Write to your MP… About porn.
Short Read (6 mins)
Today, porn is everywhere. The advent of free online pornography has led the industry to explode in scale, profitability and social influence. The result is proven profound harm to children and adults, relationships and wider society. As Head of Policy at CEASE (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation) - an human rights advocacy charity focused on tackling the cultural and commercial drivers of sexual exploitation - my work is to expose the reality of the porn industry and bring concrete change.
The mainstreaming and normalisation of porn has coincided with its escalating extremity. Videos that would have been refused classification and banned a couple of decades ago are now commonplace and just a couple of clicks away- even to children. Common themes in mainstream porn include sexism and racism; violence, hostility and denigration; emotional manipulation and deception; unrealistic or lack of sexual consent; objectification; ‘teen’ and incest.
It’s easy to imagine that “anything goes” in pornography because it’s “just fantasy”-another form of popular entertainment that has little to do with the real world. Unfortunately, a wealth of research suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. Pornography sites, which get more traffic than Twitter, Amazon and Netflix combined, cause profound harm not only to consumers but also to performers and to women in general.
porn reduces sex to a hollow commodity
When looking to counter the problems of sexism, racism, misogyny, sexual violence, child sexual abuse and the “rape culture” that’s endemic in our schools and universities, we too often overlook the influence of pornography. As well as undermining our social values of equality, mutuality and sexual consent, porn reduces sex to a hollow commodity devoid of intimacy and human connection.
The porn industry itself is rife with exploitation and abuse, a fact exemplified by the recent court case convicting the producers of the popular porn company GirlsDoPorn for trafficking hundreds of young women. What’s more, there are also many women and children who don’t even know that explicit images and videos of them are being watched by strangers on popular porn sites, since most of these function as video sharing platforms which allow users to anonymously upload videos quickly and easily.
With no checks in place to ensure that those who feature in videos uploads are consenting adults and minimal content moderation, it should come as no surprise that major porn sites are crawling with vidoes of real sexual harassment, assault and rape, along with “spy cam” porn , child sexual abuse material and so-called “revenge porn”. This abhorrent content has a huge psychological impact on victims, inducing not only deep feelings of shame, self-blame and humiliation but also a lasting terror that the material will remain somewhere online and haunt them forever.
porn themes include racism, sexism, violence, hostility, deception, lack of consent, ‘teen’ (read: underage) and incest
Despite the unique and elevated risks and harms associated with pornography, the online commercial porn industry has woefully little regulation. In spite of its track record of criminality, “Big Porn” has shown itself to be remarkably skillful at PR spin and cringing out of its safeguarding obligations. In spite of its similarities to other big tech companies, this is a “rogue industry” which is not governed by responsible corporate actors, and its self-regulation has been shown to be an abject failure.
In recent months, we have started to see the pornography industry- and in particular, its poster child Pornhub- held to account. The global, survivor-led Traffickinghub campaign and numerous media investigations leading to hearings in the Parliament of Canada and U.S. Congress, proposed legislation, lawsuits and calls for criminal investigations.
Although there’s been little action in the UK so far, the forthcoming Online Safety Bill is the perfect opportunity to introduce long-overdue regulation. Far from being a radical and illiberal assault on freedom of speech, this is about holding a powerful industry to account for making countless billions from corrupting our children, facilitating the mass distribution of filmed rape, image-based sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material, and monitising other illegal content with impunity.
For too long, Big Porn has managed to slip under the radar. Change is long overdue. Read our Expose Big Porn report here for more detail about the harms of Big Porn and our calls for reform. And please subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on social media, and send me an email if you’d like to find out more about the need to robustly regulate the online porn industry. We’d love to hear from you!
Naomi Miles, Head of Policy for CEASE - https://cease.org.uk/
Naomi Miles, Head of Policy for CEASE - https://cease.org.uk/
