In January 2024, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) issued a call for evidence on pornography regulation, legislation and enforcement. Nordic Model Now! (NMN) submitted detailed responses to that call for evidence. A PDF version of our responses is available for download.
This post provides some of the responses under more generalised headings, with the removal of some of the duplication that’s inevitable when responding to consultations in which responses to each question are expected to be analysed separately.
Evidence that legal pornography adversely affects the behaviours of viewers.
Pornography erodes empathy whether it is legal or not and research shows users of pornography are also more likely to believe rape myths.
Making a distinction between “legal” and “illegal” content in relation to a medium in which objectification, dehumanisation and misogyny are inherent is meaningless, particularly when it comes to the effect it has on the behaviour of viewers.
There is widespread ignorance about what constitutes “illegal pornography”. Some of the acts the depiction of which constitutes “illegal pornography” are now mainstream sexual acts demanded in return for payment by sex buyers accessing commercial websites, a reflection of their normalisation more generally. Is there evidence that crossing the threshold between what would be legal pornography if filmed and shared on an online porn website, and what would be illegal pornography, makes it more likely that a person would desist when they reached that point in real life?
Online pornography and the companies which own porn websites are competing for viewers’ attention in a global online marketplace which includes many depictions of extreme physical and sexual violence, torture, murder, and mass destruction.
This marketplace operates outside domestic laws and definitions of rape, sexual assault, and unlawful physical violence.
Websites which are not hosted in the UK do not post warnings that “This content is unlawful in your country” or “The acts depicted in this content could constitute criminal offences in your country” in the way that some press articles available online are blocked to viewers in the UK, often because of copyright and licensing issues.
The websites are no more likely to warn viewers of the risk of prosecution and a criminal record than the films they share are likely to feature the use of condoms in general or lubrication in films featuring anal sex because the idea that the acts depicted might have real-life consequences of any kind interrupts the fantasy and may impede the viewer’s arousal.
Men who pay for prostitution pay to control sexual activity with another person and often use women they pay to practise sexual scripts derived from porn before using them more widely in encounters with women. They will have taken the performance of enthusiasm by a prostituted woman as “affirmative consent”, rather than as a necessity requiring dissociation if the woman is to avoid a bad review of her “performance” and possible sanction or violence from a pimp or brothel-owner.
Sexual scripts themselves progress to being considered mainstream and performance of acts on a “bucket list”. Viewers, including teenagers and even children, do not receive these sexual scripts as ‘man bites dog’ outlier examples of behaviour but as part of an international rote-memorised sexual curriculum.
The misconception that having watched films involving sexualised violence on online porn websites implies consent to the infliction of these acts on you in real life is also very widespread.
In many states where porn films are made which are accessible to online viewers in the UK, offences of rape or sexual assault require evidence of coercion to secure a conviction. In some of these states, unlike the UK, marital rape is not a crime.
Differences between EU Member States over whether a new EU directive on Violence against Women should include a consent-based definition for rape and sexual assault, or a coercion-based definition, have recently resulted in rape and sexual assault being removed from the directive altogether.
England & Wales has a consent-based law for rape, sexual assault, and causing another person to engage in sexual activity subject to the defendant’s reasonable belief that the complainant consented (Sections 1-4 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003).
Consent is defined in Section 74 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which says that “a person consents if he agrees by choice and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice.”
The test of “reasonable belief” is a subjective test with an objective element. The Crown Prosecution Service recommends dealing with the issue by asking two questions:
- Did the suspect genuinely believe the complainant consented? – which relates to the suspect’s personal capacity to evaluate consent (the subjective test).
- If so, did the suspect reasonably believe it? – it is for the jury to decide if this belief was reasonable (the objective element).
There is no requirement to communicate a lack of consent.
There are conclusive presumptions about lack of consent and lack of reasonable belief if it is proved that the defendant intentionally deceived the complainant about the nature or purpose of the act, or intentionally induced the complainant to consent by impersonating a person known personally to the complainant.
