The Williams Report - Chapter 6 - Harms ?

Other effects on human behaviour

6.60 We have so far considered whether the influence of material of a sexual or violent nature might be manifested in behaviour which is illegal. To consider the possible effects on other forms of behaviour raises problems of deciding what forms of legal behaviour are nevertheless undesirable, bringing to bear certain values. For example, some of our witnesses were clearly concerned at the effect of pornography on sexual behaviour generally. But if sexual arousal results, this is hardly to be condemned in itself; if more frequent sexual intercourse follows, there is no obvious need for concern, while if the result is masturbation, still many will not be alarmed; if a greater repertoire of sexual activity is learned, many people would regard this as a benefit. The prospect of encouraging premarital or extra-marital sexual activity raises greater controversy, but the indications from research results are that sexual patterns of behaviour are fixed before reading pornography can exercise any influence. What people do is more affected by their existing habits and values than by exposure to pornography, and the sexual attitudes of groups who have been studied do not appear to have been much affected by seeing this kind of material. It is however true that attitudes towards pornography and its restriction are very much a function of other attitudes towards sex generally (see Appendix 5, paragraph 2).

6.61 Concern is expressed that readers of pornography might be led into deviant sexual practices, particularly through a progressive seeking after novelty. We have already referred in Chapter 4 to the successful publisher's philosophy of "keeping one step ahead", but the context of that progression was straightforward sexual explicitness, and we are sceptical of the extent to which the appeal of novelty, as represented in publications, draws people into sexual deviancy. Indeed, all the evidence points to the fact that material dealing with bizarre or perverted sexual activity appeals only to those with a pre-existing interest established by the experiences of early life, and that such material is of very little interest to others except perhaps as an occasional or once-for-all object of curiosity. The usual reaction of those who are not predisposed to the particular form of deviant behaviour portrayed is disgust and revulsion, and there is no evidence that exposure to such material inculcates a taste for it among such people. Even among adolescents, as Yaffe points out in Appendix 5, the reaction of the individual appears to relate to his previously established sexual identity rather than influencing the development of that identity.

6.62 We received some evidence to the effect that although exposure to deviant pornography might not induce a sexual taste in a person without a pre-existing bias in that direction, it might nevertheless bring to the surface a deviant ingredient in a person's character which he or she did not even know existed, or make it more difficult for people with deviant tastes to deal with that aspect of their personalities. Dr Hyatt Williams was one of those who made this point to us; we also heard from a man who said that he suffered from, and struggled against, sadomasochistic tendencies, and who made a plea for the suppression of the kind of publications which could arouse such feelings. On the other hand, there is the view that people who possess certain interests and tendencies should not be prevented from having material which meets those interests, when the material might in fact provide a cathartic effect, offering some means of relief for tensions that arise from those tendencies. Where the balance lies as regards the control of this material is not easy to judge. We discussed with Dr Hyatt Williams, for example, whether the protection of a small susceptible minority he had identified justified restrictions on the availability of such material more severe than restrictions on other sexually explicit material; he was inclined to think it did not, and the view of other psychiatric witnesses tended in the same direction.

