BrotherRool said:
In a prison interview conducted by Gail Dines, rape of a prepubescent child followed "habitual" consumption of child porn "within six months," although the men were previously "horrified at the idea".[8]
The implication is that they were habitually consuming child porn even though they were horrified by it, and it was the porn that made them want to do it. Ummm ... anybody here find the idea off a woman sucking her own faeces off a man's penis horrific but still habitually "consume" porn of exactly that, or does that niche porn cater to people who already like the idea?
However, a metaanalysis by Hald, et al (2010)[11] suggests that there is a link between consumption of violent pornography and rape-supportive attitudes in certain populations of men, particularly when moderating variables are taken into consideration.
Without reading the metaanalysis, I can't say what I think of their consideration of moderating variables, but "a link between" can easily be correlation without demonstrating causation. There is correlation between birthday parties and long life, but I wouldn't take that to imply that having birthday parties helps you live longer [http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/die-birthday-report-article-1.1095279]. Again, maybe they did look into it, but I think it'd be very hard to compare data from past and present, given that availability of pornography, attitudes towards it, honesty about it and the questions asked will have varied a lot over the last 30 years or so, never mind the last 200.
What do they mean by "certain populations" anyway? 60-year-old Taliban-supporters? Leeds United Football Club season ticket holders? Men with the surname Phelps? Ambidextrous sociology graduates? Registered US Republican Party members born in Ohio between 1961 and 1970 and now living in Montana? The local under-15 Australian Rules Football squad? Subscribers to loligurobbs.org?
Silbert, M. and Pines, A., in "Pornography and Sexual Abuse of Women," published their study involving prostitutes in the international journal Sex Roles, "The comments followed the same pattern: the assailant referred to pornographic materials he had seen or read and then insisted that the victims not only enjoyed rape but also extreme violence."[18]
I don't think "She wanted it and she liked it" is a new defence. I just went looking for the study, and the first search result turned out to be a multi-page illustration of "appeal to emotion" in place of argument, useful as an example of not making an argument well but hardly informative. The second, Pornography and Sexual Violence [http://www.vawnet.org/sexual-violence/print-document.php?doc_id=418&find_type=web_desc_AR], seems a little more level-headed. It's intro says this: "After two decades of research, there is little consensus, not only as to that answer but as to definitions of terms, appropriate methods of investigation, or even how to frame the question." Scrolling down less than halfway, I foudn this:
Consumption and Effects
Virtually all reviews of the research on the potential connections between pornography and sexual violence suggest there is evidence for some limited effects on male consumers but no way to reach definitive conclusions. If one is looking for direct causal links in a traditional science model, this is likely to be a permanent assessment; it is difficult to imagine research methods that could provide more compelling data and conclusions. However, if we expand the scope of the inquiry, other insights are possible (Boyle, 2000).
Three basic types of studies have emerged in the search for an answer to the question about the relationship between pornography and violence, two of which are within the traditional science model and of limited value. First, a few large-scale studies have investigated the correlation of the availability of pornography to rates of violence, with mixed results (Kutchinsky, 1991; Jaffee & Strauss, 1987). The complexity of confounding variables and the imprecision of measures make these studies of extremely limited value.
Second, experimental studies in the laboratory have been constructed to investigate directly the question of causal links. A typical study might expose groups of subjects to different types or levels of sexually explicit material for comparison to a control group that views non-sexual material. Researchers look for significant differences between the groups on a measure of, for example, male attitudes toward rape. From such controlled testing -- measuring the effect of an experimental stimulus (exposure to pornography) on a dependent variable (attitudes toward women or sex) in randomly selected groups --researchers make claims, usually tentative, about causal relationships.
One of the most thorough reviews of the experimental literature by leading researchers in the field concluded, ""if a person has relatively aggressive sexual inclinations resulting from various personal and/or cultural factors, some pornography exposure may activate and reinforce associated coercive tendencies and behaviors"" (Malamuth, Addison, & Koss, 2000, p. 81). The authors also pointed out that ""high pornography use is not necessarily indicative of high risk for sexual aggression"" (p. 79). Another large-scale literature review also concluded that men predisposed toward violence are most likely to show effects from viewing pornography and that men not predisposed are unlikely to show effects (Seto, Maric, & Barbarre, 2001, p. 46).
While this experimental work sometimes offers interesting hints at how pornography works in regard to men's sexual behavior, it suffers from several serious problems that limit its value. First, the measures of men's attitudes toward women, such as answers to questions about the appropriate punishment for rapists, do not necessarily tell us anything about men's willingness to rape. Men often view their sexually aggressive or violent behavior not as aggression or violence but as ""just sex."" In other words, men who rape often condemn rape, which they see as something other men do (Koss, 1988). Also, sexual behavior is a complicated mix of cognitive, emotional, and physical responses, and the answers one gives to a survey may or may not accurately reflect that mix.
. According to the study, child molesters indicated "significantly more" exposure to pornography than rapists in adulthood.
