From IAN VINE
One reason why experiments using pornography are far less dangerous
than Maggie Sinclair thinks (Letters, 19 May) is that to get any measurable
aggression at all in the laboratory, subjects must be hurt by a confederate
of the experimenter before exposure to the sexual materials.
But superficial reviews of complex fields like this are dangerous –
as they fail to stress the fact that what is studied is retaliation after
being provoked. More crucially, the situation is one which tacitly legitimates
such a reaction. Rather than underestimating the supposed porn/violence
causal connection, such experiments may inflate it.
The answer to Sinclair’s second question is of course that correlation
does not prove causation, and popular surveys are often scientifically incompetent.
In any case, while a victim of sexual violence may believe her attacker’s
use of porn ’caused’ the act, such a diagnosis made after a traumatic experience
will be extremely unreliable. Subjective analyses of psychological causation
have been poor at the best of times.
In fact, even the dominant academic causal theories of sexual violence
are grossly inadequate. They take no account of the moral evaluations which
are normally likely to be critical determinants of whether or not people
act upon fantasies induced by sexual depictions.
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Ian Vine University of Bradford
