Ostensibly, the law prohibits rape and sexual assault, including intrafamilial sexual abuse. Reality shows us that too often the legal process sustains the rights of child rapists via the construction of children as liars and fantasisers, vengeful colluders or seducers (Taylor 2001a and 2004a). Pornography too ‘legalises’ rape because it shows men that women and children are bodies that are there for the taking. Pornography is the training ground of future and current rapists. It is the training ground for society to understand that women and girl children are groups of sub-human citizens and how to respond accordingly. It is the training ground for social stereotypes that make the work I and others do all the more difficult. For all the excellent research into the extent, nature and trauma of sexual violence, pornography is out there depicting the opposite. Its harm to women and children generally is immeasurable.
Pornography is not just about dirty pictures and books sold in sex shops and restricted bookshelves in newsagents. Pornography – and in particular intrafamiliar pornography – is the ideology that regards women and girl children as repositories for men’s sexual needs; it is the mindset that excuses and sanctions sexual offending and refuses to acknowledge the harm of sexual violence.
Bibliography
CBS News
(19 November, 2009) ‘Mohler Family Sex Crimes Case: Wife Found Incest Porno, Say Cops’, <
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Finkelhor, David (1984)
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, Aldershot, Hampshire, pp. 167–196.
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. New York University Press, New York.
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. Sage Publications, London.
Taylor, S. Caroline (1997) ‘Betrayal of the Innocents.’
Australian Journal of Women Against Violence
. Issue 3, November, pp. 31–37.
Taylor, S. Caroline (2001a)
The Legal Construction of Victim/Survivors in Parent-Child Intrafamilial Sexual Abuse Trials in the Victorian Country Court of Australia in 1995
. PhD, University of Ballarat.
Taylor, S. Caroline (2001b) ‘A Name By Any Other Word Does Not Necessarily Make It Merely Another Rose’ in Alice Mills and Jeremy Smith (Eds)
Utter Silence: Voicing the Unspeakable
. Peter Lang, New York, pp. 211–228.
Taylor, S. Caroline (11 October, 2002) ‘Correct Language Necessary for Victims of Family Violence’
The Courier
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Court Licensed Abuse
. Peter Lang, New York.
Taylor, S. Caroline (2004b)
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. Coulomb Communications, Port Melbourne.
___________________________
1
I wish to acknowledge and thank Dr Abigail Bray for assisting me with editing, research assistance and researching online material from pornography sites. Personally I found the experience of writing this chapter deeply distressing and traumatic because of the material content I needed to access. I am very grateful to Abigail for assisting me with this chapter and providing collegial support to complete this task.
2
A discussion of brothers abusing younger siblings falls outside the scope of this chapter.
3
<
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8143268/father-in-court-for-sex-offences
>
4
This information is gleaned from personal interviews as part of previous and current research undertaken by the author.
5
See for example: ‘MILF Episodes’ of mother–son incest at <
http://www.luchstories.com/stories/incest/themilf-episode-3.aspx
>; <
http://incestreviews.com/?advic=5668
>; <
http//www.hardsextube.com/video/8846/mature-sex-incest
>.
Caroline Norma
Teaching Tools and Recipe Books: Pornography and the Sexual Assault of Children
At a 1984 US Senate Subcommittee hearing on juvenile justice, Katherine Brady testified that her father used pornography to sexually abuse her as a child in 3 different ways. Firstly, “he would use it as a teaching tool – as a way of instructing me about sex and what he wanted me to do with him.” Secondly, he “used the pictures to justify his abuse and to convince me that what we were doing was normal.” Thirdly, “he used the pornography to break down my resistance … [because] [t]he pornography made the statement that females are nothing more than objects for men’s sexual gratification” (in Russell, 1993, pp. 43–44). One year earlier, in 1983, psychologist Sue Schafer testified at the Minneapolis City Council pornography ordinance hearings about a fourth way in which men use pornography to aid their sexual assault of children. She saw them using it as a source of inspiration for their crimes. Schafer said she had counselled a number of children who had been abused in situations where “the perpetrator has read the manuals and manuscripts at night and used these as recipe books by day” (Schafer, 1988, p. 126).