There are rebuttable presumptions about lack of consent and lack of reasonable belief:
- If at the time of the time of the act, or immediately before it, any person was using violence against the complainant or another person, or causing her to fear immediate violence would be used against her or the other person
- If the complainant was unlawfully detained, and the defendant was not
- If the complainant was asleep or otherwise unconscious
- If the complainant would not have been able at the relevant time to communicate to the defendant whether she consented
- If the complainant had been given or had taken, without her consent, a substance which could cause or enable her to be stupefied or overpowered at the time of the relevant act.
Circumstances which do not match the definition of consent in section 74 of the 2003 Act, or where what would be conclusive or rebuttable presumptions about lack of consent and lack of reasonable belief in rape trials in England & Wales arise, occur frequently in porn films, especially films available through online porn sites.
Viewers are likely to take this to mean that what was filmed would not constitute rape in England & Wales if these acts were carried out in real life.
What potential impact would having acquired your understanding of consent through using pornography have on your answers as a juror to questions about whether the belief of a defendant charged with an offence under sections 1-4 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 that there was consent to an act was genuine, or that the genuine belief was reasonable?
Through which lens would a defendant have acquired “genuine belief”? How would a juror whose understanding also came from regularly watching sexually violent porn online determine what was “reasonable”?
How can a police officer or prosecutor for whom images featuring the degradation, dehumanisation and abuse of women are entertainment claim objectivity in assessing evidence relating to these questions?
Although there is no requirement that a complainant demonstrates or communicates to the defendant a lack of consent, not doing so may have consequences if acts the complainant dislikes or found harmful continue during what then becomes a relationship.
There are many reasons why she may not initially have demonstrated or communicated a lack of consent, including worrying about what she perceives as her lack of experience, or being concerned about being called a prude, but has decided to raise it a few months into the relationship.
In the Crown Court Compendium, (updated in June 2023), the Judicial College provides guidance to judges about directions they should give to juries. Section 20-4 of the compendium is about directions on consent and reasonable belief in consent in cases involving sexual offences. The guidance says:
The jury may need to be alerted to the distinction between consent and mere submission: see Doyle1332 in which the Court of Appeal described the distinction between (i) reluctant but free exercise of choice, especially in a long-term loving relationship, and (ii) unwilling submission due to fear of worse consequences. In Zafar, Pill J directed that: “C may not particularly want sexual intercourse on a particular occasion, but because it is her husband or her partner who is asking for it, she will consent to sexual intercourse. The fact that such consent is given reluctantly or out of a sense of duty to her partner i[t i]s still consent.” [Paragraph 20-4.4]
It then gives these examples about “long-term relationships”:
Example 6: Non-consensual sexual activity within or immediately after a long term relationship It is agreed that D and W have had a long term sexual relationship. This is relevant to the question of whether or not W consented to D {specify act} on this occasion. That is because the situation between two people who have/have had a long term sexual relationship is different from a situation in which two people are strangers or have met one another only a few times.
When two people have/have had such a relationship, there may be some give and take between them in relation to any number of things, including their sexual relationship. And sometimes a partner who is not feeling enthusiastic may nevertheless reluctantly give consent to sex.
However, when two people are/have been in a long term sexual relationship it is not the case that both of them will consent to any sexual activity which takes place. One person is fully entitled not to consent regardless of their relationship. What you must decide in this case is whether W consented freely and by choice, even if reluctantly, to what took place or whether W did not consent but submitted to it. You must also decide whether D may have reasonably believed that W was consenting, taking into account all the evidence including the nature of the [previous] relationship between W and D.
Interpretation of the consent/submission distinction is likely to depend on how jurors view the testimony given by the complainant.
How likely is it that these interpretations will be influenced by sexual scripts derived from pornography? How often is a complainant judged through the lens of similar, porn-derived interpretations from the very point at which she reports her abuse to the police?
Marital rape was criminalised after the House of Lords decision in R. V R in October 1991 and subsequent legislation, but there are still circumstances in which there is a higher likelihood of sexual violence going unpunished if the complainant is in a long-term relationship than might be the case if the sexual activity took place during a single encounter.
Repeated or continuous coercive or controlling behaviour towards another person within an intimate personal relationship which has a serious effect on the other person is the offence of coercive or controlling behaviour if the perpetrator knows or ought to know that the behaviour will have a serious effect on the other person.
