornography. Lumby et al. (2008), found in their survey of Australian consumers that 59 per cent of respondents reporting copying, in real life sexual interactions, 4 something they had seen whilst watching pornography. There is no reason to believe that adolescents or children are less likely than adults to also act out what they are viewing. And, given that we know the violent, aggressive, and degrading content that is now commonly viewed, we must understand that this creates fertile ground for sexual inequality and abuse. We cannot continue to uncritically accept the sexualised inequality of pornography for adult consumers as unrelated to concerns about children’s exposure to pornography. If we create a culture of acceptance regarding the consumption of pornography for adults, it is not surprising that children will be exposed to it. The questions that need to be raised are therefore much

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