Twenty-five years later, these 4 different ways in which Brady and Schafer describe men using pornography in their abuse of children are not generally discussed in mainstream academic studies of ‘grooming’, which is the umbrella term that now popularly describes the tricks and techniques of child sexual abuse. When comment on grooming does occasionally broach the topic of pornography, concern coalesces around 3 things. Academics are mainly concerned about offenders’ use of pornography to pique sexual feelings or curiosity in children, their use of pornography to blackmail children into keeping quiet about abuse, and their use of pornography to create a sexualised environment conducive to abuse. Legal theorist Anne-Marie McAlinden’s following comments from 2006 are typical of how narrowly pornography is discussed in contemporary studies on grooming:
The offender will often use ‘forbidden fruit’ type activities such as cursing, telling ‘dirty jokes’ or showing the child pornography to introduce sexual themes into their conversations. This latter stage not only begins to normalize sexual behaviour but may also be used to entrap the child further. The use of pornography in particular may encourage feelings of shame and guilt which the offender may exploit by persuading the child that they were willing accomplices in their activities (McAlinden, 2006, p. 347).
The ways in which McAlinden observes men using pornography in their sexual abuse of children are certainly important and worrying. There have also been a number of good outcomes of this kind of research. In Australia, and around the world, in the last 10 years governments have amended their criminal codes to include ‘anti-grooming’ provisions (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2008), even if these provisions mostly target online offenders. The 1995 Australian
Criminal Code Act
, for example, now includes provisions against “[u]sing a postal or similar service to ‘groom’ persons under 16” and “[u]sing a carriage service to ‘groom’ persons under 16 years of age”, as well as a clause against “ ‘[g]rooming’ a child to engage in sexual activity outside Australia.”
Despite increased levels of public awareness of the tricks and techniques of child sexual abuse, pornography continues to be marginalised in the academic conversation on grooming. This is in spite of accounts as far back as the 1980s from women like Brady and Schafer that establish pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ and a ‘recipe book’ that facilitates child sexual abuse, as well as inspires the abuses men inflict. These accounts show that one of the harms of pornography can be seen in the way men use it, and this harm derives from its instrumental use as a tool of child sexual assault.
The understatement of the problem of pornography in contemporary discussions of grooming continues in spite of plentiful evidence of men using pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ to sexually abuse children. The records of criminal cases are an easily accessible source of evidence, and contain precise accounts of pornography being used as an instrument of child sexual assault. In a 2010 New Zealand case, for example, a father was sentenced to a term of imprisonment after sexually abusing his daughter for 13 years, including when she was in hospital for injuries sustained after a serious accident (
R v H
HC AK CRI 2009-092-02). In sentencing, the judge noted that ‘Mr H’ had “used pornographic films extensively” in his offending. The judge commented that “you cynically took advantage of her when you first detected the possibility of growing sexual awareness on her part at a time when she was still very young.” Mr H’s daughter had asked him about reproduction when she was 5 years old
and, in response to this, he had “showed her a pornographic movie as a method of instruction.” Mr H himself acknowledged that “things simply developed from there.” He introduced pornography very literally to his daughter as a ‘teaching tool’ when she was 5 years old in order to initiate the abuse he inflicted on her for the next 13 years.
Mr H also used pornography to expand the range of his sexual abuse to the young friends his daughter brought home to stay overnight. The judge noted that, in the case of one friend who intermittently slept over at the house for a number of years, “whenever she went to your house, you showed pornographic movies and would ask [your daughter] and [her friend] to act out what was being screened.” The judge further commented that this “led to explicit touching and to masturbation on your part.” Using pornography, Mr H was able to not only expand the range of his own assaults, but also teach his daughter to offend against her young friend for his gratification.
It is worth noting the severe effects of Mr H’s crimes on his victims, in which pornography was recognised by the court as playing a large part. In a victim impact statement, Mr H’s daughter said she had been “unable to sleep during the night” during her childhood, and would “remain awake watching the bedroom door which she kept locked.” She would catch up on sleep during the day. In her teenage years she had “turned to cannabis and alcohol, but found that things just became worse”, and this led her to attempt suicide in the year before the court case.
The Melbourne case of
R v FVK
(2002) further shows a man using pornography to commission his sexual abuse of a girl. A father was charged with twelve counts of sexual and physical assault of his daughter. As a 15-year-old, the girl testified in court that, when she was 10, her father showed her
… pictures of naked women and guys having sex and then he showed me this lady sucking this other guy’s dick. And I went to have a bath and he came in as well and started undressing and he got in, and he said, “Why don’t you suck my dick like you saw in the picture?”
The girl recalled that, “I had to put his dick in my mouth[,] … but I didn’t suck it … [h]e kept on urging me to suck it but I didn’t.” The incomplete success of pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ in this instance was only due to the girl’s exceptional bravery. At the same time her father was using pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ against her, he was also enforcing its ‘lessons’ through brutal violence. In one instance he “made her bend over a chair and whipped her,” and in court the girl testified that “sometimes I fall to the ground and he keeps on kicking me … he’s kicked me in the ribs and legs and he has given me a black eye before …”
Not surprisingly, this physical violence consolidating the father’s pornographic ‘teachings’ generally secured the girl’s acquiescence to sexual abuse. In relation to a later instance, she recalled that,
[w]hile he was sucking my private part, he was asking me, “Does it feel good?” and that I didn’t respond ’cos it didn’t feel good and I didn’t want to say that ’cos then he might have hit me or something.
In this girl’s case, obedience secured through physical violence gradually came to replace the use of pornography as a ‘teaching tool’, but pornography nonetheless featured prominently in her initial victimisation.
Even with this kind of direct and recent evidence of men relying on pornography to orchestrate child sexual assault, the Australian government recognises this particular harm of pornography in only the most limited of terms. In 2008, it legislated against the carriage of pornography into a number of “vulnerable [Aboriginal] communities” (Emergency Response Consolidation Bill, 2008) on the basis of the publication of the
‘Little Children are Sacred’ Report
(Northern Territory Government, 2007), which contained discussion of pornography being used in the sexual abuse of children in Aboriginal communities. The report prompted the government to legislate against pornography as an instrument of child sexual abuse, but only in very narrow and racially-defined terms. The government chose to ignore evidence, like that circulating in Australia’s criminal courts, of men from a range of backgrounds using pornography in a similar way. It also chose to overlook the sex industry businesses that had been profiting from the trafficking of pornography into Aboriginal communities for many years, as Melinda Tankard Reist points out:
The government needs not only to ban pornography in the Northern Territory but to stop it being shipped out of Canberra. If the ACT Government will not take responsibility for its porn trade, it is time for the Federal Government to show even greater resolve and override the territory’s laws (Tankard Reist, 2007).
In limiting its pornography suppression order to only a small number of remote Aboriginal communities, the government also ignored concerns raised by Aboriginal women leaders outside of the Northern Territory that pornography was escalating rates of child sexual abuse in their communities (see Queensland Government, 1999, p. 100). One of these leaders, Gracelyn Smallwood, spoke out 18 years before the enactment of the legislation, in 1990, about her experience as a nurse in a remote Queensland community in Cape York. She told a newspaper reporter at the time that:
… videos are being sold by the same unscrupulous individuals who make a fortune out of peddling sly grog on communities. The people who watch them think, if it’s in the movie, it must be all right to go out and do it … [As a result,] [l]ittle kids are brought into hospital with heavy sweating and other symptoms … [a]t first it was baffling until syphilis and gonorrhoea were diagnosed (in Roberts, 1990).
Feminist insights like this from the 1990s, and those from earlier in the 1980s, articulating the fact that men rely on pornography as a ‘teaching tool’ and ‘recipe book’ to sexually assault children do not feature within the conceptual frame of ‘grooming’ that currently conveys mainstream public concern about male sexual behaviour. However, as a publicly palatable way of naming and problematising this behaviour, the discourse of grooming currently presents feminists with an opportunity to have one of pornography’s harms more widely recognised. Through highlighting the central role of pornography in all of the tricks and techniques men use to groom their victims, whether online or in real life, feminists can capitalise on the grooming discourse to show pornography to be a product of compounding sexual violence for women and girls who are harmed first in its production, and then its application.
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