UK: Violence Against Women and Girls

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate on violence against women and girls and thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Drake and Lady Warwick. I have spoken before about my fears for girls and young women today and about how our rights and the way we are treated seem to be going backwards. Central to these fears is online pornography. I will expand on the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and others.

Violent, hardcore, misogynistic, racist and utterly disturbing pornography is ubiquitous online, not on the dark web but on mainstream porn sites and all major social media platforms. Mainstream porn platforms host vast, unknown quantities of illegal content, such as videos of trafficking, rape and sexual violence, child sexual abuse material and image-based sexual abuse. I assure those who think it is still like the top-shelf magazines or videos of old that it is not. Regular porn videos include choking and strangulation of women during sex, men ejaculating on women’s faces, verbal aggression and degradation, and women being penetrated by multiple men at the same time or one after another. I hesitate to encourage noble Lords to watch porn, but until you see it—I have not been able to face watching the worst—you cannot imagine how utterly violent and vile it is.

This material is freely available online to adults and children of any age. While we are hopeful of getting age verification regulation in the Online Safety Bill, it is important to note that, while we debate Bills, children as young as nine are accessing this hardcore material. Nothing blocks them watching it.

This is not a niche issue. For context, the porn industry’s revenue estimates globally are as high as $97 billion. By comparison, Netflix brings in about $11.7 billion. Porn sites received more website traffic in 2020 than Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Zoom, Pinterest and LinkedIn combined. In 2019, there were more than 42 billion site visits to Pornhub and, during the pandemic, Ofcom reported that Pornhub had a bigger audience than the BBC. In 2020, a study by a digital marketing company concluded that Pornhub was the technology company with the third-greatest impact on society in the 21st century.

The Children’s Commissioner for England held a meeting here this week in which we heard her evidence that children are frequently exposed to violent pornography depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts. The impact of this is clear. Some 47% of respondents in research carried out by her office stated that girls now expect sex to involve physical aggression and a further 42% stated that girls enjoy physically aggressive sex acts. Porn is shaping sexual scripts and relationships. This is deeply alarming. No wonder girls no longer want to become women.

Another alarming issue is the “barely legal” genre of pornography. This content suggests sexual activity with children, where petite, young-looking performers are made to look underage through the use of props such as stuffed toys, lollipops and school uniform. This content is extremely harmful, promoting violence against women and girls, sexualising children and driving demand for real child sexual abuse material. While it is illegal and prohibited offline, it remains legal online. This must be immediately rectified by the Online Safety Bill; I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and the campaign groups leading the charge on this.

What happens on porn sets, wherever they are located, is violence against women and girls. They are trafficked into the billion-dollar porn industry, used, violated, raped and tortured, and left to live with the consequences of catastrophic physical and mental trauma—and those are the ones who escape with their lives. If we want to end the epidemic of violence against women and girls, we need to stop the violence of the porn industry, both the violence in it and the violence that it leads to.