Page 1153 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 24 June 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
but also the women gave lesser sentences. They too felt that rape was not so bad. What they showed with these groups was that the people looking at the rape trial felt that the woman was of a lower class, a lower level, to be involved in such a thing. After all, it was just a rape. The Canadian Supreme Court, on 27 February this year, determined that pornography which subordinates or degrades women or which has as a dominant characteristic the undue exploitation of sex is obscene and that it harms women. This was a unanimous decision by the Canadian Supreme Court - not most, not nearly all; but unanimous.
The New Scientist on 5 May 1990 carried a feature article about the alarming increase in rape and talked about the power of pornography. We are told that there is no connection between an increased level of pornography and increased rape. That statement is an absurdity. It is made by people who profit from pornography, the smut peddlers or the loot from lust people, as they have been called. What that New Scientist article showed is that where you have a 2 per cent increase in pornography in a community, in a society, you have a one per cent increase in rape. I have studied for hundreds of hours the research and the studies done around the world on pornography. What I have found is that where you have an increase in pornography in a community you have an increase in rape; where you have a decrease in pornography you have a decrease in rape.
One major study for a 10-year period from 1964 to 1974 showed that those countries that have had the highest increase in rape have also had the highest increase in pornography. Australia and America during that time have had tremendous increases in pornography and a corresponding increase in rape of 139 per cent and 160 per cent. In those countries that had slight increases in pornography availability and usage, there was a slight increase in rape. In Japan, where they came down very strongly against pornography over that 10-year period, you had an amazing 49 per cent decrease in rape. In most other countries in the world, rape is increasing alarmingly.
The New Scientist article showed that those States in America with the highest pornographic sales have the highest rape rates. Indeed, South Australia has a rape rate five times higher than that in Queensland. If I said that America had the fourth highest sex offence rate in the world and Australia the twenty-eighth highest, many people would say, "That is not particularly surprising". It is not true either. Australia has the fourth highest sex offence rate in the entire world and America has the twenty-eighth highest. Where did these figures come from? Interpol - the international police force. They do not have any particular axe to grind; they just look at the statistics and report them. There are many publications and videos on sale in Canberra that you would go to gaol for selling in many places in America, and they have the twenty-eighth highest sex offence rate and we have the fourth highest. What are we trying to do? Become No. 1 in the world? Is that the goal? If we leave things go a little while longer, it is highly likely that we will end up there.
What people do when they look at pornography is store these images in their minds. Get a picture in your mind of pornography that you have seen in the past - and everybody listening has pictures of pornography mentally imaged in their minds. It is totally out of their volition. That restimulator, that command, if you like, that I gave causes those images to be recalled. There are other things in society that will cause those images to be recalled: Women, little girls, boys, and in some cases men. Some people, particularly men, looking at women immediately have a recollection of earlier pornographic images. If they have
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .