PART 1 Pornography and sex trafficking: the lie of the disconnect
Surely it won’t harm, just to watch a porn clip every so often…? The women always look like they are enjoying it and I’m sure they get paid enough to do this. Everybody watches porn, how bad can it really be?
In 2022, Azalea was invited by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation to carry out research into the scale, nature and impact of pornography, as experienced by sex trafficked women. This research would go on to contribute towards the inquiry on ‘Pornography regulation: The case for Parliamentary reform’.
The Encompass Director constructed a simple questionnaire for Encompass guests to fill in. The questionnaire was available to guests during drop in, and the guests could choose whether to complete one or not. They were always offered support with reading and writing, if they required it. 15 guests filled in the questionnaire which included questions such as:
Have you ever been filmed having sex or performing a sex act without knowing?
7 (47%) answered either yes or possibly
What words would you use to describe pornography?
Answers included: violence against women, degrading, disrespectful, disgusting
Do you think that watching pornography has negative impacts on people and society? If yes, why?
12 (80%) answered either yes or possibly, and for reasons such as: pornography turns men to child pornography and people copy/imitate the acts they see in porn unlawfully on women
Do you know about current laws in the UK regarding pornography?
11 (73.4%) answered no
Many of the findings of the questionnaires were disturbing. Nearly 50% of guests who answered the questionnaire said they either had been or could have been filmed for the purposes of pornography without their given consent. This sexual offence is called Voyeurism (Sexual Offences Act 2003, Section 67). However 80% of the guests who answered the questionnaire do not know about current laws regarding pornography in the UK, and so did not know that this was a criminal sexual offence. There was also a common theme that survivors of sex trafficking found that men who watched pornography were more likely to go on to watch child pornography, than those who don’t watch pornography. Watching women be violently sexually abused could lead to watching children be violently sexually abused. There was the general consensus that pornography makes men think it is acceptable to recreate the violence that they watch, and that women are a commodity to be consumed, an object to be used. These were some of the insights offered by survivors of sex trafficking who suffer the real-life ramifications of pornography.
Here are some of the official findings from the enquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation:
The scale and nature of the contemporary pornography industry:
The user base of pornography is highly gendered – significantly more men watch pornography than women, and they watch it with more frequency. (In September 2020, 50% of all UK adult males visited Pornhub, the most popular pornography website overall, compared to 16% of adult females)
Violence against women is prolific in mainstream pornography - A study of best-selling and most rented pornographic videos found that 88.2% of scenes contained physical aggression. Perpetrators were predominantly male, while the targets were mostly female – and they were most often shown responding neutrally or with pleasure to the aggression. (1)
Illegal content is freely accessibly on mainstream pornography websites - The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) concur with this assessment of the widespread nature of illegal material on pornography websites, reporting: “These sites routinely feature sexual violence, exploitation and abuse, and trafficking victims.” Traffickers film sex trafficked women being raped and sexually abused to make extra profit.
The harms of pornography:
Pornography fuels sexual violence - research indicates that pornography influences viewers’ ‘sexual scripts’, shaping their understanding, expectations and decisions in relation to sexual behaviour. Pornography also serves to dehumanise and sexually objectify women, fostering attitudes that underpin violence against women and girls
Pornography fuels social and political harms against women and girls – perpetuating sexist attitudes and creating a stronger endorsement of rape myths
Allowing or enabling children’s access to online pornography is an egregious violation of child safeguarding
Sexual coercion is inherent to the commercial production of pornography
A huge number of organisations contributed to the research and findings of this enquiry, and it all indicates the same things: pornography is glamourising, normalising and therefore perpetuating violence against women and children, predominantly girls.
Here is a quote used in the enquiry by Dr Jackson Katz, an educator and author of ‘The Macho Paradox: Why some men hurt women and how all men can help’:
“... the porn widely available today, especially that which is targeted at heterosexual men, by far the largest group of consumers, has normalised and sexualised men choking and strangling women during sex, verbally degrading them and spitting in their faces, among countless other acts of callousness and cruelty. It requires wilful naivety to pretend that this has no negative effects on generations of young people’s sexuality or has no connection to the ongoing pandemic of men’s violence against women.”
In Encompass, outreach sees women on the streets of Luton who are given between £5 and £20 to allow men to re-enact violent sexual acts that they have witnessed when watching pornography. This money is usually taken by a perpetrator or sometimes stolen back from the woman by the man purchasing the sex. The most vulnerable people in society are suffering the consequences of the entitlement and ignorance of those who consume pornography.
Watching sexual violence on a screen in the comfort of your home creates a disconnect between you, the consumer, and the perpetuation of sex trafficking. Surely it won’t harm, just to watch a porn clip every so often?
Part 2: coming next week! Stay tuned for the recommendations of the enquiry.
(Bridges, A.J., Wosnitzer, R., Scharrer, E., Sun, C. & Liberman, R. (2010) Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update, Violence Against Women, 16(10): 1065-1085.)