An effect is “serious” if it causes the other person to fear, on at least 2 occasions, that violence will be used against them, or if it causes them serious alarm or distress which has a substantial adverse effect on their usual day-to-day activities.
“Ought to know” is what a reasonable person in possession of the same information would know.
It is a defence for the perpetrator to show that, in engaging in the behaviour, they believed they were acting in the victim’s best interests, and that the behaviour was in all the circumstances reasonable, but this defence is not available where the behaviour causes the victim to fear that violence will be used against her.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 created a statutory definition of “domestic abuse” for the first time. It includes abuse within families as well as within intimate relationships and “intimate relationship” isn’t restricted to a connection of any specific duration.
Types of behaviour specified as abusive in the 2021 Act include physical or sexual abuse, violent or threatening behaviour, controlling or coercive behaviour, economic abuse and psychological, emotional, or other abuse. It can also consist of a single act of any of these types of abuse, rather than a course of conduct.
Coercive and controlling behaviour is very commonly depicted in online pornography and many states in which porn is produced which is accessible to viewers in the UK do not prohibit it in intimate relationships in real life.
Evidence suggesting a link between viewing violent legal pornography and subsequent attitudes towards relationships, psychological impacts and/or sexual behaviours of viewers.
The use of pornography is not associated with increased sexual satisfaction and frequent use of pornography is associated with lower sexual satisfaction. Because of the way sex affects the brain, pornography can become addictive and undermine secure attachment and intimacy.
It creates expectations about sex, “sexual performance” and body image which can make both women and men feel inadequate and be physically and psychologically damaging.
The greater profits in both porn and prostitution have been at the extremes, which are now distributed globally. These extremes have become ‘norms’ in prostitution due to competition resulting from large increases in the number of women becoming involved in it because of increasing poverty due to the impact of austerity budgets and ongoing cuts in public expenditure.
They have become expectations and beliefs men often have of sexual relationships and what they think most women enjoy, and expectations young women have of what they may have to submit to if they want to attract a partner, compared with what they find pleasurable, and the risks they run of being called “prudish” by some of their peers.
In an online survey of 3,922 people carried out in September 2018 a third of respondents said there had to be physical violence for sexual activity to count as rape. A third of males and 21% of females said it would not usually be considered rape if a woman had flirted on a date. Younger respondents were reported to have held views that were “more closely aligned to the law”.
More than a third of over-65s did not regard non-consensual sex in marriage or a relationship as rape, compared with 16% of people aged 16 to 24. 42% of over 65s said if sexual activity continues after a woman changes her mind it is not rape, compared with 22% of the 25-49s.
The over-65s would have grown up in the era when marital rape was not considered a crime, which ended with a House of Lords judgment in October 1991.
A survey of 3,000 adults commissioned by the Crown Prosecution Service and published in January 2024 found that while the public’s accurate understanding of rape has grown over the past 20 years, there are still significant false beliefs, misunderstandings, lack of knowledge, and underlying misconceptions. It also revealed that misconceptions about rape have moved into the digital age with a focus on the behaviour of victims online.
Most respondents correctly identified that it can still be rape if a victim doesn’t resist or fight back, that victims may not immediately report to the police, that being in a relationship or marriage doesn’t mean consent to sex can be assumed, and that if a man has been drinking or taking drugs, he is still responsible if he rapes someone.
But few respondents were aware that most rapists know their victim, or that victims will not always seem distressed when talking about what happened to them. An even smaller number were aware that few offenders use physical violence. There was a significant lack of understanding around what is meant by reasonable belief of consent of the suspect, with 49% of people saying they were unsure or did not know what it meant.
Given the results of the 2018 survey, the response of 18-24-year-olds in the 2024 survey give serious cause for concern:
- Only half recognised that it can still be rape if a victim doesn’t resist or fight back
- Less than half recognised that being in a relationship or marriage does not mean consent to sex can be assumed
- Young people were also far less likely to understand that if a person says online they want to meet up and have sex, that doesn’t mean they have to have sex when they meet
- Overall, two thirds of respondents recognised that even if no physical force is involved a person might not be free and able to consent to sex; but this dropped to 40%when young people were asked, compared with 74% of over 65s.
