In an interview this week, Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, told journalists that violent pornography is “fundamentally changing” the views of boys about sex. In nearly a third of rapes reported to the police during the year to March 2024, the victims were girls aged 18 and under, and police forces received more reports of rape from 14-year-old girls than any other age group.

While it is excellent that the Home Secretary is publicly acknowledging the catastrophic nature of the situation that we now find ourselves in, we should not be surprised. As our policy adviser, Esther, explained at our Rethinking Consent webinar in February, the deterioration in young people’s attitudes to sex and sexual violence has been clear for years and was confirmed by surveys about attitudes to rape and sexual assault in 2018 and six years later in 2024.

In the 2018 survey, younger respondents held views more closely aligned to the law compared with older respondents who had grown up in an era when domestic violence and abuse wasn’t taken seriously and marital rape wasn’t considered a crime. Six years later, the situation was reversed.

The 2024 survey found that the views of 18–24-year-olds had deteriorated significantly and now aligned less closely with the law than those of older people. This suggests that porn and misconceptions spread in digital spaces have more influence than what young people are taught in school, and that this is likely to be equally true for under 18-year-olds.

But that’s not all. Recent police data shows that children are now the biggest perpetrators of (reported) sexual abuse against children and police say that the involvement of minor offenders is exacerbated by the accessibility of violent porn. The media colludes in misrepresenting the law through saying, for example, ‘a man was convicted of having sex with a 12-year-old’ when what they are referring to is, in the eyes of the law in England and Wales, the rape of a child.

Further misconceptions come through the social and cultural environment that permits and even valorises the prostitution industry and its ever expanding spinoffs and online portals (such as OnlyFans, and webcamming and prostitution advertising sites) which present men and boys with an endless catalogue of young women who are apparently sexually available and willing or even desperate to fulfil their every whim, while simultaneously defining this as a great job for women, through the use and acceptance of the “sex work” terminology.

This is highly misleading, just like when the big porn sites promote dangerous and violent practices to get more clicks, thereby suggesting to children and young people that sexual violence is what sex is. What men are buying in prostitution – and in webcamming and “intimate” content on OnlyFans etc – is not healthy, mutually satisfying sexual intimacy but rather the control of sexual activity. It is sex on the man’s terms with little or no consideration of the woman’s wishes, feelings or enjoyment – while she is obliged to pretend that it is pleasurable and that he is a stud– or she won’t get paid or risks reprisals from the brothel, the website, the agency, or her boyfriend/pimp, if not from the punter himself.

It is impossible to overemphasise how confusing this is for everyone, but not least for boys and young men. Reviews that sex buyers post on punter forums and elsewhere about their encounters with prostituted women demonstrate this confusion and make it clear that men routinely continue with the sexual activity even though it is obvious to the reader that the women they paid were unwilling, subject to threats or coercion, intoxicated, or otherwise lacked autonomy. In other words many men have little shame that what they are indulging in and publicly describing is in fact sexual assault under UK law.

At NMN, we are convinced that little is likely to change in terms of the epidemic of male violence against women and girls until or unless we, as a society, are more honest about what is really going on here and we no longer tolerate this state-sanctioned commercialised abuse of women and girls.

Misogynistic entitlement does not suddenly appear in a vacuum. It is curated and cultivated by a profoundly misogynistic culture. This will persist as long as young people see older men who pay for sex (and third parties profiting from that) escaping sanction altogether. Men who pay for sex are more likely to be violent towards other women and so the cycle of violence against women will continue.

If the Home Secretary really wants to prevent and reduce violence against women and girls, she urgently needs to take action to reduce demand for prostitution by sanctioning buyers and pimps, providing support for women who want to exit prostitution, and introducing programmes to educate young people. She needs to introduce the Nordic Model, along with robust age verification on all online porn, and the closure of the big prostitution advertising sites.

More on how porn affects attitudes and behaviour.

In March 2024 we responded to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s call for evidence on pornography regulation, legislation and enforcement in connection with the Independent Pornography Review set up by the Conservative government.

For a shortened version of our responses and to download a PDF copy of our full responses, see Evidence of the harmful impact of online pornography on viewers and society.