In this case, however, it is blatantly not true. We have not “been over this” before. I have not seen you post a single response to the content of Harvard study entitled Pessimism about Pedophilia, that I posted on Friday. I suspect that you haven’t read it.
Bold mine. Really Quesi? This was my reply, from page 3 of this thread:
Quesi linked a study from Harvard that she seemed to believe gave evidence that the discrimination against pedophiles was warranted, however as it's been pointed out by others, any such study is highly flawed as their data represents a biased fraction of the pedophile population. If you read the study, the first half of it is a note about the limitations of their research. Their data comes from interviewing convicted pedophiles in prison.
That would be like interviewing convicted car thieves and then concluding that anyone who likes cars is likely to steal one. It's a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and it's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of pedophiles out there do not act on their compulsions and live normal lives. Frankly it's fear mongering and an institution like Harvard should be ashamed of publishing it.
So is it really
blatantly not true that I haven't posted a response to it? Or is it this simply
another example of you not reading carefully? If you can't devote enough attention to the conversation to read my replies, why should I waste my time respond to your questions?
Perhaps you are confusing the Pessimism about Pedophilia article with a different article I posted a few months back, published in the Harvard Medical Journal, on a topic pertaining to relationship between pornography and child abuse.
Clearly I'm not.
You dismissed the study by linking an unpublished article that some economics professor had written on the topic, and declared victory.
You keep making this claim that I've ignored the studies you've linked, and suggesting I haven't read them. You are a
fucking liar. Anyone who upvotes you is
a fucking idiot for doing so. I've read and responded to every one of them. You on the other hand, have clearly ignored the evidence I've presented. I'm not surprised by Quesi who has repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of intellectual honesty, but those of you blindly upvoting her without verifying her claims are incredibly dissapointing.
Perhaps a little memory refresher is in order for those of you who think Quesi's claims against me are valid.
Quesi claims that in response to her link to a Harvard study, I linked to "
an unpublished article that some economics professor had written on the topic." This is a lie. The truth is that I linked to three studies by an economics professor, a law professor, and a sexologist who is also the founding editor of
Archives of Sexual Behavior. I
linked them in a reply to
Rickymooston's question before Quesi
posted her link to the Harvard study in response, not the other way around as she claims.
The one she is referring to now which she is dismissing as "
an unpublished article that some economics professor had written" is
Pornography, Rape, and the Internet by Clemson University Economics Professor Todd Kendall and written with assistance from the Stanford Law School. Here is the summary:
Using state-level panel data from 1998-2003, I find that the arrival of the internet was associated with a reduction in rape incidence. While the internet is obviously used for many purposes other than pornography, it is notable that growth in internet usage had no apparent effect on other crimes. Moreover, when I disaggregate the rape data by offender age, I find that the effect of the internet on rape is concentrated among those for whom the internet-induced fall in the non-pecuniary price of pornography was the largest – men ages 15-19, who typically live with their parents.
It is well-written and thouroughly sourced. Apparently she believes that economics professors can't have valid opinions on crime statistics. Actually, analysing numbers and trends and forming hypothesis and predictions about them is something economists are quite good at.
She made
one comment about this paper, stating that it is "
about internet usage and rape statistics, and has nothing to do with child pornography or pedophilia."This is a lie by over-simplification. The paper is not simply about "
internet usage and rape statistics" but specifically makes the argument that the reduction in sexual crimes is not a coincidence and is not simply the result of increased internet access, but specifically the increased availability of pornography. She would know that
if she actually read it.
I stated that increased access to porn lowers the rate of sexual crime, which I linked the paper to support. My argument was that the same would hold true with regards to child pornography and child sexual abuse because the function of all types of porn is the same: to provide a sexual release. This is true of straight porn, gay porn, lesbian porn, granny porn, tranny porn, midget porn, even torture, rape, and beastiality porn. She provides no evidence that refutes that argument.
In that same post, she makes this statement:
No one knows how many children are sexually abused, because most sexual abuse is not reported. I could get on the phone right now and call up a dozen women I know personally who were sexually abused as children, by uncles at family barbeques, by step brothers throughout their tween years, by husbands in arranged (forced) marriages that would not be legally recognized in most parts of the world, by employers, by security guards at refugee camps where they sought protection, by coyotes who were paid by their parents to get them safely across a border, by traffickers who promised them a better life, and by soldiers who burned their villages. There is no data on these women. They are not included in anyone’s study of the sexual abuse of children.
Really? She personally knows
a dozen women who were sexually abused as children? That dubious claim aside, why are they not included in anyone's study of the sexual abuse of children? Not a single one of them reported it to the authorities? That's a shame because we do have people who are paid to deal with situations like that.
Besides, even if they didn't report it, they are included in the studies, under
estimated number of unreported cases. Again, she would know that if she actually bothered to read any of the studies.
There are no reliable numbers that capture the reality of child sexual abuse this year or last year or 20 years ago or a hundred years ago because that data has not been collected. So let’s not pretend that there are studies that say that child pornography (internet or otherwise) has decreased the incidence of child abuse. There is no reputable study that could make that claim.
