Bridging Disciplinary Boundaries (January 11 - 14, 2007)

When reviewing work conducted by various researchers over thirty years, Malamuth, Addison, and Koss (2000) reported a continuing and strong relationship between pornography use and aggressive behaviors, particularly for violent pornography and for men at high risk for sexual aggression. However, much of the work in this area has been conducted with college students and in psychology lab situations. Therefore, the research results may not pertain to sexual abusers, adolescents, or real life experiences. Within the brief research on the relationship of pornography use/exposure to sexual offenses committed by adults, researchers have reported; frequent use of, early exposure to and exposure to violent pornography, as well as use of child pornography as part of child molester's preparatory behaviors (Carter, Prentky, Knight, Vanderweer & Boucher, 1987; Demare, Lips & Briere, 1993; Malamuth, Addison & Koss, 2000; Zgourides, Monto & Harris, 1997). While exposure to pornography and type of pornography have been investigated with juvenile sexual abusers, in a very few studies (Leguizamo, 2000; Emerick & Dutton, 1993; Becker & Stein, 1991) all indicating that sexually abusive youth have greater pornography use/exposure than non abusive youth, further research is required to understand the relationship between pornography and sexual aggression by this population - which is assumed by researchers and treatment providers to be strong. Accordingly, this cross-sectional project explored the degree of exposure of youth to pornography as related to sexual aggression and arousal. Using survey data from 350 adolescent sexual abusers and 150 adolescent non-sexually abusive delinquents with an average age of 16.53 (SD = 1.37 years) with no difference on age between groups, sexual abusers reported more pre- and post-ten (years of age) exposure to pornography than non-sexual abusers. Exposure was not correlated to the age at which the sexual abusers started abusing, to their reported number of victims, or to offense severity. Exposure was significantly correlated, but minimally, to sexual arousal to; obscene phone calls, masochism, peeping, frottage and females. The pre-10 exposure subscale was not related to abuse of children, and the forceful exposure subscale was not correlated with either arousal to rape or degree of force used in the youth's sexually aggressive behaviors. Finally, exposure to pornography was moderately correlated with all of the non-sexual crime scores. These results were contrary to expectations. In concurrence with previous research, the sexual abusers were exposed to more pornography than non-sexual delinquents, and continue to use more pornography as adolescents; however, exposure was not related to any aspect of sexual crime in this study. Nonetheless, exposure was related to degree of sexual arousal to a number of stimuli. Previous research using similar variables of severity and modus operandi found several relationships between these variables and experiences of trauma. Perhaps learning sexual aggression from experience is more powerful and salient (Bandura, 1996) than learning from pictorial stimuli. Social workers make up more than 30% of the largest professional association (ATSA) working with sexual abusers, making such research salient for our profession. Etiological theory, research, and clinical implications will be discussed.