As the 18–24-year-old respondents are likely to have had more exposure to sex education in schools than older ones, this reversal of the age group most likely to have false beliefs suggests that misconceptions are evolving and being spread in digital spaces, that digital spaces have more influence than what they were taught in school and that this will be doing the same for those under 18, which is causing serious problems now and presents serious challenges for the future. Children are now the biggest perpetrators of sexual abuse against children. The police say the involvement of minors as offenders is exacerbated by the “accessibility of violent porn”.
Evidence of links between viewing pornography and viewers’ attitudes towards violence against women and girls.
There is considerable evidence to suggest that one of the biggest drivers of the increase in acts of abuse and violence against women and girls is free, unfettered access to online pornography in general, as online porn sites operate in a competitive global market.
Forty years of research has shown that there is a clear and unambiguous link between the consumption of pornography and violence against women and girls both online and off.
An independent report commissioned by the UK government and published in 2020 included a literature review of 19 academic papers. It found that “there is substantial evidence of an association between the use of pornography and harmful sexual attitudes and behaviours towards women.” The report found an even stronger association where violent pornography was concerned and that most people agree that “an increase in violent pornography has led to more people being asked to agree to violent sex acts … and to more people being sexually assaulted.”
A 2015 meta-analysis which examined the links between pornography and sexually aggressive behaviour also found ‘that exposure to non-violent and violent pornography results in increases in both attitudes supporting aggression and in actual aggression’.
These attitudes and behaviours are being formed at increasingly young ages. Research by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) found that children were watching or coming across pornography online from the age of 7 or 8 in some cases, with 51% of 11-to-13-year-olds having seen pornography at some point. This access is damaging children’s mental health and warping their perceptions of healthy sex and relationships, including consent.
Recent research by the Children’s Commissioner for England into case files of child-on-child sexual abuse found that 50% contained at least one term referring to an act of sexual violence commonly portrayed in pornography. According to the Children’s Commissioner for England ‘additional review of some of these cases found children suggesting direct links between pornography exposure and the harmful sexual behaviour exhibited.’
An Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges published in June 2021, revealed how prevalent sexual harassment and online sexual abuse are for children and young people. The review expressed concern that, for some children, incidents are so commonplace that they see no point in reporting them.” It highlighted how easy access to pornography had set unhealthy expectations of sexual relationships and shaped perceptions about women and girls. Women and girls are now expected to partake in increasingly dangerous sex acts such as anal sex and strangulation.
Research from the Children’s Commissioner for England found that 47% of young people think that girls expect sex to involve physical aggression. A further 42% think that girls enjoy physically aggressive sex acts.
Andrew Tate is one of the more widely-publicised instances of men taking advantage of the entitlement years of exposure to online porn has given to men, but he is far from alone. The very success of his Hustler’s Academy is built on the ideas that society owes men access to the bodies of women, that the dehumanisation and degradation of women is normal and a measure of a man’s success, and that the only issue is how a man goes about achieving it. His views about the legitimacy of sexual exploitation of young women found fertile ground because of the online porn industries and would not have gained the traction they have done without it.
Surveys in the US have shown that teenagers are now having less sex than their parents did. In a paper published in 2019 reporting the results of seven large, nationally representative surveys, Jean M. Twenge and Heejung Park noted that between 1976 and 2016 there was a significant decline in adolescents engaging in adult activities, including having sex and dating.
This is not what teenage boys think if their expectation of the level and nature of sexual activity happening around them comes from online porn.
The same contempt for women expressed on “incel” forums, to great condemnation, is routinely expressed on sex buyer forums, reviews by sex buyers of prostituted women on commercial sex websites, and in many contexts on social media and elsewhere to widespread indifference.
What unites them is that the women in question declined to fulfil misogynist sexual expectations largely created by pornography. Women are at the highest risk of serious violence or homicide from men with whom they are, or have been, in relationships, or from family members. It isn’t a lack of access to sex or relationships that has given these men a propensity to violent misogyny.
