images and offending: what do the data tell us?

images and offending: what do the data tell us?

images and offending: what do the data tell us?

8 November 2020
from reflections on cp, part of a life less lonely

leonard johnston

3 of 6: Does viewing CP encourage child abuse? What about artificial CP, like images, dolls, stories?

This item is part of a special series of posts. A six-part series on child pornography and artificial child pornography, aka drawings, stories, etc. This series covers:

1. The morality of child pornography (this post).
2. The morality of artificial child pornography.
3. To the best of our data, what effect do both of those have on offending?
4. A story from someone recently arrested for possession of child pornography: how he got into it, how it affected his life, what happened next.
5. Two former users of child pornography talk about how they stopped viewing it, and their feelings now that they're off of it.
6. My own experiences with artificial child pornography and the role it's played in my life. This article is the third in the series.

About a year ago, I was pretty shaken by a comment in a Quora thread. The person I was talking to cited a New York Times article about the psychology of pedophiles, where they concluded that virtually everyone who views child pornography also abuses children. In fact, right from the article: "a pair of psychologists at the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 85 percent of convicted online offenders acknowledged in therapy that they had raped or otherwise sexually abused children."

I was deeply shaken when I read that study. First of all, I've talked to people who view or have viewed child pornography but say they never abused children. Some of them are online friends of mine. Were they all lying to me? Is it possible that more of us are "ticking time bombs" than I realized?

But beyond that, a lot of people view drawn images or computer renders of things that depict, quite frankly, child abuse. What would that say about us? About me?

It freaked me out.

So here's the thing I want to figure out. Does viewing child pornography encourage child abuse? What about artificial child pornography, like images, dolls, stories, etc. that depict fictional children in sexual situations? Does someone like me have to abstain, suppress, and repress all their life?

I talked last time about the moral questions surrounding artificial child pornography. It's a really hard thing to talk about because it brings out such strong reactions. But if you stop to think about the mechanisms, does artificial cp lead to abuse by reinforcing bad neural pathways? Or does it prevent abuse, by providing an outlet to avoid the buildup of repressed feelings? If you want to think about that, check out the post.

But for an actual answer, we should turn to research. I am, by nature, a scientist; I want to look to facts for evidence.

I really wish I could open this post by pointing to the magic study that solves everything. The randomized controlled trial where a bunch of pedophiles volunteered to randomly either view artificial child pornography for a few years or abstain completely, and they were followed in detail to see if those people were more likely to offend children.

Uh huh. Right.

If you look at research in this area, you'll quickly realize there's basically none. Even setting aside the deep moral problems with the study I proposed, people just aren't willing to step forward and say "I'm a pedophile!" There's no representative sample of those like me who haven't offended; researchers can only study offenders in prison (many of whom are situational offenders, not even pedophiles). Because of this lack of research, most psychologists will agree that we just don't have effective treatments here.

Plus, let's be honest, it's not great for your career to say anything that isn't broadly condemning of pedophilia, so that doesn't encourage much research, either.

Instead, we have to rely on pretty shaky data. My hope in this post is to share everything I've been able to find, so we can at least have some basis for important decisions. This is a pretty technical post, which may or may not be your thing, but I think it's important.

let's start with that study

"A pair of psychologists at the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 85 percent of convicted online offenders acknowledged in therapy that they had raped or otherwise sexually abused children." It still scares me. It claims something really dark about people like me. People I empathize with.

After it was mentioned in Quora, I remember looking up the study. I just didn't know what to do with it. Yes, ok, it had been a "convenience sample" (that is, only people in prison who volunteered), and so that was kind-of an argument against it, but... c'mon, the numbers were so extreme. It must've meant something big was going on. Didn't it?

It was only after a larger internet search that I discovered some very thorough research. Here's the money quote from the first link:

At a professional workshop, Hernandez (one of the study’s co-authors) explained that he created a climate of "systematic pressure," so that inmates would "put all the cards on the table," abandoning a "life style of manipulation." Patients were required to compose lists of people they had sexually harmed, which they updated every few months. At daily community meetings, when offenders insisted they had nothing left to disclose, other prisoners accused them of being in denial or "resistant to change." If they failed to accept responsibility, they were expelled from the program.

In a weird way, I breathed such a huge sigh of relief when I read that. Now it made sense. A bunch of guys, all in prison on long sentences, under pressure, both social pressure and pressure with outside consequences, to admit their "crimes." They were alone, and locked up, and that was how they could get treatment. How they might have a hope at release. It is, unfortunately, not an unfamiliar story.

It is also not a valid study.

Meanwhile, other studies consistently find a very low level of recidivism or hands-on offenses for viewers of child pornography.