Again, correlation, cause or effect? If we assume everybody is distributed within a multi-axial graph of sexual desire, with axes for violence (yes, folks, we have axes for violence here), number of partners, power dynamics each way and a lot of other things for every ethnic group, age and hair colour ... which is going to be one hell of a lot of axes if you count Romany, Slav, Angle, Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Pict, Norse, Dane, Frank, Teuton, Breton, Basque, Turk, Hellenic, Hopi, Apache, Navajo, Comanche, Arapahoe, Hittite, Samarite, Canaanite, Farsi, Armenian, Pashtun, Dari, Hindi, Tamil, Matabele, Zulu, Shona, Shoshone, San, Maori and so on and so forth and 0-1, 1-4, 5-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20, 21-25, 26-35, 36-45 and 46+ and ... well, all the hair dyes on the entire shelf in Boots ...
and axes for awareness of society's norms, for how much someone cares about them and for self-control ...
Have I lost everyone yet, or is someone still with me?
... it becomes clear that "child-molestor" refers to someone from an envelope of a very complicated shape with low regard for societal norms, low awareness of those norms and/or low self-control and high desire for at least some members of at least some of the vast array of groups that count as children. It should also be clear that there will be people with high self-control, awareness of "the rules" and regard for them who are
not child-molestors because they are, for want of a better term, too nice to act on their desires, and in terms of activity, of potential harm, they are mixed in with the people who are not child-molestors because their sexual desire for the under-13 groups (13-17 are teenagers, not children) is extremely, or what we might call normally, low.
Likewise, a rapist of victims of any other age is someone in a bad part of the graph. If you simplify things and ignore some of the axes, you lose track of something, like whether someone is guilty of having tender, gentle sex with a consenting 15-yr-11-month-5-day-old in a long-term relationship or of bludgeoning a 25-yr-old stranger near-unconscious and taking her by force in an alley. Legally, both are rape. You may just find a 20-yr-11-month-5-day-old still happily with the guy who "raped" her five years after the fact and not feeling at all harmed, though.
It would be wrong to assume that everyone who finds an idea attractive wants to act on it. Imagine Rikku with a strap-on and Pinkie Pie pleasuring each other ... or don't, if you'd rather not. If you liked the idea, are you now inclined to go out and get some slender blonde teenager in a yellow bikini to act out those scenes with a real pony dyed pink? It seems unlikely, and it could be unlikely because you know society would condemn the act, because you don't think you have the resources required or because you don't think it'd be good for the girl or the pony and you prefer your real-life sex to be harmless to all participants.
Rather than asking whether pornography causes rape, we can ask how pornography helps make rape inviting.
Based both on the lab research and such interviews, Diana Russell has argued that pornography is a causal factor in the way that it can: (1) predispose some males to desire rape or intensify this desire; (2) undermine some males' internal inhibitions against acting out rape desires; (3) undermine some males' social inhibitions against acting out rape desires; and (4) undermine some potential victims' abilities to avoid or resist rape (Russell, 1998, p. 121).
Note the word "some" in each case, and the narrow definition of the effect.
According to the study "Pornography Use as a Risk Marker for an Aggressive Pattern of Behavior Among Sexually Reactive Children and Adolescents", sexually reactive children and adolescents (SRCAs), also referred to as juvenile sexual offenders, "may be more vulnerable and likely to experience damaging effects from pornography use." According to the study, the SRCAs who used pornography were "more likely" to display aggressive behaviors than their nonusing counterparts
See "Testosterone poisoning," on Wiki [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone_poisoning] or Urban [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=testosterone%20poisoning&defid=3285099], for a crude answer, or the bigthink [http://bigthink.com/Mind-Matters/testosterone-poisoning-isnt-what-you-think] page for a rather more sensible discussion of it:
Christoph Eisenegger and his colleagues had 121 women play the ultimatum game. Those who received testosterone beforehand were more fair and less egotistical than those who got a placebo.
Actually, there was one group of women who did behave according to stereotype, taking a much more "in-your-face'' stance in the talks. These were the women who thought they had been given testosterone.
Two conclusions: First, this is evidence for Eisenegger's more careful definition of testosterone's effect. He believes it's not a one-note promoter of aggression and lust, but rather a spur to competition for status. The experiment was designed to distinguish between the two theories: if testosterone just impels humans to act like rutting elks, then it should induce bad behavior at the bargaining table. But if it promotes status-seeking, then extra testosterone should make people want to win the game (with skillful, self-restraining effort) not burn down the casino. And that turned out to be what the study found.
What counts as status and success among adolescent males? See rap and James Bond for your answers.
So yes although it's not conclusive there is a huge body of evidence that perusual of pornography leads to increases and rape and child molesting.
It's a huge body you might accidentally go right through like The Juggernaut through an internal wall if you run at it with a scientist behind you though, eh? There are some solid pine struts in there but that's a whole lot of plasterboard.
I get carried away sometimes. I'm not dissing pornography, I'm not saying it has a strong affect on making people's rapists, what I'm saying is letting people have access to child pornography might not reduce the number of peadophiles, but in fact increase them. The big difference between general availability of porn and this is that the majority of standard porn users are normal people, whereas here we're talking about a subset of people who desire is specifically not allowed by society and the idea of whether access would help or not. 