The pornography industry is grooming men and boys to commit acts of violence against women and girls, while grooming girls to accept violence as normal. History has shown that dehumanising, degrading, and objectifying human beings is always the first step in committing violence against them and this is exactly what the pornography industry does.
Evidence of the prevalence of legal pornography viewers going on to view illegal pornography or child sexual exploitation and abuse material.
Much of the content on mainstream sites like PornHub, which is the most popular mainstream pornography site, would be considered illegal if it were viewed offline or acted out in real life. This makes the framing of this question rather confusing. Viewers, including children, are already watching content that would be considered illegal in other circumstances.
Common pornography categories such as ‘teen porn’ and ‘barely legal’ porn (including incest-themed porn) depict sexual activity with children, by using small, young-looking performers who are made to look underage by using props such as stuffed toys, lollipops and school uniforms. This material is extremely harmful; normalising children as objects of sexual desire and driving the demand for “real” child sexual abuse material.
Police and practitioners in the UK have noted the increasing trend of men ‘crossing the line’, acquiring a sexual interest in children because of their heavy porn use, often via the bridge of ‘teen porn’. Research also shows that high consumption of content which sexualises children can also result in offenders viewing illegal child sexual abuse material.
Simon Bailey, the former Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary who is the National Police Chief’s Council lead on child protection, told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse that free online pornography is ‘creating a group of men who will look at pornography and the pornography gets harder and harder and harder, to the point where they are simply getting no sexual stimulation from it at all, so the next click is child abuse imagery. This is a real problem.’
Michael Sheath, who worked with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK-wide charity dedicated to the prevention of child sexual abuse, for over 20 years agrees, argues that “what we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.”
The porn industry is actively monetising videos that promote child sexual abuse, and while sites like Pornhub may have changed their search tags, due to the ongoing scrutiny of its practices, videos with titles which relate to incest, refer to “teen” or are deliberately ambiguous about the age of a person on whom sexual violence is being inflicted, are still common on mainstream pornography sites.
Evidence of how illegal pornography affects the behaviours of viewers.
Online depictions of sexualised violence create expectations in viewers which greatly underestimate risks of pain, serious harm or even death that the acts depicted can carry if emulated in real life. Porn films tend to feature positions chosen to fit with camera angles, rather than because they increase sexual pleasure. Injuries and harm inflicted on women during porn shoots are edited out.
The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 restated in statute that a person is unable to consent to serious harm which would constitute actual bodily harm within the meaning of section 47 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, grievous bodily harm, or wounding within the meaning of section 18 of the 1861 Act. This includes intentional strangulation, and any other act which would both constitute the offence of battery against a person and affect their ability to breathe.
For someone to be convicted of murder in England and Wales, the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt both that the defendant caused the victim’s death and that they had the required level of intent at the time. For murder, the level of intent is subjective. In 2003 the Supreme Court confirmed that the necessary level of intention exists if the defendant feels sure that death, or serious bodily harm, is a virtual certainty because of the defendant’s actions and that the defendant appreciated this was the case.[1] This is a high bar to cross and is partly the result of the mandatory penalty for murder being a life sentence.
The porn viewer does not see harm suffered by performers because, like using condoms and lube in scenes involving heterosexual sex, the consequences are seen as an interruption of the fantasy. What would a porn viewer then understand was a “virtual certainty”?
Advocates for ‘rough sex’ and BDSM have appeared frequently on the mainstream media in recent years, following trials of men who have murdered women during ‘rough sex’, to stress that what took place violated BDSM ‘norms’ and could have been avoided had the killer and victim taken proper instruction from people like them.
At the same time, they are reticent about criticising acts of extreme violence which clearly violated ‘norms’ and resulted in serious injury or death because they fear being accused of ‘kink-shaming’. This does not inspire trust in them as providers of instruction and guidance.
The Government is proposing to provide aggravated sentencing powers to judges where defendants are convicted of manslaughter following abusive, degrading, or dangerous sexual conduct. The Minister for Victims & Safeguarding, Laura Farris, sent a letter to Sir Bob Neill MP, chair of the justice select committee summarising the proposals in which she said:
This measure also responds to one of the recommendations made by Clare Wade KC in the Domestic Homicide Sentencing Review. In the review, Clare Wade KC found that the narrative of ‘rough sex gone wrong’ needs to be reconsidered in the light of coercive control. Violence during sex, whether said to be consensual or not, should not be seen as distinct from the gendered violence and control which occurs elsewhere between intimate partners.
