Grooming, Child Abuse, & Child Sexual Exploitation
Adding fuel to the fire? Does exposure to non-consenting adult or to child pornography increase risk of sexual aggression?
Full Article Name: “Adding fuel to the fire”? Does exposure to non-consenting adult or to child pornography increase risk of sexual aggression?
Open Access: No
Abstract
This article is the first to integrate the vast research literatures on non-consenting adult and on child pornography (also a form of non-consenting pornography) by using the framework of the Confluence Model of sexual aggression. In contrast to the contradictory conclusions reached by various reviewers and commentators who have typically emphasized a particular methodology or parts of the literature, this review finds a great deal of consistency and convergence among the differing methodologies and literatures that have examined the impact of pornography on individuals. It is concluded that pornography use may add to the risk of sexual aggression only for those men already predisposed to aggress sexually due to more primary causes than pornography use.
Relevance
“The research indicates that those individuals who are relatively high in risk characteristics, including antisociality and hostility toward women, are more likely to choose to be exposed to non-consenting pornography and to be sexually aroused by it…when they are exposed, they are likely to be changed by such exposure—for example, in their attitudes about the acceptance of violence against women.”
Exposure to pornography “may prime behaviors…This may be particularly so among adolescent populations, whose attitudes and behaviors are more ambiguously defined than those of adults and among whom organizing effects of pornography exposure may be more significant in reinforcing developing constellations of personality characteristics.”
“Associations between pornography consumption and aggressiveness toward women could be explained by a circular relationship between high coercive tendencies and interest in certain content in pornography, whereby aggressive men are drawn to the images in pornography that reinforce and thereby increase the likelihood of their controlling, impersonal, and hostile orientation to sexuality. The way relatively aggressive men interpret and react to the same pornography may differ from that of nonaggressive men.”
For men at high risk of abusing children, “exposure to either adult or to child non-consenting pornography can add to the risk of committing sexual aggression (i.e., add “fuel to the fire”) and in some cases may actually function as a “tipping point” that leads a person at risk who might not act aggressively to actually commit a sexually aggressive offense. Men not predisposed to aggress sexually have not shown increased risk for sexual aggression as a result of exposure to pornography.”
Citation
Malamuth, N. M. (2018). “Adding fuel to the fire”? Does exposure to non-consenting adult or to child pornography increase risk of sexual aggression? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 41, 74-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2018.02.013