The argument in favour of sex dolls

The argument in favour of sex doll use is quite simple — these dolls are essentially pieces of latex that provide a sexual outlet for those who, for either personal or legal reasons, are not able to act out their sexual fantasies and urges in the real world.

Let’s first look at the personal reasons.

Sex doll users often report feeling lonely. This is one of the themes that really comes through strongly in the Channel 4 documentary above, and also in online fora of sex doll users. For these men (as doll owners are overwhelmingly male), their dolls are more than just an outlet for sex. They offer companionship, friendship, and love (some owners even dislike the word ‘owner’, and prefer to be referred to as ‘doll lovers’).

Mental health problems — whether related to social anxiety, personal insecurity, or more serious issues around disordered personality — undoubtedly play a role in the development and maintenance of healthy (or ‘normal’) relationships with real women. Because of the fact that we all have sexual drives and instincts, men with issues such as these may look to dolls as a more active way (compared to standard pornography) to obtain sexual gratification and release.

Naturally, these personal reasons are more related to those men who own adult-looking sex dolls, rather than dolls that resemble children. The owners of child-like sex dolls may have additional reasons for their use that are related to the law.

Like sex dolls, paedophilia is a controversial topic in its own right. The conflation between paedophilia and the sexual abuse of children is commonplace within society (there is clearly a link, but these two terms are not synonyms), which leads to emotional reactions to the ‘paedophile’ label that are similar to those made about ‘sexual offenders’ more generally.

The potential use of child-like sex dolls for people with paedophilic sexual interests has been the topic of very emotional debate recently. The sexual abuse prevention charity StopSO were accused by some members of the British tabloid press of advocating for the use of such dolls as ‘prescriptions’ for paedophilia.

Quoted in the Daily Mail newspaper, StopSO’s chair, Juliet Grayson, said:

If someone comes forward and says, “I am attracted to young children, and I want help to ensure that I never act on that attraction, so that I never harm a child,” then maybe society should consider the use of dolls in a carefully regulated way. Perhaps a “prescription” for the use of a child sex doll could be given, alongside therapy, mentoring and supervision, could help the individual remain law abiding and fully accountable for their behaviour. This carefully regulated use of child sex dolls might be one way to keep children safe. It feels like dangerous territory, but is certainly worthy of consideration.

This is an interesting argument to make. A range of experts in the area of child sexual abuse have made the argument that the prevention of offending should be made a higher priority than the current approach of waiting for an offence to take place before doing anything about it.

This is the essence of the mantra that “prevention is better than cure”.

When evaluating this argument about the potentially protective role of child sex dolls, though, it is important to consider what the available data say about the role of sexually explicit material.

In a 2009 meta-analysis conducted by Christopher Ferguson and Richard Hartley, it was reported that the broad effects of pornography consumption on rates of sexual aggression were negative. In their conclusion, the authors stated that:

Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships. Although these data cannot be used to determine that pornography has a cathartic effect on rape behavior, combined with the weak evidence in support of negative causal hypotheses from the scientific literature, it is concluded that it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.

Expanding this conclusion to the topic of child sex dolls, there may be an argument to make that dolls could help some paedophiles to abstain from sexually abusing real children.

Of course, this is a rather abstract way of looking at the effects of sexually explicit materials and sexual offending. A team led by Milton Diamond examined the effects of pornography consumption on rates of sexual abuse, and found support for the cathartic effect hinted at by Ferguson and Hartley. Diamond’s team drew upon a period in Czech law whereby the ownership of pornography (including material involving children) was legal. They reported a significant reduction in rates of sexual abuse during this time, which echoed similar trends in Denmark and Japan in relation to the sexual abuse of children.

Diamond and his collaborators stopped short of suggesting that so-called pornographic material involving real children should be legalized. Instead, they argued that artificially-produced material might serve as a useful preventative substitute for some people with sexual interests in children who are actively trying to not offend against real children.

Child-like sex dolls clearly fulfill this brief of artificially-produced material, and therefore the suggestion that these dolls might be a suitable ‘prescription’ option for some paedophiles does appear to have some empirical backing.