Okay, sorry I have been gone a few days. I had to get some space between me and the boards. Every time I thought about posting I felt like I was doing homework in my hardest class.
Anyway, I have found that if you go to Google and enter the question, “Does pornography cause violent behavior?” You’ll find a lot of material on the matter. These days the answer seems to be, “We don’t know.” On the one hand, the fact that pornography is found to be big with sex offenders does seem compelling and significant. On the other hand, the studies that have been done which, we have been told by the US government, indicate that porn is a cause of rape have a number of problems. Also, the studies, as data, have been widely misused by entities such as the Meese committee.
For example, one of the studies relies on the testimony of convicted sex offenders.
"When I seen that movie, it was like somebody lit a fuse.... I just went for it, went out and raped”, said one perpetrator. Obviously such a statement could be self serving yet the study does not take note of that. I do not trust a researcher who ignores such obvious bias in an interview subject.
Also, as has been stipulated previously, the general population’s violent or nonviolent responses to pornography can not be assessed.
As far as the misuses of data are concerned, consider the following.
The individuals who use studies to illustrate that porn is linked to violence are guilty of:
• making no distinction between violent and nonviolent sexual stimuli;
• not distinguishing between short-term versus long-term effects of such stimuli;
• ignoring the limits of laboratory studies, which cannot test for violent behavior outside of the laboratory.
The above is according to Julie A. Allison and Lawrence S. Wrightsman who performed a meta-analysis of several key studies on perpetrators of rape and more generalized samples of sexually aggressive men.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) studied 41 incarcerated offenders guilty of performing between 10 and 78 rapes each. The sample most closely resembles the classic stereotype of the rapist as a predatory stranger and home invader. The results cannot, therefore, be generalized to the majority of rapists. Involvement in the armed forces is artificially inflated by the existence of a draft system in effect during the Vietnam War era.
The results of the analysis are that more research is needed to accurately determine what, if any, is the connection between porn and violence.
What strikes me is that I have noted a number of conclusions which reveal more about the researchers than the subjects, in my opinion. For instance, a researcher noted that men with a strongly masculine streak would, after viewing a pornographic movie, sit closer to female researchers during the questioning phase and generally seemed more flirtatious. This led the researcher to conclude that viewing porn caused men to be more sexist toward women. I do not think that is indicated at all. I do not view flirtatious men as sexist. If researchers do not put checks and balances on their own biases, how can they be trusted?
Also, studies show that violent nonsexual material(films, images) causes men to be more violent. If one concludes that violent porn increases violent tendencies, how can one know if it is the sexual content or the violent content that spurs violence? Questions like this are why I will not let up on the correlation/causation issue.
Glory
Article is available at
http://www.crime.smartlibrary.org/NewInterface/segment.cfm?segment=1721