Evidence that viewing legal pornography might lead to inadvertently viewing illegal pornography or child sexual exploitation and abuse material.
Much of the content on mainstream sites like PornHub, which is the most popular mainstream pornography site, would be considered illegal if it were viewed offline or acted out in real life. This makes the framing of this question rather confusing. Viewers, including children, are already watching content that would be considered illegal in other circumstances.
Pornhub’s position as the most popular mainstream pornography site has been unaffected by recent accusations of monetising videos of rape, sexual assault and other acts of violence, and numerous lawsuits related to human trafficking. It is free to view and in 2019, when it stopped providing information about its overall user count, received more than 80,000 visits per minute.
A vast, unregulated online pornography industry has grown exponentially over the last three decades. The type of pornography now freely available on mainstream pornography sites is misogynistic, racist, degrading, increasingly violent and dehumanising.
More than 10 years ago academic research into the most popular pornography films found that 88% of the scenes contained physical aggression directed at women, such as gagging, strangulation, spanking, and slapping. The situation has deteriorated since and, if left unchecked, will continue to do so, because online pornography operates in a competitive marketplace.
Online porn websites glamorise the subjugation of women through videos of sexual coercion, abuse and exploitation, humiliation, punishment, torture, and pain. They host enormous quantities of illegal content such as rape, abuse and other non-consensual sex acts, image-based sexual abuse (often wrongly referred to as “revenge porn”), “spy-cam porn” (illegal surreptitious recording of women and girls in changing rooms, locker rooms, gynaecological appointments etc.) as well as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
A research study carried out by Dr Fiona Vera-Gray and colleagues at Durham University published in April 2021 examined ways in which mainstream pornography positions sexual violence as a normative sexual script by analysing video titles found on the landing pages of the three most popular pornography websites in the UK – Pornhub, XVideos, and XHamster.
The study was unique in focussing on content immediately advertised to a new user. The researchers found that one in eight titles shown to first-time users on the first page of mainstream porn sites describe sexual activity that constitutes sexual violence.[3]
They also found that:
- The word ‘Teen’ was the most frequently occurring word across the entire dataset.
- Sexual activity between family members, such as incest, was the most frequent form of sexual violence.
- The second most common category was that of physical aggression and sexual assault.
More recent research in France showed that the proportion of porn titles shown to first time users of porn sites which describe activities which constitute sexual violence has increased since this study was published in 2021. It found that 90% of mainstream internet porn involves verbal abuse, or physical or sexual violence, often in violation of French laws against sexism, racism, violence, and even torture.
The situation is unlikely to be different in the UK.
Evidence that porn performers are not receiving adequate protections from harm in the industry.
The power imbalances and dynamics within the porn industry mean that viewers will frequently be watching content produced in highly coercive and controlling circumstances.
The abuses uncovered by recent and current criminal investigations into the working practices of several major porn companies in France are clear evidence of this. We have members who can confirm that these abuses are not unique to France but are a systematic feature of what the Sénat and the Haut Conseil à l’Egalité accurately refer to as “pornocriminalité”.
Directors often seek to produce fearful or distressed reactions or require neutral responses from porn performers to violent and painful acts, because these responses are more popular. The cruelty is the money-earner. Injuries and harm inflicted on women during porn shoots are edited out.
Performers may have to sign agreements consenting to what happened to them during a shoot and stating that they were not harmed before they get paid. Even where this is not the case, complaining or being seen as difficult will affect how you are seen by directors in the porn industry and whether you are cast in films again. This is why you rarely hear honest accounts from porn performers about the nature of the industry until they have left it.
Viewers of porn and sex buyers often fail to recognise that porn performers and prostituted women are performing acts, roles, and personas for a financial reward. They assume the stereotype that women in porn and prostitution are more “highly-sexed” than women outside the sex industry.
