http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/study-finds-no-link-between-child-porn-and-sex-abuse/story-fn3dxity-1225749645592



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/study-finds-no-link-between-child-porn-and-sex-abuse/story-fn3dxity-1225749645592 Page 14-17, and 18 are of interest

I was not convicted of possessing/viewing, making, or distributing child pornography (hereby referred to as CP). So I do not have a dog in this fight. I personally find CP disturbing and I do not understand the drive of people to look at pre-pubescent children. I am also not a psychologist, so I do not understand this drive but I have been told by some friends here it is then re-living their own abuse. I honestly do not understand it. I think some people accidentally click on it, but I think most people purposely continue to view it. You don't just accidentally download thousands of pictures and videos. For the people who accidentally downloaded CP like Nak's son, I feel extremely bad for. Teens that get in trouble for viewing pictures of other teens, I feel bad for. However, CP, especially of the young, young children just creeps me out.

That all being said and my personal biases out of the way, I find this notion of CP causes or leads to child sexual abuse (hereby referred to generally as contact crimes) to be silly. First of all, this idea that CP causes a person to go out and touch a child has not been proven. In fact it is impossible to prove. What I mean by this is how do you create a scientific study to determine how many people who watch CP then go on to commit child sexual abuse? In order for a scientific study to mean anything you would need several things.

1. You would have to have a random sample of people who download CP. Which is all but impossible given the internet right now. Random samples are important if we are going to have any hope of extrapolating the data we receive to the rest of the country. This would be unethical because the participants in the study would not know they are being studied and would not sign off on it.
2. We would need an adequate sample size. Again, very hard to do because of the secrecy and the covertness of CP and CP viewers.
3. We would need some way to determine if the people who were a part of the study actually went on to commit contact crimes. You can do this several ways, none of them is ethical. You could count how many of the people being studied are actually arrested for a contact crime, a reverse recidivism statistic if you will. You count by year how many of the participants got arrested for a contact crime. This is not only unethical but does not measure fully the amount of contact crime because it is usually done in secret. So what? You put surveillance on everyone who is a participant in the study until they commit a contact crime?

Are you starting to see how it would be absolutely impossible to prove that CP leads to contact crimes?

This is a re-packaged idea known as the hyperdermic needle theory, which first originated in the 1940’s and 50’s. To make it as simple as possible, this theory is basically saying monkey see, monkey do. This was the argument from the far right that violent movies lead to more violent crime. We obviously know that is patently false now.

So what evidence is there to say that CP leads to contact crimes? There is not any because as I already previously stated, it is impossible to prove. What can be proven is that a lot of people in prison for contact crimes view/viewed CP. However just because someone in prison for a contact crime viewed CP does not mean that the CP caused the contact crime. This is just intellectual laziness. Because again how do you control for other factors? How do we know it was the CP and the CP alone that caused the contact crime? Again impossible to prove.

The study is called the Butner study, it was published in 2009 (there was a previous study in 2000 I believe). The study was done with 155 men in prison who were convicted of CP. After they received treatment, 85% of them confessed to contact crimes against children.

This link can do a better job of discussing why I think this study is hogwash.

https://rsoresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/butner_study_debunking_kit.pdf

In short, “The Court finds these results highly questionable given the extraordinarily highpercentages, as well as the fact that the researchers saw a 2,369% increase in the number of contact sexual offenses acknowledged by the treatment participants during the course of the Study. These astronomical figures lead the Court to question whether this unvetted prison Study, conducted by the former chief of the federal sexual offender treatment program and distributed by the Department of Justice to prosecutors, is, in actuality, a product of the tremendous political pressure applied to researchers is this research field.”

Another link that shows the debate of this study:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/us/19sex.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Now, there is a governmental agency that actually believes very differently about CP leading to contact crimes, the US Sentencing Commission. This is a link to their huge over 400 page document. Here is their conclusion though:

http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/news/congressional-testimony-and-reports/sex-offense-topics/201212-federal-child-pornography-offenses/Full_Report_to_Congress.pdf

F. CONCLUSION
The Commission’s recidivism study of 610 offenders sentenced under the non-production child pornography guidelines in fiscal years 1999 and 2000 and other relevant recidivism studies allow for the following conclusions:
-The known general recidivism rate for federal non-production offenders studied by the Commission was 30.0 percent during an average follow-up period of eight and one-half years after the offenders’ reentry into the community.
-Those offenders’ known sexual recidivism rate, a subset of the general recidivism rate, during that same follow-up period was 7.4 percent. The known “contact” sexual recidivism rate, a subset of the overall sexual recidivism rate, was 3.6 percent.
-Because there are sufficient similarities in offense and offender characteristics between the offenders sentenced in fiscal years 1999 and 2000 and current federal non-production offenders, the findings of the Commission’s recidivism study appear to have continuing relevance to current offenders.
-The known general and sexual recidivism rates found in the Commission’s study of federal non-production offenders are comparable to the known general and sexual recidivism rates reported in two recent child pornography recidivism studies by BOP and Canadian researchers.
-The known general recidivism rate and known sexual “contact” offense
recidivism rate found in the Commission’s study are lower than such rates for contact sex offenders tracked by BJS in a large-scale study of such sex offenders released from state prisons in 1994.
-The known general recidivism rate found in the Commission’s study is similar to the known general recidivism rate for a comparable segment of the total federal offender population (i.e., United States citizen white male federal offenders) studied by the Commission in 2004, as well as the supervised release revocation rate for federal offenders generally (as discussed in the Commission’s 2010 report
on supervised release).

I don't have any articles but a wee bit of experience. My husband was arrested for downloading CP and is now serving a prison sentence. We had loads of help from the charity Stop It Now in the UK and he had several in depth psychological assessments. They got to the route of his "addiction" but will need extensive therapy. Although he is a "high risk" for CP reoffending until he proves himself, he is "no risk" for contact offending. That was the views of several psychologists, offenders management, social work and the specialists at Stop It Now. I was told not all those who view CP will make contact offences just as those who have made contact offences don't all view CP.

Same with my son Sally

Samkaplan1 posted this link in the other discussion post on this:

http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to2014/2010-porn-in-czech-republic.html

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The study shows a correlation between CP reducing CSA but that still does not mean causation. For example all crime has gone down in the past 30 years in the U.S. Any politician could wisely point out any crime bill in the past 30 years that they had a hand in crafting was the reason crime went down. They may be right, they may be completely wrong, but how can you separate it all out? You cannot.

Here is an example that most on here would definitely disagree with that by this correlation logic it would support: the registry has reduced sex crimes. Unlike what people believe, according the NCVS and the UCR sexual crimes against children has gone down from 1994 until now. As we know in 1994 the Jacob Wetterling Act passed formerly starting the public registery. Now one could say that since sex crimes went down it is a direct cause of the registry, and an uneducated person would say that makes sense. However all crime went down in the past 21 years. How can we say with any certainty that it was just the registry that dropped the rate of sex crimes specifically and the overall drop in crime rate isn't more responsible?

Interestingly enough researchers that have studied the registry do not believe that it is responsible for the drop in rate of sex crimes but I was just bringing this up of an example of falsely showing a correlation and trying to claim causation. Correlation does not equal causation, that's a fundamental principle of statistics. And this study still is only showing a correlation but if extremely interesting and counter intuitive to what the general public believes.

Very interesting, thank you for posting it.