The Illogic of Linking Porn and Rape : Meese Commission Overlooks Proper Reasoning in Findings
Attention, students of Statistics 101. Here is your final exam. It consists of two questions:
1--If 100 police officers testify that every drug addict they arrested was found to have milk in the refrigerator at home, why can’t we conclude that drinking milk leads to drug addiction?
2--If 100 women testify that the men who abused them had pornographic magazines under their beds, why can’t we conclude that pornography causes rape and sexual abuse?
Give yourself five points if you realize that both faulty conclusions ignore the negative cases--the many children who drink milk and do not become drug addicts, the many men (and women) who read pornography and do not become rapists and child molesters.
Give yourself 10 points if you also answered that links between events do not tell us anything about which event causes which.
As the statisticians say, “Correlation is not causation.” Even if drug addicts turn out (in controlled studies) to be unusually fond of milk, we cannot conclude that drinking milk causes drug abuse. Perhaps drugs create a desire for milk. Even if rapists are unusually fond of pornography, we cannot conclude that pornography causes rape. Perhaps rapists are men who are drawn to pornographic literature--or perhaps a third factor, such as abuse in childhood, causes men to rape and to enjoy violent pornography.
Whatever your feelings about the civil-rights and women’s-rights aspects of the pornography debate, these lessons in statistical reasoning were entirely overlooked by the Meese Commission on Pornography. The basic research question--does pornography cause people (mostly men) to abuse, rape and exploit others (mostly women)?--was never satisfactorily answered by the commission. It could not have been. The commission members, like their predecessors in Richard M. Nixon’s era, didn’t even agree on what pornography is.
Among the members of the commission who dissented from its main report were Judith Becker, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University whose career has been devoted to evaluating and treating the victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes, and Ellen Levine, the editor of Woman’s Day magazine.
They argued that the short time and the limited funds that had been granted to the commission meant that a “full airing of the differences” among its members, much less the issuing of a comprehensive report, was impossible. As a result, “No self-respecting investigator would accept conclusions based on such a study.” Among their objections:
- No effort was made to procure an accurate sample of the varieties and distribution of pornography; visual materials “were skewed to the very violent and extremely degrading.” (For that matter, portrayals of the violent degradation of women were limited to pornographic films; horror movies and popular films by, say, Brian de Palma or Charles Bronson were ignored.)
- Little effort was made to acquire testimony from people who enjoy pornography and are not harmed by it. It would not have been easy to get such testimony, but not because it doesn’t exist. The commission members were understandably sympathetic toward the victims of sexual crimes who tearfully testified that their abusers loved pornography, but our social climate does not encourage the millions of consumers of X-rated films, soft-core magazines and Victorian erotica to freely admit that they enjoy the stuff. (Remember all those people who read Playboy “for the interviews”?)
- Social-science studies have been conducted mostly on male college student volunteers; their results cannot be extrapolated to sex offenders or any other group.
The dissenters concluded: “To say that exposure to pornography in and of itself causes an individual to commit a sexual crime is simplistic, not supported by the social-science data, and overlooks many of the other variables that may be contributing causes.”
Never mind--we will be hearing endlessly about the commission’s “findings,” which will provide an excuse to do what the commission was determined to do from the very outset: Harass and intimidate purveyors and purchasers of pornography--whatever that is.
Becker told me about a discussion that members of the commission were having about “victims of pornography.” At last she asked, “What, exactly, is a victim of pornography?”
The commission members struggled to answer. “Someone who has been raped,” one member said.
“That is a victim of the crime of rape,” another replied.
“Someone whose father or brother abused her.”
“That is a victim of incest.”
After an hour or more of these exchanges, Becker finally concluded that a “victim of pornography” is “someone who sustains a paper cut while turning the pages of a sex magazine.”
There’s no better, and no more scientific, definition than that one. Until there is, the government would do well to prosecute people who commit crimes of violence against either sex, and stay out of the mind-control business.