This stereotype is a myth propagated and perpetuated by the sex industry because the biggest threat to its business model is unpaid sex.
It enables men who watch porn or pay for sex to ignore the circumstances in which women became involved in the sex trade and promotes the belief that the women they pay made choices directed by their sexual desires. Women and girls who are not involved in the sex trade then find themselves compared unfavourably and coercively with women who were paid to perform sexual acts they would not otherwise have performed.
Esther, a survivor of pornography and prostitution who is one of our members, says:
“Through involvement in BDSM circles I met a UK-based businessman who had a sideline running two porn websites involving corporal punishment which were registered in Hungary, where most of the films were made. His demand for a first meeting was to cane me 100 times as soon as he entered the room. As a novice I assumed this must be the bar to entry into BDSM pornography.
Most of the women who were on the receiving end of physical and sexual violence in films his company made were young women recruited off the street by his agents in Budapest who knew, as he did, that they had substance issues and were taking part in the films to pay for drugs. They were not submissive women who had actively sought to receive acts of violence which human rights organisations would regard as torture, to which you cannot consent, in any context other than the sex industry. The truth behind these films would not have been clear to any viewer watching the finished product.”
At its heart, the porn industry, like other parts of the sex industry, is a pinnacle of social conservatism, regressive norms, and investment in the maintenance of gender inequality.
How is the current response by the criminal justice system impacting individuals’ decisions to report modern slavery/human trafficking in pornography?
Pornography can often be a loss leader for prostitution. If you are well known as a porn actress, men will offer you very large sums to meet them in private. The films you make are more like publicity or promotional films which increase how much men will pay you for sex in private. The films will not be what you make most of your money from. A similar business model has been operating in the music industry for some years, with the bulk of profits coming from live performance.
Esther, a survivor who is one of our members, says:
“Several times I was paid to meet buyers with women who were well-known in the German porn industry and came to the UK to meet buyers. They had ‘managers’ who were often highly coercive and controlling. One manager encouraged a porn actress he controlled to have unprotected group sex several times a week with large numbers of men who paid relatively small amounts of money and were sometimes included in her films. When she was offered a very large sum to meet a buyer who wanted protected sex in private her manager pressured her into turning this down by claiming that the fee offered was too high and that accepting the payment might affect her ‘brand’.”
While the rules for content creators set out by the OnlyFans website forbid using the site to arrange “full service” prostitution, the ease of setting up an account and the way it has been glamorised, normalised, and misrepresented in the media as an easy way of making loads of money, have all worked to lower the bar to entry into prostitution.
While a minority of “content creators” do make considerable sums of money, the vast majority make very little. Having invested large amounts of time, emotional and physical energy, and money in using the platform, many women find that they make practically nothing. It is hardly surprising that many of them then turn to “full service” prostitution – especially as many women report that male “fans” frequently pressure them to meet up in person for this purpose. Both OnlyFans and webcamming act as a gateway to prostitution for women and as a gateway to prostitution buying for men.
Accounts on OnlyFans can also be controlled by others who are exercising coercive control over women whose content is shared on the site. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in the USA has uncovered evidence of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans.
Controlling OnlyFans accounts of women he was exploiting through associates is among the allegations made against Andrew Tate by law enforcement authorities in Romania. He is not alone in doing this. Research into “e-pimping” by a Dutch organisation which specialises in digital forensics also showed that pimps were managing the accounts of models on OnlyFans and had access to explicit material they could use to blackmail the models.
The Modern Slavery Act 2015, which is the human trafficking legislation for England and Wales, does not conform with the international definition set out in the Palermo Protocol and other international treaties which have been signed by the UK Government, but which it has not implemented in full.
The 2015 Act does not conform with the agreed international definition of trafficking because it centres its definition on travel and excludes exploitation of the prostitution of others, or of other forms of sexual exploitation, from the trafficking purposes to which the offences it creates apply, except where the exploitation can be categorised as a form of forced labour.
The international definition implicitly recognises that the most common motivation for sex trafficking is to profit from the victim’s prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation, such as pornography and that these cannot be considered normal forms of labour.