6.63 A particular aspect of behaviour to which some of our evidence was directed was that between partners in marriage and it was put to us that pornography could be influential in damaging human relationships and in leading to marital breakdown. The typical aspect of the argument seemed to be that pornography sometimes implanted in husbands the desire to engage in sexual experimentation which their wives found abhorrent, and which therefore introduced tensions into the marriage. Other ingredients of the argument were that pornography's emphasis on sex divorced from any notion of love, and the wildly exaggerated ideas which it offers of sexual fulfilment and sexual performance, create dissatisfaction with existing partners and the desire to look elsewhere. We have to say, however, that we received very little concrete evidence to this effect. The Nationwide Festival of Light expressed the belief that the problem was a very considerable one. Mrs Mary Whitehouse told us that she had received a large number of letters about the deleterious effect of pornography on marital relationships, some of which she quoted in her book Whatever Happened to Sex?, but she said that it would not be practicable for her to produce them for us to see. We received one letter of personal testimony of how the writer's interest in pornography had harmed his relationship with his wife; and a Methodist minister told us of two cases from his pastoral experience in which pornography had played a part in marital breakdown. This was, however, the limit of the specific evidence we received. If there was a real problem of this kind arising from pornography we had expected to hear more of it, and we were interested to hear from Mrs Angela Willans, who has had long experience of conducting the problems page of the magazine Woman's Own, that she received few letters from wives complaining of the demands of their husbands installed by a reading of pornography. Many of her readers were upset to find their husbands taking an interest in pornography, but that is a rather different point. Indeed, we also received evidence of how pornography had been of help in enabling married couples to overcome their sexual problems; one correspondent told us how his marriage had been saved when the physical relationship between him and his wife was rekindled in their looking together at sexually explicit magazines. More generally, as paragraph 6 of Appendix 5 makes clear, such material is also used in the clinical treatment of sexual dysfunction, to alleviate the problems of those whose relationship is suffering, through impotence or frigidity. In short, the evidence in this area once again tends both ways and we came to the conclusion that the evidence of detrimental effects was too insubstantial to suggest overall that pornography was a significant cause of harm to marriages or other personal relationships.

6.64 We received a number of submissions, not only from women, which stressed the degradation of women which is a feature of much pornography. While it is true that if pornography degrades then it degrades also the men it portrays as well as those who consume it, there is a special sense in which, as pornography seems to be almost exclusively designed for male consumption, it uses women as simply the objects of men's sexual needs. Many organisations considered that this was not merely offensive to women but was demeaning in a way that could be regarded as a social harm. Some of these were those with a religious view of human dignity who saw pornography as an assault on women, and we received both Christian and Jewish views of this. But much evidence also had a specifically feminist viewpoint, which tended to see pornography as but one form of sexism, perhaps a particularly blatant and vicious form but essentially reflecting the same view of women commonly encountered in advertising, entertainment and other aspects of our social existence. Much of what we received from Women's Liberation groups was indeed directed as much at the world of advertising and at the general reinforcement of women's subservient role which society was seen as pursuing than at pornography itself, which was seen as only one of the instruments of women's repression; and some radical groups specifically distinguished their views on pornography from those more traditional groups by emphasising that, quite apart from other differences, their approach was based on a different attitude to the nature of women's sexuality. It follows from this view, of course, that pornography (at least on these grounds) should not be singled out for special treatment under the law, since the desire is to alter fundamentally society's attitudes towards the role of women rather than to legislate against one symptom of those attitudes. Many of our women correspondents wanted the law to be invoked against the degradation of women in pornography; but the consensus of those parts of the Women's movement from which we heard tended to attach greater importance to freedom of expression than to the need to suppress pornography.

6.65 The effects of pornography and violent material were widely seen as particularly dangerous to the young, and most of our witnesses wished to see children and young persons protected. We did hear from some of our expert witnesses a certain caution about just how susceptible children were to such influences, for this is not a field where much is known: for obvious reasons children have not been used in experimental work on exposure to pornography, and we heard no evidence of actual harm being caused to children. Some witnesses suspected that children would not take very much notice of pornography and that they might be more robust than was commonly assumed, but there was nevertheless a reluctance to take any risks where the young were concerned. Dr Hanna Segal saw in particular two ways in which such influences might be harmful to children. First, children learn to overcome their own sexual fantasies by looking at behaviour in the real world, but if their view of the adult world confirmed those fantasies, they were likely to become fixated by them; secondly, she felt that an essential element of all pornography was cruelty and that this could establish a link between sexual activity and violence. Dr Gallwey of the Portman Clinic thought that a particular experience of exposure to pornography at a time of stress in the child's process of growing up, particularly when trying to evolve an understanding of aspects of life, could be very confusing to a child and, if in constellation with other disturbing factors, could tip the balance towards psychological damage. Dr Gallwey also offered the comment that it was better to avoid exposing children to the infantile conflicts of adults. The greatest harm, in the view of Dr Hyatt Williams, might be to those on the verge of puberty, but he saw the danger more in terms of pornography being used by an adult with a view, for example, to homosexual seduction than in relation to pornography being passed around among children.

