Sean Block was convicted of selling his girlfriend’s 5-year-old to a police informant.
From the San Antonio Current:
“My behavior started with — call it an addiction, call it a compulsion, I’m not sure, people call it different things — but an addiction to pornography.”
[...]
“And it was adult pornography that led me to many other things in my life — not even continuing my education after high school, because I tried,” he told the court. “I tried to go to college, and every night I was looking at pornography and not doing homework and then sleeping through class the next day. And it all started there.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about the gazillion other people who view porn, manage to get an education, hold a job, and resist the urge to sell their friend’s kids to the first police informant who comes along with enough big enough offer? Nope, I don’t think your problem is related to porn, Sean. Nice try, but no one is going to believe porn made you do it.
Well, no one except the anti-porn crusaders:
“The majority of porn that’s on the internet is violent and degrading,” said Mary Anne Layden, one of the principal authors of the report and co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Therapy. Offering a graphic example to emphasize her point, Layden said the most rapidly increasing pornographic image online involves anal penetration followed by the man inserting his fecal-flecked penis into a woman’s mouth. “Violence is normalized, degrading is normalized, lack of intimacy is normalized, and the message also is that all men do this,” she said.
Wow! That’s nasty. But how does that fit into a discussion about whether porn causes crime? The facts may even point the other way:
Academics are divided over what links, if any, exist between pornography and the development of violent sexual behavior. In recent years, the headlines have belonged to people like Anthony D’Amato, a widely published author and Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law. In a 2006 paper, D’Amato suggested that while “the American public is probably not ready to believe it,” porn may actually be reducing sexual violence. Culling rape statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, the law-school prof reported a dramatic decline in rapes nationally since the release of Deep Throat on VHS in 1972 and the dawning of our new millennium, so marked by ubiquitous online X-rated videos, photos, and chatter. Reported rapes have dropped — from about 2.5 offenses per 1,000 people in 1980 to .4 per 1,000 almost a quarter-century later in 2004 — he wrote in his paper “Porn Up, Rape Down,” published by Northwestern as part of a research series in public law and legal theory.
The story continues with the anti-sex crusaders pulling out their trusty old tip-of-the-iceberg claim saying that rape only appears to be in decline because women aren’t reporting it as much anymore.
While woman will often claim they haven’t been raped, they will report they had sex after physical force or threats of physical harm. “You’ve got to use many more kinds of questions,” [Layden] said.
They never want to talk about all the people who manage to use porn without committing any sex crimes. Or maybe she would claim that have committed rape, but they just haven’t been caught yet…
