Friday’s Guardian editorial featured a spit-flecked rant against internet pornography, starting and finishing with a demand to ban all of it. At the same time, the Daily Mail was putting up a strident demand for more efforts to police child porn. These articles are both profoundly wrong on facts and science, and breath-takingly hypocritical, not to mention steeped in conservative morality.

These articles are inaccurate in both their description of the content of internet pornography (and pornography generally), and the science of its effects. In its first incarnation, the Guardian editorial claimed that all internet pornography was abusive and violent, a claim it updated within hours on the same day to reduce the focus of the article to “violent pornography.” Internet pornography covers a very, very wide gamut and is not necessarily violent or abusive at all, and characterizing it as such is ignorant at best, misleading at worst. The Daily Mail claimed that

Experts say Google can combat abuse by paedophiles by simply popping up messages when users type in search terms such as ‘teen sex’ or ‘barely legal’, warning them that they may be about to access illegal material.

There is almost zero chance of finding kiddy porn by those search terms, just a huge number of sites with young adults pretending to be teenagers, and any “expert” who thinks targeting these search terms is going to stop child porn is a fool. I note that the Daily Mail doesn’t bother identifying these so-called “experts.”

These opinion pieces are even more misleading and disingenuous when they talk about the science of porn’s supposed effects. The Guardian provides a range of links to its claim that the science is under dispute and there may be good effects to porn, but is strangely lacking links to any evidence when it makes the ludicrous claim that

there is strong evidence that at the very least it is addictive, can normalise violence, and at the same time diminishes sympathy for its victims

The Daily Mail at least tries to give some science, when it cites a British scientist and says

He pointed to a British study from 2007, which found a ‘substantial minority’ of those who watch child porn go on to attack children.

David Middleton, of De Montfort University, analysed 213 online offenders and 191 paedophiles who had physically abused children.

‘The majority of people [who watch child porn] don’t appear to escalate their behaviour. But a substantial minority do,’ Professor Middleton said.

‘Various studies have looked at this and put it somewhere between one in six and one in ten.

The problem with drawing the conclusion in the first line from the findings of this study is that it runs afoul of Bayes’s theorem. Unless the prevalence of child abuse is very high, the probability of abusing children after watching child porn is much, much lower than the one in six found in the study of child abusers, and the link can’t be properly described until we know how many people view child porn – a figure that is never going to be known, despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail to suggest that watching “barely legal” videos is somehow the same thing.

The big problem with claims that internet porn or child porn desensitize criminals to their victims or encourage crime is that we don’t know the causal order. We know that Mark Bridger had a violent rape scene from a slasher film on loop the night before he went and abducted April Jones. But was this the cause, or the symptom, of his violent disorder? This is a thorny scientific question, and one that will be very hard to answer because of the difficulty of collecting data (and the woeful state of scientific research).

The thing about these articles that really flabbergasts me though, and makes me angry, is their rank hypocrisy. They complain that internet porn is a big business and people have vested interests against stopping it, and that this needs to be fought, but on the morning that I read the Guardian article the newspaper was saturated with adverts for a Thai dating website that featured an upskirt shot of a barely legal Thai girl in pigtails and semi school uniform. What’s that trying to tell readers about the content of the women on that site? And isn’t the Guardian a strong anti-trafficking campaigner? What’s the subtext of Thai dating websites in the UK, if not trafficking? So the Guardian can demand action against internet porn on moral grounds, at the same time as it is broadcasting adverts with barely legal girls showing their crotch? Meanwhile, read any article on the Daily Mail website and you will see the disgustingly named “Femail” sidebar, that contains links to hundreds of articles salivating over young women’s bodies. Yesterday when I read the article on child porn there was a link to an article about a barely legal starlet which started with the words “no daddy’s girl anymore!” And isn’t this the newspaper that, more than any other, reduced the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister to an arse? A crime that all the British media participated in.

The Daily Mail has a heavy investment in salivating over barely dressed women, putting up pictures of wardrobe malfunctions (i.e. upskirts and nipple shots), and reducing “it” girls to a collection of body parts. This is the moral equivalent of porn, just dressed up enough to escape the moral outrage associated with page 3 girls. Make no mistake: the Daily Mail is up to its eyeballs in fetishization of “barely legal” girls; and if the Guardian want to protect “vulnerable women” by banning things, they can start with the advertising on their own website.

It’s also not clear what the Daily Mail hopes to gain by hounding google about child porn, which is already highly illegal and hard to get. The implication of the article is that there is lots of child porn out there, just a google search away. I think the only such “child porn” that anyone will find is actually legal pictures of legal age women pretending to be 16. Is that what the Daily Mail wants to ban? And why can’t they say so?

The reality is that we have no evidence that porn is addictive, desensitizing or dangerous, and porn has been around a lot longer than the internet. There are strong reasons to be uncomfortable with the messages that modern children are getting from online porn, and to think that child porn is linked to child abuse, but the causal nature of these links is far from established. Also, let’s look at some things that are absent from the discussion of children’s safety and causative agents in these articles: there is no mention anywhere of parental supervision, of educating children about sexuality (rather than just sex education), or of ways of “protecting” children other than by banning porn. There is also no mention, anywhere, of the fact that Mark Bridger – who killed April Jones horribly and probably sexually abused her – had spent years working in abbatoirs, killing and dismembering animals. The evidence that cruelty to animals is linked with cruelty to adult women is just as strong as the evidence on child porn (i.e. weak and subject to huge assumptions) and banning abbatoirs is very easy to do. Why are we hearing no calls for this? Or at least, for careful monitoring of and intervention in abbatoir workers? Could it be, to quote the Guardian article, because the meat industry “is a global business” and one that the Guardian supports? Would that be hypocrisy?

Like attacks on sex workers, calls to ban porn are one of the easiest and most successful moral scares for small-minded people to drum up. But they aren’t going to protect women and children, and certainly are going to be of very limited effect compared to the huge benefits to be derived from careful police work tracing and capturing child pornographers. Furthermore, there is almost no link between the mainstream porn industry and child porn, and targeting the former is simply going to divert resources from the latter. The British tabloid media are eager to show that they are strongly against child porn – so long as you don’t look too closely at the barely legal smut they’re peddling in their sidebars. Are these articles a distraction from the real issues in media representation of women? I’m sure they wouldn’t like you to ask …