Is it possible that FBP study is right? I suppose so, but all my experiences, plus a lot of researchers, say it's probably wrong. (And remember, these are researchers who have absolutely no professional reason to stand up for pedophiles.) Honestly, it still freaks me out that the study is out there, and that people believe it, but at least I understand what happened.

So, these days, everyone has their own reason to hate on the New York Times. Mine, their bad use of a scientific study about pedophilia, might be... a bit unique. (That plus their conflating of pedophiles and child abusers.) But regardless, whether it's in the Times or not, it's not good research.¹

what if you ask pedophiles?

If the FBP study were even remotely valid, it'd be a pretty severe diagnosis. If so many of the people who view child pornography go on to molest kids, you'd have to assume that even artificial child pornography would have the same effect. But it sounds like the true numbers are much, much lower, so that doesn't really tell us so much.

I know that this might not be seen as the most trustworthy source, but I do want to open with asking pedophiles about the effect of viewing artificial child pornography on their offending. After all, there are a lot of us with that lived experience. (Of course, take it with a grain of salt—even if we were all that introspective, representative samples of pedophiles are still basically impossible.)

For example, there was a poll on the site Virtuous Pedophiles, which provides a forum for those with pedophilic attraction to talk to each other. Of 40 respondents, five said that viewing artificial child pornography increases their likelihood of offending, 21 said it has no effect, and 14 said it decreases their likelihood of offending. That matches both my intuition and what I said last time: it depends on the person, but artificial child pornography probably helps on average.

That's not a very big sample, though. A few years ago, Professor Michael Bailey at Northwestern University did a study of pedophiles from a number of different sites online, including Virtuous Pedophiles but also a number of other sites. (Published articles from this study are available here) and what happens when national or state policies change?

If you're not satisfied just by asking pedophiles (and I'm not!), then we should try to get some real-world data about the effect of pornography on sex-related crimes. Even if it's pornography in general (rather than images about kids), it can still tell us something about how humans react. Here's a pretty neat study you can do: if the availability of pornography changes, either because laws change or because, say, the internet becomes available, you can study how that changes reports of sexual violence. This could validate "seeing pornography makes people seek out harder stuff until they rape someone," or it could validate "pornography provides an important release that prevents people from acting out on their urges."

In fact, there was a big media flurry about ten years ago with various studies showing that availability of the internet correlated with decreased rates of rape (of adults); the theory was that porn provided an outlet. That wasn't even the first such study: porn access also increased before the internet (VCRs!) and similar things happened there. For example, here's a paragraph from a Scientific American story:

"Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s," says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.

(And yes, that article is titled "The Sunny Side of Smut," because journalists.)

That's pretty promising, but let's also be clear: this is a hard study to get right. There are lots of other things that might correlate with internet access, such as poverty, urbanization, and more. In fact, crime and poverty are closely linked. In the US, with just 50 states, I'd be surprised if they could effectively control for those differences. (As a further wrinkle, why would rapes have risen in places without internet access, rather than staying flat? Something else was going on.) In other words, this is an interesting study, but hardly conclusive. That's going to be a problem for everything in this section: we've got signals, but nothing conclusive.²

You might argue that pedophilia and adult rape are different, and you're right; the mechanisms might be totally different. But understanding porn's effect matters, and if you'll indulge me for a moment, we'll even see child pornography play a role here.

In a 1991 article from the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry there's a look at pre-internet porn accessibility from 1964-1984. In all of the US, Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany, accessibility of pornography went up significantly, but violent sex crimes did not go up any faster than non-sexual violent offenses or non-violent sexual offenses.

In the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Japan, studies have shown that when pornography was legalized, incidence of sex crimes decreased. However, those studies showed something else interesting. In each of those countries, there was a period where actual, real child pornography was legal(!), and rates of child sexual abuse also went down. (See here for the 1973 paper about Denmark.) I'm definitely not arguing that child porn should be legalized, because I don't believe it's moral. But that is a strong suggestion that perhaps artificial child pornography could be a good and similar substitute. It's another data point for the "safe outlet" theory.

Unfortunately, there are limits to these studies. For one thing, if you look at a whole country as a monolith, it's hard to have any meaningful experiment; there are all kinds of national confounding factors that could have caused the changes. For example, maybe attitudes towards sex and what was reportable as abusive changed over time; maybe access correlated to income; etc. It's an intrinsic limitation of studies like this. One attempt to fix this was a 2007 state-by-state examination of the US which looked at how internet access compared to rates of sex crimes. Rates of sex crimes dropped as internet access increased, but it's hard to know if internet access had some effect on the rate of reporting of rapes, or if it caused a decrease unrelated to pornography, or if there's some other relationship and internet access had nothing to do with it. There's some nuanced commentary at Freakonomics for example.