6.66 It was clear from our discussions with Witnesses that no very definite answer can be given about the age at which the special protection of children is no longer necessary. Individual sexual maturation is so variable that, as Dr Segal put it to us, some 15 year olds could quite well cope with exposure to pornography while others even in their early twenties could still be susceptible to outside influences of this kind, while Professor Sir Martin Roth also felt that a person's sexual development might sometimes be in the balance until after the age of 20; his concern was primarily with children being subjected to propaganda for homosexuality. Because of this lengthy period of varying maturity, some of our witnesses declined to offer any view as to the age at which special protection should cease; the choice of others tended to hover between the ages of 16 and 18.

6.67 Rather similar considerations applied to the exposure of the young to violent material. Children have to learn what violence is and it is clearly better if they do so, and are introduced to certain potentially disturbing material, within a secure and loving framework. There is of course no shortage of unpleasant and horrific subjects in traditional children's literature, but some of our witnesses thought that there was no reason for parents to be concerned about fairytale violence on the one hand - including that in westerns, for example, on the other - the real-life violence of news stories. But there is concern in particular about the effects on those young people who have been deprived of a secure background and the normal socialising influences which enable them to develop their own healthy personality. It was, Dr Gallwey told us, the more disturbed children who were both more frightened and more fascinated by violent material, and also the most vulnerable who were the very people likely to be exposed to violent influences. Brody makes the point from research evidence that it is those who lack firm contact with ordinary life, with severe neurotic problems or of frankly disordered states of mind, who are likely to be most susceptible to adverse effects from films. Ordinarily, although children may be upset or disturbed by watching films, the solid base which they have to fall back on means that the effects are only temporary; but those whose development has already been impaired, and who have to find a substitute for reality in a fantasy world, are the minority likely to be at risk. We found a wide feeling that it was right that those still in the process of emotional development should be shielded from some of the very powerful images Of violence, particularly material which appeared to exploit and glorify violent behaviour.

6.68 The protection of children also figured largely in the evidence we received about the harm done to those who were exploited in the production of pornography; in this connection we turn now to the question of harmful effects on participants rather than on the consumers of published material. Even in relation to children, the evidence we received did not all point in the same direction Professor Trevor Gibbens, for example, told us that he thought that young girls often had the ability to exploit what they saw as a "good racket" and were quite capable of still growing up into well-adjusted women. This did not mean that Professor Gibbens was arguing that the use of children in pornography was anything but undesirable, but he was suggesting that long-term damage to those involved was more doubtful than is widely assumed. Few people would be prepared to take the risk where children are concerned and just as the law recognises that children should be protected against sexual behaviour which they are too young to properly consent to, it is almost universally agreed that this should apply to participation in pornography. Participating in pornography, it ought to be said, will often involve the commission of what are anyway offences such as unlawful sexual intercourse with girls under sixteen, indecent assault and indecency with children, and there is only a small area of pornographic activity which is not covered by the law on sexual offences. On the evidence we received, this area is even smaller in practice than it may appear on paper. But there are strong arguments that the prevention of this harm also requires the power to suppress the pornographic product as well as the original act, so as not to provide the incentive to pornographers to flout the sexual offence law, or to deal without inhibition in products which are imported from other legal jurisdictions. We should not be parochial about the prevention of harm to children; if English law is to protect children against offences in this country, it is hypocritical to permit the trade in photographs and films of the same activities taken overseas. These considerations reinforce the view that the law on sexual offences is not enough; a law dealing with the published product is required in addition.

