Jaicee said:
I sourced all my claims, but to speak to the general body of evidence concerning rates of childhood abuse among women in the sex industry, most of that data comes from background investigations of women involved in or arrested for prostitution, which really is fine because there's a ton of overlap between all sectors of the sex trade and because prostitution is the eventual destination of a large percentage of women in pornography once their brief careers of a few months or so come to an end. There are a ton of those and they establish a clear link between childhood abuse (especially, but not exclusively, sexual abuse) and greater tendency to view sex as a commodity and to wind up in prostitution as a result and aren't confined to the United States either. Examples spanning the years can be found here, here, here, here, here, and lots of other places. They all find that significantly more than half of prostituted women suffered sexual abuse and/or battery as children, and also that women in prostitution are significantly more likely to be impoverished and drug addicts. No analogous studies have been conducted of women in pornography specifically to my knowledge and the one you link to here is, as you can see here, broadly considered incredulous among experts because its just a survey and not an actual background investigation, because samples of convenience are used, and because one of the co-authors of the study, Sharon Mitchell, as one commenter succinctly puts it, "is a de facto lobbyist for the adult entertainment industry. She used to run AIM, the industry-funded mandatory STD testing service. She has a very personal stake in making the industry look good." The difference becomes clear when you consider that studies of prostituted women can be falsified in the same way if you just rely on surveying a control group. For example, the 2009 study of prostitutes out of Calgary, Alberta linked above finds that "the present study indicates 73% of prostitutes were sexually abused in childhood, compared to 29% of a control group obtained in a random population survey." It's not that these women are even lying necessarily, it's that sexual abuse survivors often don't fully understand what rape and sexual assault even are, as differentiated from consensual sex. I can relate to that personally, as someone who was myself raped as a kid. You'll often respond intellectually by rationalizing it to yourself so that it doesn't seem so bad and resultantly may develop a warped concept of what how sex is supposed to work. But even if the 2012 survey you link to is fully accurate, it still in reality implies a strong connection between sexual abuse in childhood and increased likelihood of winding up in pornography, as the 36% rate of molestation indicated therein is still double the rate likewise voluntarily reported by American women in general contemporaneously. The only question here is whether it's "only" double. Only. And rape is widely understood as the most under-reported crime there is. Actual experts widely regard sex commodification and sexual abuse in childhood to be closely linked is my point. |
That is fantastic evidence for the fact that there's a link between child abuse and prostitution, but then you make a big ol' leap with no evidence that it'll just be the same for porn actors.
I am not willing to ignore the only study that we have because the second author is involved in the porn industry. Having written a number of scientific articles myself I know that the second author rarely has major input on the writing of the article or design of the scientific study and I would take a guess that this person is how they got access to the subjects given the survey and had little else to do with the study. I could be wrong but we're both just guessing at this point so we're kind of stuck.
I don't understand what you mean by "broadly considered incredulous among experts" and then you send me to a blog post with some commenters talking about how they don't trust the study. Am I to understand that lindsay beyerstein, a Canadian journalist that I can't find any indication of having any training in sociology studies, is an expert? Most of the other commenters aren't even kind enough to provide their full names so they're as much experts as youtube commenters in my eyes. What are we qualifying as experts here? I have seen studies where experts disagree, and it's done in letters to the journal or subsequent studies, not comments on a blog.
The 2012 study would indicate there's no difference between the control group and the porn actor group because when they were asked the same question they answered in statistically indistinguishable ways. You can't take the 36% and compare it to the overall number for the entire population when you only survey 177 people, that is why there's a control group included, to determine if there is a difference between those that are porn actors and those that aren't.
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