Sandra Paterson: Encounter with porn

Seeing this is my first column for the year, I was planning on writing something nice and light about my camping adventures on the East Cape.

But then, a few days ago, I found a package in my letterbox containing an unlabelled video cassette.

There was no sender's address and no letter inside, so I figured it was probably from a friend who had taped a programme I might enjoy and then forgot to include a quick note.

I don't have a video player, so went next door to my neighbour's house and popped it into the machine with one hand while holding her newborn baby with the other.

Up on the screen came some very graphic hardcore porn. I switched it off as fast as possible, but even after those few seconds it has been difficult to get such a disturbing image out of my head. I was sorry the next-door neighbour had to see it, too.

Later that day, I took the tape down to the police station, where it will be held on file in case my anonymous correspondent decides to make a habit of it, and then headed home to start writing a column about camping.

However, on the way I picked up the latest Listener magazine and was astonished to read an editorial-type piece that implied that pornography was really just a bit of harmless fun.

Now, I would much rather write about camping and how good it is for kids to wear old clothes and make dams in streams and toast marshmallows. Really, I would.

But since the subject of pornography had just been shoved under my nose - or, rather, in my letterbox - I decided to change tack.

Under fire from the Listener was Judith Reisman, an international expert on the effects of pornography, who addressed the United States Senate on the topic late last year.

Reisman told the senators that viewing sexually explicit material produces a chemical reaction in the brain similar to the high from a street drug. This creates new memory pathways and changes the way the brain works.

It is particularly harmful if children view pornography, which often happens when a paedophile is grooming a victim because their developing brains are more vulnerable.

She also said that the mainstreaming of pornography since the 1950s coincided with a huge increase in copycat sex crimes.

This was the sarcastic response from the Listener writer: "Porn causes violence? Oh yes. And sex crimes ... as well as being the root cause of paedophilia. I had no idea." Which is precisely what the medical and psychology fraternity is saying: she has no idea.

Are Reisman's theories spread here? It's only a matter of time; after all, Destiny Church is pushing the American-based virginity pledges.

I looked up the transcript of Reisman's address on the US Senate's website. She did not say pornography was the root cause of paedophilia, but she did mention an American study which found that 100 per cent of rapists and paedophiles possessed adult porn.

Nor did she say pornography causes violence or sex crimes, but that it was a contributing factor.

Detective Sergeant Dave Henwood, who heads a sex crimes profiling unit based in Otahuhu, agrees with her last point.

"I don't believe that porn causes sex offenders as such," he said. "But it gives them options, it gives them ideas of how to carry out some of their fantasies.

"With certain types of sexual predators, particularly those with a voyeuristic side to them, we quite often find in their rooms a whole lot of pornography."

He then told me about a case he once worked on in which two stationery shop retailers were tied up back-to-back and sexually violated. The offender's fingerprints were found on a soft porn magazine in the shop on a page which just happened to depict two women tied up and assaulted in exactly the same way.

A quick look on the internet shows that there is intense debate over whether pornography is harmful, with compelling studies and statistics on both sides.

On one site you read a study where 87 per cent of child molesters admitted imitating what they had seen in porn magazines; on the next, you read there was a 30 per cent decrease in sex crimes in three European countries after pornography was made widely available.

Research aside, then, my own views are influenced by personal stories, like the guy I knew who had been addicted to porn and who talked about how horrendously powerful it was; the otherwise-lovely boyfriend who sometimes read Playboy and how that made me feel; and, in particular, what happened to a friend of mine.

She and her husband and their three children were a happy, close-knit family until they got a computer and her husband discovered internet porn.

Not that she knew for a long time why he spent so much time on the computer so late at night. She found out about the pornography habit only after he was convicted last year for inappropriately touching several children in the community.

He is now in jail, the rest of the family devastated.

Judith Reisman is not a medical doctor but much of what she says, in her role as consultant to governments around the world, makes sense: Pornography is both highly addictive and destructive.

Whether it contributes to crime, offends a spouse or takes away a child's innocence, it is far from harmless fun.

* Sandra Paterson, of Mt Maunganui, is a freelance journalist.