6.69 Children are the most obvious example of a group who are capable of exploitation because they do not enjoy a fully developed right to choose. But our evidence on participants went a good deal wider, and it was submitted to us that adults were also exploited and harmed in the production of pornography. The question of consenting adults being exploited raises broader issues and merges with the kind of argument which suggests that much employment is exploitation because people are obliged to do what they have no desire to do in order to earn their living. A more limited view of exploitation would be that people are taken advantage of in ways that are against their best interests, and are forced to suffer harms which they themselves are capable of recognising as harms. If there are people who willingly and even cheerfully or enthusiastically take part in pornographic films or photographic sessions and are able lucidly to square that activity with their own values and consciences and to decide that it is advantageous to them to do it, then it is very difficult for other members of society to impose on them a view that they are demeaning themselves or allowing themselves to be exploited in undesirable ways.

6.70 At the very least, we would suggest that a particular kind of moralism is involved in pressing the charge of exploitation with respect to participation, particularly in pornography, when that participation is by ordinary criteria voluntary. It may be that much employment which by those standards is voluntary can justly be seen as exploitation, but there is no particular reason to pick out employment in the production of pornography. Some who do specially pick out pornography in this connection perhaps believe that no-one. knowing what was involved, and not under the direst pressure of economic or other necessity, would want to engage m it. If that is their thought. we can only report that our enquiries do not suggest that it is true.

6.71 We were not able to conclude that participation in these activities was a cause of harm. Allegations to this effect were sometimes made to us, but these were usually in the context of evidence that assumed pornography to be evil and any association with it to be contaminating. We received little evidence of a more objective kind. One of our psychiatric witnesses, Dr Gallwey, suggested to us that there was much misery in the trade and that many of the girls in strip clubs, for example, were disturbed and mentally ill. Mr. Raymond Blackburn suggested that the most dangerous risk to participants was of their being subjected to blackmail. However, the other evidence we received contained no substantiation of these suggestions. Evidence from within the trade denied it. This is hardly surprising, but, for what it is worth, Mr David Sullivan told us that the models used by his magazines were a complete cross-section of society and that, in his view. the work had no effect on them. He saw no reason to believe that to embark on such work was to step on a slippery slope to corruption or prostitution or, for that matter, to step on a stairway to stardom. The vast majority of models in this field undertook the work simply because they regarded it as an acceptable way of making money.

6.72 There have been instances in which the alleged harm to participants has fallen in a very different category. It has been suggested, for example, that there is a genre of film - the so-called "snuff" movie - usually said to originate in South America, in which sadistic pornography is taken to the extreme of having an unsuspecting model actually mutilated and murdered in front of the camera. There has been much scepticism about the existence of films of this kind and although rumours about their existence were indeed followed in America by the appearance of a film called Snuff ("the film that could only be made in South America ... where life is cheap!") there appeared to be general agreement that the violence in the film was simulated rather than real; it is possible that the rumours themselves had been engineered for the purposes of advance publicity for this film. Another film, which we saw, which purported to include actual documentary sequences of mutilation and death, was subsequently reported to have been, at least in part, faked. Clearly the danger of physical injury does represent an undeniable harm, even if it is potential rather than actual. As with offences against children, however, this is an area where the criminal law already operates for the protection of the individual and the infliction of physical injury may be punishable in the courts even where the injured person consented to be so treated. Nevertheless, again as with children, we do not think that the authorities in this country will have discharged their responsibility for discouraging such behaviour just by legislating to punish such acts which arc committed in this country. There is a strong case for taking measures against the circulation of material which involves real cruelty or physical injury, even when it originates overseas.

6.73 The broadest arguments put to us concerned the social harms flowing from the widespread availability of pornography, in terms of cultural pollution, moral deterioration and the undermining of human compassion, social values and basic institutions. Arguments of this kind were less concerned with the possibility of specific effects on individual behaviour than with the gradual infecting of society with a disregard for decency, a lack of respect for others, a taste for the base, a contempt for restraint and responsibility; in short, with the weakening of our civilisation and the demoralisation of society.

