Pornography: what we know, what we don’t by Mona Chalabi.
From the post:
Unsurprisingly, on the Datablog we often write articles about data when we have data. But some topics, like pornography, aren’t conducive to statistical analysis, no matter how important many claim they are.
Despite these challenges, a report released today has sought to assess children and young people’s exposure to pornography and understand its impact. Led by Middlesex University and commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner, this was a rapid evidence assessment – completed in the space of just three months as part of a much larger ongoing inquiry into child sexual exploitation.
The report found that a “significant proportion of children and young people are exposed to or access pornography”, and that this is linked to “unrealistic attitudes about sex” as well as “less progressive gender role attitudes (e.g. male dominance and female submission)”.
Though the report makes these and other important conclusions, you’ll notice that numbers are conspicuously absent in its language. One reason is that its findings were not based on primary research but a literature review that began with 41,000 identified sources and concluded by using 276 of those that were deemed relevant.
The post doesn’t even mention that we will know pornography when we see it.
😉
Perhaps that is part of the problem of measurement.
Rather than processing a trillion triples, the next big data measure should be indexing all the pornography on the WWW over some time period.
Yes?