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From: mat@mtx5a.UUCP (m.terribile)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.legal,soc.singles
Subject: Re: Evidence and Pornography Legislation
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Date: Fri, 19-Sep-86 02:26:53 EDT
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Posted: Fri Sep 19 02:26:53 1986
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I wouuld like to thank Adam Reed for the article to which I am following
up; it may have opened the door some Useful Discussion, and turned the
flames down a bit.

>> If you believe that the evidence is not yet adequate to base policy on, and
>> you fail to search for more evidence when the evidence that is there makes
>> a strong suggestion, then you are showing your bias.
>
>I think you are barking up the wrong tree. One of my areas of expertise
>is the methodology of psychological research; and so I do participate in
>the search, as an inventor of new methods, a peer review referee for
>scientific periodicals and funding agencies, and as a consulting editor
>of *Behavior Research Methods*.

...Ahh.  Thank you.  It's taken a long time to coax you into admitting that
you have Qualifications.  More on this is a little bit.

>...  On the basis of what I have seen so far, research into the allegedly
>harmful effects of erotica is much like "parapsychology": all the "positive
>evidence" comes from inadequately controlled or fallaciously analyzed
>experiments; and once adequate controls are performed and valid analyses are
>done all the alleged evidence vanishes into thin air.

I won't dispute your experience, since I am evidently not qualified to do
so.  What's more, you might be right, but I think the we have to look at
certain limits that the current studies have, and indeed that all behavioural
research may have.  Again, let's hold off on this.

>> .... at the very least, the studies show a reason for concern and
>> for more extensive study.  They certainly do not indicate that we should
>> abandon two centuries of legislative and judicial tradition ....
>
>Now we get into questions about the ethical foundations of the law.
>Legal punishment means depriving a person, at least temporarily, of the
>rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  One of the ethical
>foundations of western society is the presumption that no one ought to
>be deprived of these rights without a demonstration, beyond a reasonable
>doubt, of having caused harm to another person.

Not quite true.  If there is reason to believe that a harm is likely to
result, restrictions related to the magnitude of the harm may be imposed.
Drunken driving is a classic example.  Also, the reasonable doubt requirement
does not hold in the construction of statutes, nor does it hold in limiting
the rights guaranteed by the Amendments to our Constitution.  There criteria
such as ``immediate and overwhelming harm'', ``compelling interest'', etc.,
come into play.

>Even clear evidence of having transgressed a legal prohibition would fail to
>meet this criterion, if legal prohibitions are instituted without requiring
>proof - beyond a reasonable doubt - that the activity being prohibited is in
>fact harmful.

Here we start to get into a curious split between liberal, conservative,
libretarian, and other viewpoints.  (Please excuse my use of simplistic words
like these ...)  Where restrictions have been in place for a long time, it does
not seem wise to me (nor apparently to the Supreme Court in some cases) to
discard them without a more thorough examination than the simple experiment of
letting everyone do without them for a fraction of a lifetime.  Moreover, if
we look at evidence outside of the social sciences, we do see a connection
(whether causal or otherwise) between a certain class of people who are
convicted in courts of law of causing direct and severe harm to others and
certain types of materials which fall into the range that we might call
``pornographic''.  We have testimony of law enforcement officials to this
effect; in other cases where the offense may not have been punished by law, or
may not be punishable by law (in spite of being a harm, or reasonably
considered a harm) we have testimony, often provided at great cost in
personal humiliation, that such things have occurred.

It is my contention that as soon as we see large and unexpected effects in
things that we had taken for granted as a basic part of our society or
environment, we ought to stop making these changes, and even back off a
little, until we either know what is happening, can be sure that it's not
related to the changes, can be sure that it will not alter the effects of our
changes, or can convince ourselves that it's not really harmful.

If you will allow me a little emotional rhetoric, we could say that had
the operators of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant number 4 followed this
course instead of continuing to ``push the envelope'' we probably would
never have heard of Chernobyl.

