This is an edited transcript of Shabbana Kiyani’s introduction to the ‘Breaking the Cycle: Exposing the links between male violence, pornography & prostitution’ conference in London on 11 November 2023. The recording is online.

Before I welcome the speakers onto the stage, I want to say a few words about the thinking behind this event.

We’re living through a crisis of male violence against women and children, much of it sexual violence. And there is little doubt that it’s getting worse.

For example, this chart shows the number of recorded rapes in England and Wales from 2002 to 2022. The number of recorded rapes has increased by more than 300% in 20 years. This is an astonishing increase and it can’t be explained by changes in the way rapes are recorded.

In England and Wales, in the year to March 2022, 9% of women over the age of 15 were victims of domestic abuse.

In the year before that, in England and Wales 89,200 child sexual abuse offences were recorded by the police, about one third of them involving rape or sexual assault.

And shockingly, in a recent survey, one in ten men admitted to having committed child sexual offences (most of which were not recorded by the police).

Women involved in prostitution are at even greater risk. Pimps and sex buyers subject them to staggering amounts of violence and abuse – physical, emotional, and sexual – and they are at much greater risk of being murdered.

And yes, we know that women also commit offences against both adults and children, but the vast majority of sexual offences are committed by men, and mostly against women and children.

Using research, analysis and graphics by Clare Dimyon, this slide shows that, according to official data in England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the EU, and the US, 99% of people convicted of sexual offences are male and 88% of those sexually offended against are female. The data is similar in most other developed countries.

So I think it is clear that we are witnessing a very serious social problem and that the measures most governments have taken so far are having little to no impact. One of the UK government’s big ideas for tackling male violence against women and girls is to improve streetlighting in a few notorious trouble spots! While welcome, this is not nearly enough and misses the structural drivers of male violence against women and children.

So the thesis of this conference is that male sexual violence is a cultural phenomenon. We do not believe that it is innate. We do not believe that boys and men are biologically prone to sexual violence and misconduct. We believe it is learned behaviour and that it persists because it is condoned and protected by political and cultural forces. And key to that culture is the sexploitation industry: pornography and prostitution.

We will have no hope of putting a dent in the epidemic of male violence against women and children unless we tackle the porn and prostitution industries head on.

We believe that cultural change is possible. That is not to say that it will be easy or that it won’t take huge determination. But cultural change has happened before, sometimes very rapidly, and it can happen again. Let’s remember that today, so we don’t fall into despair as we witness some of the harrowing testimony that we are going to hear.

So that is what this conference is about – understanding the links between male violence and porn and prostitution, and how we can bring about change.

Breaking the Cycle: Exposing the links between male violence, pornography & prostitution

You can watch the recording of the event here.