MANCHESTER, CT — Adult industry professionals have heard the claims a million times. According to critics, sexually oriented shops drop property values, attract drug users, prostitutes, child molesters, rapists, and dangerously bad people of all sorts who put innocent women and children at risk due to their inability to control their lusts and passions.Adult industry professionals also know that when asked to back these extreme claims with facts, few are presented and even fewer support their wild accusations.
Now a collection of Connecticut academics and experts are speaking out in support of adult businesses in an attempt to shed light on the highly emotional subject, which has influenced many a city planner’s zoning policy. Most specifically, the board of directors of Manchester.
Very Intimate Pleasures, also called VIP, has opened in a previously mainstream business location and, as is the tradition, opponents of adult shops are repeating the same lines employed throughout the country in order to close the store, located at the Holland Turnpike exit from Interstate 84.
According to protestors, the shop will ruin the city’s image since it will detract from its “village charm.”
Associate professor Lori Sudderth is an expert in sociology at Quinnipiac University and while she admits that “sexually aggressive behavior” can be linked to “attitude; we can’t link it to sexually-related behavior,” including the viewing of pornographic materials. Sudderth contends that pornographic materials do not cause or inspire aggression. Instead, she contends that the tendency toward such behavior exists independent of consumption of pornography.
Clinton Sanders, a professor at the University of Connecticut, agrees with Sudderth. “There’s absolutely no casual relationship,” he insists. “All those arguments are a smokescreen for the main concern: that these are dirty things and we don’t want dirty people coming here.”
As Sanders sees it, the internet has made the low risk of violence even lower since potential customers have more shopping options than ever.
Even if the experts are ignored, the city’s board of directors can look at pre-existing adult shop, Amazing Superstore, which met with even greater resistance when it opened, to get an idea how VIP might affect surrounding areas. Although those who wanted the store to stay out of the city asked for zoning changes that would require it to be located away from parks and schools, no such changes were made.
Twelve years later, records indicate that it receives fewer police calls than shops nearby. “There was no spike in crime from the opening of that business,” Captain Marc Montminy assures citizens. He makes an important distinction between types of businesses which attract and adult clientele when he points out that “Certainly, facilities like pool halls and bars require more police service than a book store, but drawing a correlation between an adult store and crime in the area is pretty thin.” Montminy further illustrates his claim by explaining that the 32 calls since 2003 that were made included nine false alarms, five for suspicious activity, four for parking lot accidents, three regarding telephone harassment, three about traffic stops, one related to a theft, one involving an intoxicated person, and one concerning indecent exposure. Montminy says that, other than the one indecent exposure case, none of the other calls are unusual for a business of any nature.
Another adult shop in the area, Hollywood Video, has had nearly double the number of calls during the same time period, again with nine false alarms, but also regarding five thefts, four auto accidents, three general disturbances, and one each related to drugs, an intoxicated driver, and a car robbery.
Additionally, Montminy says that beefed up policing of adult shops would only result from “statistical proof to indicate that this was damaging to the crime pattern, and I have yet to see any information to prove that.” What does influence increases in crime, according to the police chief, is increases in population.
In 1985, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography released a document reluctantly supporting the results of a 1970 large-scale federal study that had found no evidence linking the use of erotic materials to sex crimes. It did, however, conclude that violent pornography could desensitize viewers, although professor Sudderth contends that the same can be said about violent mainstream films.