In the years since the 1970 Commission, there has been a great increase in
the range of sexually explicit material available.  Pedophilic materials
were not considered by that Commission, since they were so exceedingly rare.
Since that time, they have become far more widespread.  In addition, materials
mixing pain, violence, and coercion with apparent sexual satisfaction of the
``object'' individual have become more widespread, and such materials are most
often the materials that law enforcement officials and self-identified victims
have indicated are used by the offenders.  Indeed, if we believe the testimony,
they are often the means by which the offender either intimidates the victim
or by which he becomes aroused prior to committing his offense.  It may be
(and it may not be ...) that this material aids him in establishing the
connection between the coercive, violent, or humiliating effects he will have
and the sexual pleasure he will experience thereby.

What I will argue is that whether or not we believe that ``normal'' individuals
are immune from these effect, until we have a much better understanding of what
is happening, it is our duty to back off on the well-meaning changes.

>Human sacrifice, judicial torture, slavery, and other traditions many
>times more ancient than the prohibition against pornography, were
>abandoned when found to conflict with the ethical foundations of our
>society. As long as there is no evidence which would prove beyond a
>reasonable doubt that pornography is harmful, a legal prohibition
>against pornography remains in conflict with those foundations.

We found that human sacrifice, slavery, et al., were actions which were
in fundamental conflicts with rights that we considered well-established
in other cases.  The restrictions (some of which are *not* prohibition, but
zoning laws (the Supreme Court has found that they can be used against
material not legally obscene so long as they don't have the effect of
prohibiting affected establishements *everywhere*), laws against display
for minors, etc) are similar to restrictions used against other things,
some of which are suspected harms.  What is more, the Court has held that
people do have a right to be protected from unwanted exposure to material
that is ``patently offensive.''  Some legal sanctions against some pornography
are required to accomplish this protection, and the Court has so held.
In other words, in the absence of further experience, I don't think that we
can view the balance of rights in the case of sanctions against certain
sexually explicit photographs or films the same way we view the balance
of rights in the case of human sacrifice or slavery.

>It is this conflict which lies at the base of attempts to manufacture the
>requisite "evidence" through disregard for fundamental requirements of
>methodological integrity.

To the extent that people who wish to demonstrate harm are doing this, I will
agree that they are going about things the wrong way.  Here I am going to
ask you to inform me if one of my perceptions is correct:

	The great strength, and great weakness, of the behavioural approach
	to human psychology is the basic assumption that the human being is
	viewed as a black box with certain inputs and certain outputs and
	certain measurable effects.  The strengths are obvious.

	The weaknesses lie in the fact that a very great part of psychological
	and psychiatric understanding has come from what amounts to
	introspection, and the individual study of people engaged in
	introspection, or in conversation, etc., about intimate feelings,
	reactions, and perceptions that effectively allow one (trained)
	individual to conduct inquiries that would ordinarily be introspective
	within the experience of another individual.

	This entire area of study is almost completely closed to statistical
	research of the sort that you are familiar with.

What you have called the Psychiatric Fallacy (the tendency to generalize from
people who are in some sense mentally ill to all people) is invariably an
error in behavioral research that depends upon statistical measures.  It
is not always an error in the study of the human mind from the inside out.
There one can consider the effect of a mechanism that is ``gone wrong''
without discounting the possibility or probability that that mechanism is
at work in normal individuals, but in normal ways.

To look for the impact of pornographic materials from the ``black box''
view requires that you succeed in finding the effects by looking in likely
places.  It allows relatively little consideration of what internal
effects may occur without producing immediate results that can be detected
by relatively simple tests.  It does allow relatively simple interactions
such as inhibition, excitation, habituation, etc., to be postulated and
measured.

Please feel free to take issue with this; I will, of course, feel free to
take issue with your response!

I have one more question, oriented toward values, purposes, and goals:

	Given the claims of law enforcement officials and self-identified
	victims (many of whom are quite credible), what is the proper role,
	if any, of this field in which you are expert?  What can or should
	behavioral science do to try to determine what the cause of these
	criminal acts is, and what link, if any, pornographic (or other
	fantasy-inspiring) materials may have with these acts?
-- 

	from Mole End			Mark Terribile
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