The UK Government’s failure to conform with definitions of trafficking in international treaties of which it is a signatory has been recognised as a concern by the independent review , the GRETA Committee and the CEDAW Committee.
The Government appears to have no intention of correcting this. The claims in its response to the home affairs select committee’s recent report on human trafficking that “the UK is a pioneer in combatting modern slavery” and that “the UK’s approach to eradicating the scourge of modern slavery has led the world” are false, as its approach has excluded exploitation of the prostitution of others, or of other forms of sexual exploitation from the ambit of the offences in the Modern Slavery Act 2015.
That the Government has effectively taken the side of those who profit from the sexual exploitation of others, and that its stance has resulted in some other countries adopting the same approach while it claims to be an anti-slavery pioneer is a national embarrassment, not a cause for self-congratulation.
Part 2.2 of your call to evidence entitled Exploitation and Abuse: Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking describes criminal offences enacted by Parliament as if they were part of an armoury of available sanctions currently in use, but the truth is that many of these offences are not being used by the police and Crown Prosecution Service at all.
The latest data on prosecutions and convictions of the various prostitution-related offences that are in force in England and Wales over the five years to 2022 leave little doubt that the police do not enforce the law and that the conduct these offences refer to has effectively been decriminalised. It is misleading to refer to them in a consultation document as available options when in practice they are not.
From a political accountability and democratic oversight perspective it is unfortunate to have to acknowledge, in what is likely to be a general election year, that legislative changes are pointless if they can simply be put to one side in spaces away from public scrutiny and left to gather dust.
Esther comments that:
“It was the FBI, not the National Crime Agency, which acted against Craigslist from the United States, although the section of its UK website for women seeking men was dominated at that point by pimps and extortionists who reported posts by people they didn’t control. A post which remained for months in the section for men seeking women sought an inexperienced young woman who could be groomed into a submissive, with the process being documented in photographs and in the writing of a novel and the woman then being sold as a prize to the highest bidder once she had been ‘trained’.
I contacted the man who posted it to point out that what he was proposing was likely to involve the commission of criminal offences. He told me that, because he had received no suitable responses, he had contacted traffickers from Eastern Europe on the dark web. They had presented him with rows of photographs of the faces of hundreds of young women identified only as numbers and said they could bring the woman he chose to the UK. He had found the numbering arousing. His response to being told of the risk of prosecution was to update his post with the comment that women who had been, or were in the sex industry, should not contact him. I was clearly not alone.”
Another time I met a man on a mainstream dating site who used the site to find women with whom he made Point of View (POV) films involving anal sex without lubrication or condoms for an online porn site. He recruited women into the porn industry in many parts of Europe and brought some of them to his studio in east London. The grimaces on women’s faces were what made him money. When I asked him why they agreed to be filmed he replied, “Easy money”, but it was very clear that they were going to end up in prostitution in the UK and elsewhere.
Although it is basic criminology that the likelihood of being caught is a bigger deterrent than the length of a sentence imposed following conviction, national police organisations and the Crown Prosecution Service measure priorities by the length of a maximum sentence, and don’t regard enforcing offences which address demand by targeting sex buyers, such as kerb-crawling or paying for sex with a person subject to force or coercion, or other, as of equal importance.
The National Crime Agency told the home affairs committee:
“There is a demand for sexual services in the UK which has created a sexual services marketplace where both autonomous, self-determined sex workers operate alongside traffickers exploiting victims of sexual exploitation. NCA does not aim to reduce the demand of legal sexual services however is undertaking work to tackle the demand for sexual exploitation.”
The demand for trafficked victims of sexual exploitation cannot be tackled without reducing demand for sexual exploitation more generally, wherever it comes from.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, those who profit from the sexual exploitation of others will move into spaces left by those who have been sentenced if the demand is not addressed. This is as true of pornography and the competitive online market for increasingly extreme content, as it is for prostitution.
[1] R v Matthews (Darren John) [2003] EWCA Crim 192.
[3] Fiona Vera-Gray, Clare McGlynn, Ibad Kureshi, Kate Butterby, Sexual violence as a sexual script in mainstream online pornography, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 61, Issue 5, September 2021, Pages 1243–1260