Now, everything I've said until now was stuff I basically knew before writing this blog post. However, I wanted to make sure I did my research before writing it, and I did come across two more recent studies that give an opposite result, which left me a bit disheartened because it muddies the story.
Most notable is a study from India although it doesn't look as promising, especially because the increase in child sexual abuse reports they notice predates the increase in internet access!)

Anyway, the Norway result weighs in against the "pornography as safe outlet" claim, and it's a good study.

One thing none of these studies have looked at is underlying psychology; they all just look at correlations in the real world. Predating the Norway result, I think it's worth pointing to a 2009 paper in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior which, in addition to looking at access to pornography, also reviews psychological studies. (Sadly, those are still inconclusive.) I think their conclusion is helpful:

Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

I'll be honest. When I first started this research, I hadn't seen the Norway article, and so I felt like the preponderance of signals indicated that access to a safe outlet is likely to decrease child sex abuse. I thought this would be a pretty straightforward section of the blog post, but instead I have to report mixed signals. I don't want to overplay it; the article from Norway is well done, but it's one among many. Nonetheless, you also have to admit there's probably some publication bias overall: a paper saying "yo, access to porn makes rape incidence go down!" is much more likely to get published because it's so counter-intuitive.

I also know my personal biases. I want to be able to look at artificial cp because it gives me a personal release, and so I want the data to say we should make sure it's legal.

But just for the record—if you're rooting for the Norway paper, keep in mind that it would strongly argue we should ban _all_ pornography. After all, it found that all sex crimes increased with internet access. And don't forget, most articles come to a different conclusion.

Ok, so, that was a bunch of data. What do I think right now? Well:

It's all just signals. There's nothing definitive.
I think the significant majority of those signals say that access to pornography probably lowers the propensity to sexual violence, which suggests that artificial child pornography would help pedophiles avoid offending.
My personal experience, and those of my friends, tells me that having an outlet of artificial child pornography is good for me.

I'm not enough of an expert to say something more definitive, but that's how I see it point.

Is there anything about pedophiles and child pornography specifically?

All those studies were about pornography in general. Can we say anything about pedophiles? Child pornography? Artificial child pornography?

Well, there was the discredited study I started with. And there are the results from Denmark and the Czech Republic where child pornography was legalized, which coincided with a decline in the incidence of reported child abuse. (I am being very careful in my phrasing there!)

I dislike generalizing from convicts, because it's such a biased sample, but I will quote this review article that looks at if use of child pornography correlates with being arrested again:

Kingston, Federoff, Firestone, Curry, and Bradford (2008) studied child molesters and the influence of pornography on risk for recidivism. Their results revealed that use of pornography was not a significant predictor of recidivism for crime, in general, or for sex offenses, specifically. They did find, however, that exposure to pornography was associated with recidivism for non-sexual assault; these associations, however, were very weak. The authors concluded little support for an influence of pornography on risk of sex offenders re-offending.

Especially since they were looking at multiple correlations, it's not surprising they found one weak one just by chance. In other words, what little evidence there is suggests that child pornography didn't make a difference to recidivism. There are plenty more studies that say similar things, such as this one. However, I have not read them in detail.

Unfortunately, that's it for the research I can find.

Who might be affected, and how?

One limitation of all of these studies is that they treat people as a monolith. This sounds obvious when you say it, but it tends to be ignored: different people react differently to pornography! There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution here. It might be a release valve for some, and encouraging illegal behavior for others.

An early meta-analysis concluded "We suggest that the way relatively aggressive men interpret and react to the same pornography may differ from that of nonaggressive men, a perspective that helps integrate the current analyses with studies comparing rapists and nonrapists as well as with cross-cultural research."

Here's a useful quote from the BBC:

Neil Malamuth at the University of California, Los Angeles has carried out numerous studies examining porn and sexual violence, including one involving 300 men, and concluded that men who are already sexually aggressive and consume a lot of sexually aggressive pornography are more likely to commit a sexually aggressive act. But he argues that porn isn’t the cause of sexual violence. In 2013, he told BBC Radio 4 that porn consumption can be compared to alcohol, suggesting that it isn’t inherently dangerous, but can be for those who have other risk factors.

This doesn't help you if you're deciding what to do, though, so here are a couple of useful resources I learned about from this blog post from Dr. Craig Harper. The first is the [motivation-facilitation model of sexual offending which essentially tries to clarify what drives people to sexually offend. It points out that there's a lot between having a motivation (such as being attracted to children) and acting. It takes more than motivation, such as facilitation through trait factors (like an antisocial personality) or through state factors (such as being intoxicated at the time).

Maybe this can be a basis for understanding who is likely to act on their desires.

