ADELAIDE, Australia — A workers' comp case recently brought forth in Australia against an anti-porn group by one of their own employees provides another bizarre example of plaintiffs deploying the debunked concept of “porn addiction” and stigmatizing language as legal strategies.
Michael Bowker, a man working as a national office manager at Family Voice Australia, a conservative Christian organization which lobbies agains pornography and other social issues, had a stroke at work in April 2016.
Bowker then sued Family Voice Australia, claiming that his workplace, where he worked for four months, had become so stressful that the situation had a direct impact on his health, leading to the stroke, reports Australia’s The Mercury newspaper.
Bowker’s peculiar argument was that because of the difficult work environment “he turned to the ‘sin’ of pornography,” which contributed to the stroke since “he felt this was in conflict with his religious beliefs and his moral standards,” the paper reported.
The South Australian Employment Tribunal, in a judgment published online, awarded Bowker two years of weekly compensation payments after finding that his stress levels “significantly contributed” to his brain hemorrhage.
The tribunal took into consideration several workplace environment factors, including “poor staff morale, long hours, workload and technological issues.”
But Tribunal Deputy President Stephen Lieschke also accepted Bowker’s claim that his “increased use of pornography in the weeks leading up to his stroke” were a response to his state of anxiety, mentioning that the South Africa-born Bowker “grew up in a seriously religious family.”
His 'Use' of Pornography
The judgment took into consideration what they called Bowker’s “use of pornography” after he claimed to have “witnessed a fatal drive-by shooting in 1993 and has, since then, ‘used’ it intermittently and struggled with it for many years.”
The stigmatizing language of “using” or “consuming” pornography, as opposed to merely “watching it,” is associated with discredited beliefs that watching sexually explicit content is in any way analogous to ingesting mind-altering substances, and that it can lead to “addiction.”
“He felt this was in conflict with his religious beliefs and his moral standards,” Deputy President Lieschke wrote in his judgment. “He believed that looking at pornography was a sin” and “he said that when he felt under pressure or stress he used pornography.”
Oddly enough, religiously motivated anti-porn crusaders Family Voice Australia had a taste of their own medicine and became entangled in a confusing chicken-and-egg argument over whether work stress caused Bowker to watch more porn, or vice versa.
Personal Subjective Stress
The religiously inspired group tried to argue that there were “other, more significant factors” than workplace stress and pointed the finger at what they called his “increasing concern over viewing pornography in the weeks leading up to the stroke.”
This concern, Family Voice Australia argued, “was highly significant for a person of such a strongly held religious belief system.”
But Deputy President Lieschke’s ruling accepted “the genuine personal subjective stress and anxiety experienced by the applicant about these work issues.”
The Mercury describes Family Voice Australia as an Adelaide group founded in the mid-1970s (and formerly known as the Festival of Light) which has militantly opposed same-sex marriage, the adoption of children by same-sex couples and the decriminalization of cannabis and of sex work.