Assertion: Child porn availability does not increase child sex abuse

There are a few different reasons why people oppose the existence of child pornography. One is the harm to the children when it is made. This is a valid objection. I think that putting children in sexual situations should remain a serious crime. It does not apply, however, to virtual child porn, made with young-looking actors or any of the variety of animation-related techniques.

I believe one major objection to all forms, including the virtual, is rarely formulated: people find it gross and disgusting. That's a reasonable reaction, and one I expect I would share to some of this material, based on descriptions I've read.

The main objection to such materials is that they might incite pedophiles into doing bad things. Courts have cited it as justification for these laws. (This is a dramatic step with regard to civil liberties, but that's not my topic here. See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Speech/Adler_full.html). Regardless of whether it should influence policy, is it true?

One argument in favor of it is intuition. Looking at pictures of forbidden things might reasonably make it more likely you'd do those things. There is resistance in many quarters to applying this reasoning to the parallel situations of fictional violence in movies and to the degradation of women in pornography, in part because there is no convincing data.

Another argument in favor is the experience of clinicians. Here the sample bias is huge. The only population being studied is people who have offended against children. They may well find that a man went from thoughts about children to looking at child pornography to offending against children. It's reasonable to think that if he does not look at child pornography, the chain will be broken. But of course this doesn't address causality. Increasing desire and lowered inhibitions may cause both the child porn viewing and then the offense. And it leaves open the logical possibility that of two men who felt attracted to children, one looked at child porn and went on to offend against a child. A similar man might have had more and better child porn, satisfied his desires with it, and not gone on to offend against a child.

However, there is also a line of research that bears on this question directly. http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1999-effects-of-pornography.html Milton Diamond and colleagues examined several societies in which child pornography was very difficult to obtain, but then due to societal changes it became very easy to obtain. He looked at how the number of child abuse case reports changed in the society. One thing he never found was an increase in sex crimes against children -- if anything, they went down. Now, there are confounding factors in all these cases, but finding the same result across several societies makes them more convincing. They are avoiding the sample bias problem and looking at the society as a whole. This is the measure we care about.

There are implications here beyond child pornography. In related discussions here, for instance http://lesswrong.com/lw/it3/assertion_a_large_proportion_of_pedophiles_are/9vv9?context=3 some people have suggested that pedophiles would do better to think as little about their attraction as possible as a way of protecting children. But consider: If a pedophile views child porn, he sees people actually doing the things he would like to do; often the children seem not to mind. If that doesn't increase offending against children, why would thinking about it do so?

A reasonable analogy might be sex education. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it will make kids (teens especially) think about sex and become sexually active. The data doesn't support that, of course, and the explanation is that kids are thinking about sex already. Pedophiles are also thinking about sex; the fact that the people they are attracted to are always inappropriate partners doesn't change this aspect of the situation.

Few people suggest that child porn made with real children should be made legal, even if it became established that its availability decreases child sex abuse as opposed to not changing it. Non-consequentialists don't want to sacrifice the welfare of a few children to help the many. Even if that doesn't bother someone, the alternative of virtual child pornography should be tried first.

I might appear to have a vested interest in the availability of such materials. I don't, personally, though the number of men who are given years in prison for looking at pictures does distress me deeply. In any case, one of the rationality principles does say that arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, not the attributes of the person making them.