There's also been some work to develop a "Problematic Pornography Consumption Scale" which is on the last page of [this document. Perhaps a tool like this can help individuals decide if pornography use might be triggering or helpful.

differentiating between real child pornography and artificial child pornography

In most of this post, I haven't distinguished much between real child pornography and artificial child pornography. There's basically no research about artificial child pornography, so I didn't have a choice.

Even if real child pornography was an "outlet" that prevented abuse, I wouldn't support using it. However, artificial child pornography comes with none of the baggage of hurting real kids.

What's truly interesting to me, though, is that the artificiality itself is something of a shield. It provides a clear delineation from reality and a reminder that this is all fantasy. I've talked to at least two people who gave up real child pornography but have continued viewing artificial child pornography, and both of them said that viewing real pornography made them more likely to offend, but that artificial child pornography doesn't. As someone allowed me to post in a comment to my previous post:

I think real CP had a much more normalizing effect, in terms of normalizing the idea of sex with kids, specifically *because* it involved real kids. While artificial CP, on the other hand, seems to have the opposite effect. It’s artificial because real CP (and sex with kids) is wrong, and hence helps to reinforce that.

In short, artificial cp might be even better as a release valve than real cp. If artificial cp were shown to either reduce the likelihood of abuse or have no effect, I think it should be allowed and even destigmatized so that people can get the help they need with it.

next steps

Well, congratulations. You've now read over 3500 words to conclude that... we don't know much. There seems to be consistent (but weak) evidence for the "safe outlet" theory. What are we to make of that?

For one thing, at least to me, it seems more likely than not that artificial child pornography would lead to a reduction rather than an increase in offenses against children. For that reason alone, I believe it should be consistently legal and not stigmatized, at least until more research is done. It's not perfect; it does seem to make it harder for some people to resist their urges. Nonetheless, on balance, I think it's a good, safe outlet, at least in communities that are clear about being against real child abuse.

Certainly I believe that it's a huge misuse of police and court resources to go after people who only view artificial child pornography, and I think it's wrong to ruin someone's life over viewing something that didn't involve real kids. (For example, in Canada as well as many other countries, it is illegal and lands you on the sex offender registry for life.) Moreover, forcing people into secrecy creates insular communities that prevent people from seeking help.

However, all of those conclusions are based on shaky evidence. Above all, I think we need more research, and better research. We need to fund better research into how to treat pedophiles, not after they offend, but _before_. We need to better understand people who struggle with their attractions and how we can be supportive.

There's so much more that we could be doing, if this wasn't buried under emotion and preconceptions that prevent productive action. I can't imagine what it will take to bring about that change, but I hope we can succeed.

¹: To be clear, I didn't dive into the follow-up studies, which the Times claims have similar results. It's possible they were done better, but it also seems quite difficult to get accurate information on how they were done since (as far as I can tell) mostly the first study was closely examined.

²: As long as I'm enjoying the use of footnotes, fun fact to illustrate how hard these studies are to get right: one study found a correlation between subscription rates to the magazine Field & Stream and local rates of rapes. Unless you somehow think that ads for sun blocking hats increase rates of rape, you have to assume there's some hidden variable causing that correlation!

About the author: After realizing my attraction at the age of 13, I began the journey of figuring out how to live a good life. When I eventually landed happily, I decided to share that journey with others. At first, I primarily wrote answers on Quora, which were viewed over a million times, liked thousands of times and led to numerous positive comments and discussions. I also started a blog, which was fortunate as a likely reporting campaign resulted in my Quora account being deleted, so much of my work remains online there. In addition to his writing (here and elsewhere), I enjoy board games, hiking, and spending time with friends. I have been part of the community for over a decade, seeking to do my part to make the world a better place.

You can find the original article, along with reader comments (and the opportunity to leave your own) at Leonard's blog.

tags for this item

ethics of images⁵⁰

nature of attractions²¹

offending²⁸

science of pedophilia¹²

other relevant items


thread: how does a pedophile not become an abuser?	the perfect pedophile	no dogs allowed discussed by three pedophiles

bly Pedophiles have different starting points and end with differing beliefs and behaviours. What do we know about why?	ethan edwards What would a perfect pedophile look like when all humans are imperfect in many ways?	markus No Dogs Allowed dares to tell a realistic story about us and breaks with a false image that has been painted too often.

thread: how does a pedophile not become an abuser?
bly

Pedophiles have different starting points and end with differing beliefs and behaviours. What do we know about why?

the perfect pedophile
ethan edwards

What would a perfect pedophile look like when all humans are imperfect in many ways?

no dogs allowed discussed by three pedophiles
markus

No Dogs Allowed dares to tell a realistic story about us and breaks with a false image that has been painted too often.