John Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice has claimed to MPs that extreme internet pornography is causing rapists and murderers to commit worse crimes than before the time when such horrific material was available online, However his claim appears to
be on rather shaky grounds being based on just two cases. The most senior judge in England and Wales said he had dealt with two deeply disturbing criminal cases which had been influenced and intensified by shocking internet pornography.
He told
MPs of the House of Commons' justice select committee:
The first of the two cases has left me in no doubt that the peddling of pornography on the internet has a tremendous effect on that individual.
What's available now to download and to see is simply horrific and it played a real part in ... the way in which this particularly horrible murder was carried out.
The first case referred to by Lord Williams
concerned Jamie Reynolds , a sexual deviant who killed 17-year-old Georgia Williams by hanging her at his parents' house in 2013. In the second case, former soldier Anwar Rosser murdered four-year-old Riley Turner in a savage and gratuitous
attack.
I Beg to Differ M'Lud
From mirror.co.uk
From backlash.org.uk
Nick Cowen, an
academic and researcher at the campaign group Backlash, responded to Thomas's claims saying it was impossible to suggest that porn was making men more likely to rape and murder.
In fact, he suggested that the arrival of hardcore pornography may
have even made society LESS violent:
You cannot establish a strong relationship between images someone looks at and what crimes they commit. Violent crime is actually on the decline for all manner of reasons. Some
recent evidence suggests pornography may be contributing to that, although the effect is small.
He pointed to a Home Office graph which shows the UK has become less violent since the 1990s, when internet pornography first became
available.
And Some Unsubstantiated Claptrap from Safermedia
Pippa Smith, chair of the religious campaign group SaferMedia told Mirror Online about a number of cases described to her by colleagues and psychotherapists. She told of a 18-year-old boy who had watched so much porn that he developed fantasies about
punching women in the face and even began to follow strangers late at night.
Today's men are part of a guinea pig generation for porn exposure, she spouted, and the consequences could be dire:
Pornography
has become much more violent and abusive and it can lead some to view ever more perverse material and even act it out. So for those who say porn is harmless, it is just not true.