6.74 A leading exponent of the view associating pornography with a cultural sickness is Mr David Holbrook and we discussed his concern with him. Mr Holbrook sees pornography and sadism as having been allowed to increase in our culture in recent years, with the result that a stream of hate - which he sees as an essential element in pornography - and debased sexuality has been thrust into our consciousness through powerful mass media. In consequence, in his view, there is now a widespread mental obsession with sexuality, a considerable degree of commercialisation of sex, a growing egotistical nihilism, a preoccupa- tion with satiation and a corruption of culture. Culture had been debased to the extent that it is now difficult to write about sexual matters in an adult way because the expectations of the audience had been so corrupted. Writers wishing to appear trendy had committed intellectual treachery by praising the latest work of sex and violence, while those who attempted to raise a debate on the serious issues involved in the spread of pornography and its effect on culture were ignored and isolated. Mr Holbrook complained that his books were no longer being reviewed because editors disagreed with the stand he had taken.

6.75 The emphasis given to the nature of the social harms naturally varied from witness to witness. Some witnesses, for example, saw violence in the media as contributing to public attitudes which regard violence as a legitimate means of achieving desired ends or of expressing feelings; or as encouraging a callous disregard of the effects of violence. The particular question of psychological desensitisation to violence was one which we discussed with a number of witnesses, and Dr Guy Cumberbatch sought to reassure us from the results of research on the subject. As he told us, and as Brody has also pointed out, experiments have certainly shown that the viewer may become desensitised by exposure to violent material, but this appears to occur in a specific rather than a general way. For example, volunteers had repeatedly been shown an extract from a violent film. with the effect that their measured response to it declines with each showing, but when they were afterwards shown the complete film, their reaction to other scenes of violence had been normal and it was only the familiar scene to which responses had been dulled. In any case, Dr Cumberbatch argued, responses to fictional and dramatic material were quite different from those of real life, and there were no indications that a person's ability to feel pity and willingness to help the victim of an act of aggression. was lessened by watching representations of similar acts of violence.

6.76 However, the arguments range more widely than such delimited psychological effects. As we have said, many of our witnesses claimed that there were more generalised damaging effects of pornography, violent publications, and films, effects which were necessarily of a less identifiable kind. These arguments should not be discounted or ignored simply because they are not based on direct tangible effects. Long-term effects on civilisation and culture are self-evidently important and should be considered as carefully as one can, even if they cannot be quantified and demonstrated. The arguments here do, however, involve the danger, as we have already said and is very obvious, of citing as a cause something that is itself only an effect or part of a cultural and historical process. There is also the danger that the cultural process is itself disliked because it is new, unfamiliar, and perhaps threatening, and things that are indeed extreme and ugly cultural phenomena, but perhaps not deeply significant ones, are seized on in order to attack social and moral developments which are indeed more significant, but less obviously to be rejected. In these reactions, an idealised image of the past often plays a part. In considering the dangers that are sometimes seen as threatening our social fabric in the area of sexual conduct and of pornography, one needs a sense of historical perspective.

6.77 There were almost certainly more child prostitutes in London a hundred years ago than there are today. Pornography, in any case an age-old phenomenon (1), flourished then and is by no means a modern development. Of course, technological innovations have offered new scope to the producer of pornography, but it would be a mistake to minimise the circulation of pornography in earlier years, even in Victorian times. Needless to say, we are no more able to quantify the availability of pornography a hundred years ago than we are to chart its progress in recent years, but the comments which we quote in Appendix 1 from those who were trying to combat pornography in nineteenth century England have a familiar ring today. H Montgomery Hyde has written that the output of purely erotic pornography in England during the nineteenth century was prodigious. This was not merely the production of leather-bound limited editions for a minority of specialist collectors, as can be seen from the results of some of the police activity against such material. In 1874, for example, one raid on a dealer led to the seizure of about 135,000 obscene photographs and slides. A raid in 1895 netted about two tons of obscene literature. The trade must have been considerable.

6.78 What has become clear to us in the course of our discussions about the social harms of pornography and violent material was that many of our winesses had in mind a class of material which included much that could not remotely be dealt with under the kind of laws we were appointed to review, or wore considering the type of harm which certainly could not be ascribed to such material alone or even predominantly to such material. Often, the argu- ments that were put to us about damage to culture, morality and social values were not primarily directed to the effects of pornography at all. Some of our witnesses recognised this; the Catholic Social Welfare Commission, for example, admitted that pornography and representations of violence may be symptoms of a more general malaise and may be considered effects, or at most partial causes in particular contexts, rather than sufficient explanations; their case rested on the belief, however, that pornography and the representation of violence in certain forms and circumstances is one of the elements which threaten some basic institutions and values. Mrs Mary Whitehouse too is well-known for her passionately held views on the erosion of standards over a wide area. The degradation of sex figures strongly in her thinking. She did express to us very strongly the view that pornography is corrupting our society, and indeed that it is being used by the extreme Left, for this purpose, in much the same way as the Nazis used pornography as part of their assault on the cultural life of the Poles or, she alleged, Communists, while clamping down on sex shows and prostitution in Mozambique, have been pouring pornography into South Africa. But Mrs Whitehouse has in general concentrated her attention on television programme content - which in this country is hardly ever pornographic - and this fact illustrates her concern with the far wider aspects of media influences on the quality of life.

6.77 There was a sense, we felt, in which pornography was being used by many of our witnesses as a scapegoat. The tastelessness and depressing awful- ness of pornography generally makes it easy for its detractors to attack it without fear of contradiction and to gain a sympathetic hearing for their description of its anti-social effects. Mr David Holbrook was one of our witnesses who made it clear that his attack was directed at a broader target. In deploring the commercialisation of sex, he referred to the use of sexuality in advertising in order to give a wide range of products a greater appeal to a consumer society; in deploring the glamorisation of sexual aggression, he referred to what he regarded as the social evil of the James Bond image, in which, as with Don Juan, he perceived a degree of latent fascism; in deploring an obsession with perversion and hate, he was in fact speaking in the context of the intellectual debate rather than on the effects of pornographic magazines.

6.80 While there are some serious and interesting questions about the character of pornography, what the experience of pornographic work is like and how that relates, for instance, to the experience of art, little of this, it seems to us, is very directly connected with the causation of social harms. Conversely, Mr Holbrook's diagnosis of a cultural sickness and collapse is not very closely connected, in our view (which we put to him in discussion), with pornography and still less with the laws on obscenity. The point goes more generally. One factor that we have not so far mentioned is that sexual matters in general are more openly discussed now than before, and the fact that pornography is less concealed in one aspect of this development. Our witnesses recognise this development; some seemed to regret it, preferring the subject to remain a private one to be treated in public with more reticence than is often the case. even in serious discussion. Others welcomed it, regarding the denial of an interest in this basic and integral part of the nature of all of us as something that can only obstruct understanding of ourselves and others and impede the development of true maturity. Whichever of these views is taken, we have no doubt that this new openness is among the things that have influenced the availability of pornography, rather than the reverse. Cultural artefacts themselves play a role in not merely reflecting but in influencing social development, but given the multitude of factors, and from everything we know of social attitudes and have learnt in the course of our enquiries, our belief can only be that the role of pornography in influencing the state of society is a minor one. To think anything else, and in particular to regard pornography as having a crucial or even a significant effect on essential social values, is to get the problem of pornography out of proportion with the many other problems that face our society today.

References
1 At least in pictorial forms. Pornographic prose fiction seems, at any rate in Europe, to have first appeared in the middle of the 17th Century. The first original English prose pornography (as opposed to translations), and also the first to take the form of a novel rather than a dialogue, was John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure ("Fanny Hill"), 1748. See David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1666-1745 (The Book Collector, 1964).

© Crown Copyright 1979. This extract republished in the public interest.