Now, see what she did there? She's
poisoned the well. She can claim I have no data to back up my argument because now she can refer back to this any time I cite a study to make my point.
There are two problems with this. First, it's
confirmation bias. While I certainly agree that none of the studies I've cited can be 100% accurate in their data collection, she is essentially saying that the number of child rape victims she personally "knows" outweighs the opinions of qualified experts who have done years of study and research.
Second, I can make the same argument about any study she cites, and render her data invalid as well.
I've repeatedly invited anyone to read the studies I linked and share your critique of their conclusion or method. The fact is if you read all of the studies that both of us have linked you will find that the ones Quesi posted get most of their data from interviewing inmates, and that the authors themselves have written in long warnings about how that affects the accuracy of their results.
The other two studies that I linked
that she isn't mentioning (in a classic cherry picking) are:
Porn Up, Rape Down by Northwestern University Law Professor Anthony D'Amato. From the abstract:
The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85% in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan
Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.
It further supports my argument that access to child pornography would almost certainly reduce the incidents of child sex abuse. Again, no response from Quesi about this paper. At all. Did she read it? Who knows.
And finally
Sexual Science and the Law, by Richard Green, Harvard University Press, 1992. Green is an American sexologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, and author specializing in homosexuality and transsexualism, specifically gender identity disorder in children. Green is the founding editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior and the founding president of the International Academy of Sex Research. He served on the American Psychiatric Association DSM-IV Subcommittee on Gender Identity Disorders.
From Dr. Green:
As for child pornography in Denmark, reproduction and sale of child pornography was not illegal between 1969 and 1980. Between 1967 and 1973 child molestation or "physical sexual interference with female children" showed a rapid decrease.
There is an inverse relationship between the availability of the wide range of pornographic materials in a society and the commission of sexual crimes.
The availability of portrayals of a forbidden activity accompanied by autoerotic behavior, or masturbation, may provide an outlet for antisocial sexual impulses. It may permit the person to experience vicariously or in fantasy what would otherwise have been acted out in a crime with a victim.
Quesi described this as "
a book by a guy from Harvard who writes primarily about transgendered youth, with no indication of anything he has written about child pornography or pedophilia." Really Quesi? If you're not going to do the research just come out and say it. Admittedly a hard-copy book is not as easy to access as a direct PDF download, but it is a good book that makes some great points about pornography and specifically about child pornography use. If she didn't want to spend 37¢ to buy a used copy on Amazon or looked for a copy at the library, she could have just said that instead of claiming that the book was irrelevant to the discussion.
She never provided any thoughtful disagreement to the studies I posted, nor even demonstrated that she had in fact read them or understood how they supported my argument.
In response, she linked to an article that was
]behind a fucking paywall. Did she pay $5 to read it herself? Or did she not read it either, knowing I wouldn't read it so she could then claim I was ignoring her evidence? Sure I could have shelled out 5 bucks to read the article, but I didn't want to. At least
I immediately pointed out that I couldn't read the article instead of dodging and claiming it wasn't relevant to the discussion. She never responded to the note that it was not a free article, but
here she is today complaining that I dismissed it.
In that same reply with the paywalled article from Harvard, she also linked
an article from Psychiatry Online that was a reprint of a Mayo Clinic article and a
Wikipedia entry about the relationship between child pornography and child sexual abuse which included a study by the American Federal Bureau of Prisons. This was her evidence against my argument that increased access to child pornography would lessen the incidents of child sex abuse.
Remember how today she criticized me for linking "an unpublished article that some economics professor"? Well, that article was published, but the one she was using to support her argument,
the study by the American Federal Bureau of Prisons had already been withdrawn from publication in a peer-reviewed journal over concerns that the results were too biased and did not represent the "large and diverse group of adults who have at some point downloaded child pornography".
I read them
and replied that the Mayo Clinic article did not make a case for a causal link between use of child pornography and acts of sexual abuse against children. I
referenced it again later and summarized my argument against their results by saying "
They simply state that most rapists use porn. It can obviously be stated that most porn users are not rapists."
In response, she
posted an except from the article, highlighting the following text:
30% to 80% of individuals who viewed child pornography and 76% of individuals who were arrested for Internet child pornography had molested a child.
In addition to this snippet from the Mayo Clinic article, she copied
the wikipedia entry on the already debunked study from the American Federal Bureau of Prisons. I'm not sure how she thought that an unpublished and discredited study would help her win the argument, yet she still posted it.
I replied with the following:
I've already read both of the studies you mentioned, they are highly flawed as even their authors repeatedly point out. First, the claim that 30-80% of child porn consumers have molested a child is ridiculous. 30-80% is hugely vague and it's impossible to know how many child porn consumers are really out there, or how many of them have molested children.
Sure, you can interview pedophiles arrested for molesting children and ask them if they viewed child pornography, and I'm sure most of them did. I'm sure most rapists of adult victims also viewed pornography. I'm sure most of the people arrested for unpaid parking tickets also viewed pornography. Is there a connection between bad parking and pornography use or are these numbers simply reflecting the fact that most people watch porn?
I later
added this in reference to Quesi's linked studies.
However that doesn't take into consideration the studies that conclude that sex crime worldwide has gone down since the advent of the internet and the proliferation of freely accessible pornography. Many many studies on both general pornography and specifically child pornography have demonstrated that increased access to porn gives an outlet to sexual energy and leads to fewer incidents of rape.
Very few studies have reached the opposite conclusion, I've read them, and I find their methods to be highly flawed. Even the authors of the studies preface their conclusion with a warning that it's impossible to determine how accurate they are. They emphasize the point that the vast majority of rapists use porn but don't seem to consider the fact that the vast majority of porn users are not rapists.
The vast majority of rapists probably also watch TV, eat ice cream, and like long walks on the beach. Of course nobody blames those things for rape because society doesn't feel the need to demonize those behaviors like they do sex. Just because porn is related to sex does not mean there is a causal link between porn and rape, and indeed no causal link is proven in the studies, but merely suggested.
In
reply #415 I mentioned to a new user Atheistisaweirdword the studies I had cited earlier
"that conclude that increased access to pornography (including child pornography) leads to a reduction in sexual assaults and rape." Quesi
claimed that was bullshit, accused me of making up facts and retreating from the argument made by the studies she linked.
I reiterated my problems with the Mayo Clinic study, which was not actually a Mayo Clinic study at all, but
merely regurgitated and inflated figures from an earlier paper from the American Prosecutors Research Institute, which in turn got it's data from a U.S. Postal Inspection Service report that was quoting a statement by the director of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.And as I pointed out, even the authors of the Mayo clinic paper prefaced the article with a statement casting doubt on it's accuracy. As the 2005 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children report puts it "we do not know if these child porn possessors were representative of all Internet-related child porn possessors."In other words, my concerns about the accuracy of her studies are valid. She ignores them.
I re-posted the link to Todd Kendall's article with an excerpt that backed up my argument, as well as a link to
another study by Dr. Milton Diamond, University of Hawaii, Department of Anatomy & Reproductive Biology that stated that not only does greater access to pornography lead to fewer sex crimes, but specifically included statistics demonstrating that legalizing child pornography lead to a
significant reduction of child sex abuse cases in Denmark, Japan, and the Czech Republic.
On June 21st, in
an exchange with Rickymooston, I said that I believed children were maturing later in life because we coddle them. I was quite obviously referring to their mental maturity, as I even added that they were reaching puberty (physical maturity) earlier in life.
Quesi
demonstrated that she clearly misunderstood me by smiting my comment and replying with this:
No Joe. CHILDREN ARE NOT MATURING LATER. As I've cited a few times, children are maturing earlier. Puberty at 8.5 years for girls is now considered within the normal range.
Obviously she had thought I used the word
maturing to mean physically maturing, despite my clarification. Lucifer
points out to Quesi that he (correctly) thought I had meant emotionally maturing, not physically.
I reply that Lucifer was correct, and I was in fact referring to emotional maturity. I made a similar misunderstanding with someone a while back, but the person had written his post in such a way that he invited misunderstanding so I didn't feel it was my fault. In this case, my meaning was clear and Quesi chose to
continue to argue against a strawman even after repeated clarifications. She never acknowledges her mistake or apologizes. This just goes to demonstrate the shameless depths of her intellectual dishonesty.
You see Joe, I do you the courtesy of reading the articles you link.
Do you really? The evidence suggests otherwise. You've never once given a rebuttal to any of them other than vague comments that don't specifically address their content.
But all of this running around in circles distracts from the questions that are of real importance. Joe, you have said repeatedly that pedophiles can and do control their urges. And yet inconceivably high numbers of children continue to be raped and sexually abused on a global level.
You seem to think those are two conflicting statements. They are not.
For example: Men can and do control their urges. Is that not a true statement? Yet inconceivably high numbers of women continue to be raped and sexually abused on a global level. Is that not also a true statement?
Your suggestions so far, to address this problem have included 1) Increasing access to child pornography, so that potential abusers can watch children being abused having sex, and hopefully the act of viewing the rapes consensual sex with a minor will have the effect of quenching, rather than amplifying their sexual desires
Corrected that for you. If you want me to agree that it was my suggestion, then you have to let me define it. Otherwise, as you wrote it, it is not an accurate assessment of my position.
, and 2) Lowering the legal age of consent so that children who want sex can have it without endangering their adult partners.
Sure, I'll agree with that.
As a father, who has done such extensive research on this topic that you can laugh at the inaccuracies in studies conducted by Harvard and the Mayo Clinic, is that the best you can offer?
Is that the best you can offer? You notice there's
not actually an argument there? There's not actually any refutation of the points you've just listed. You just ignore all of the data, research and testimony of qualified experts in the legal and medical profession that I've provided. You just ignore the flaws in the studies you keep referring to that even their authors are quick to point out. You don't even suggest your own alternative. You just list my two points and somehow claim victory. That, Quesi, is how
pigeon chess is played. Bravo.
