Violence against Women and Girls: Pornography Prostitution

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of pornography prostitution on violence against women and girls.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I begin by thanking two organisations that have been hugely helpful in preparing for today’s debate: UK Feminista, which provides the secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, and the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation—CEASE—and particularly Gemma Kelly, its head of policy.

Let me set out from the beginning precisely what I mean by pornography prostitution. It is the fusion of the pornography industry and the sex trade into one system. It is the buying, selling and consumption of sexual access to women, livestreamed, or filmed and uploaded, and monetised as entertainment. It is seen by many as a new and booming industry. I disagree: it is commercialised abuse, repackaged and sold as entertainment. It is a form of violence against women and girls.

Nowhere is that clearer than on OnlyFans, a UK-based company that has now become the global giant of online sexual exploitation. Last year, it generated $6.6 billion in revenue. It markets itself as a harmless subscription platform but, in reality, it is the largest pimping empire in the world today. I want to focus on three areas where OnlyFans is enabling violence against women and girls.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

First of all, I commend the hon. Lady on bringing this forward. I spoke to her beforehand to ensure that my thoughts are similar to hers. There is no doubt that online platforms such as OnlyFans pose a potential threat to how young people perceive sexual relations. Does the hon. Lady agree—the Minister is here to answer this, of course—that the law needs to be brought up to date to ensure that OnlyFans and all other online pornographic platforms, including adult services websites, put proper age and consent checks in place to protect young people from damaging content online?

[Joani Reid]

I agree. I think that age verification is hugely important in tackling children’s exposure to pornography. It is not just on those websites; it is found on mainstream websites as well, and I think that is something that we need to look at in the next regulations under the Online Safety Act 2023.

As I said, OnlyFans is the largest pimping empire in the world. It is a playground for child sexual abuse and exploitation. Harm and coercion are suffered by women who become so-called content creators, and there is a wider societal and cultural impact, particularly on children and young people.

I begin with the most damning evidence: OnlyFans claims to have a zero-tolerance approach to child abuse, yet Reuters has documented at least 30 criminal cases between 2019 and 2024 in the United States alone involving child sexual abuse material on the platform, including hundreds of videos and images, some depicting extreme abuse. In one horrific case, the graphic abuse of a 16-year-old girl was monetised for more than a year before it was taken down, and that was only after Reuters started asking questions. We should be under no illusion: OnlyFans is not a safe platform for consenting adults to express and enjoy themselves. As one survivor put it,

“A whole company has made money off of my biggest trauma”.

The truth is that all that is just the tip of the iceberg, because OnlyFans hides content behind millions of individual paywalls, and there is no meaningful way for independent investigators, charities, or even law enforcement to monitor the full scale of the abuse. That is not transparency; it is secrecy by design.

Ofcom fined OnlyFans for providing misleading information about age verification. While the company claims to set a global standard, the reality is stark. It has no meaningful age verification in the vast majority of the more than 100 countries in which it operates. How many of the 500,000 new users signing up every day are children? We do not know because OnlyFans will not say. OnlyFans likes to boast that every video is reviewed by a human moderator, but the figures just do not add up. Last month alone, 62 million pieces of content were uploaded. Independent experts have said that it would take tens of thousands of moderators to review it all, but OnlyFans employs just a few dozen staff. It outsources the rest to Poland and Ukraine, behind non-disclosure agreements, with no transparency. When the company tells us it has zero tolerance for abuse, we must ask: zero tolerance or zero credibility? The evidence suggests the latter. It is not a British success story; it is the British export of the abuse of children to the world.

The second reality is that OnlyFans is not the empowering feminist fairytale that its marketing suggests. It claims to give women financial freedom, but the facts tell another story: 73% of the profits go to the top 10% of creators, and the average woman makes just £4 a month. That is not liberation; it is a lottery in which a handful at the top get rich and millions of others are driven to push their boundaries further and further to survive. As one former content creator described it,

“I wasn’t there. I was doing things like a robot.”

Another said,

“When you’re making an OnlyFans, you are gambling…Betting that your clients are strangers who don’t cross into your real world.”

She said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her when she discovered that the man who had paid her over $10,000 over a two-year period for her explicit videos was not a stranger but her uncle.

Research by Talita, an organisation in Sweden that supports women out of prostitution, pornography and trafficking, found that almost all women drawn into online pornography had suffered childhood trauma: 96% reported abuse, 88% sexual abuse, and 79% physical abuse. Predators deliberately target vulnerability. Women do not wake up one day just wanting to make porn. As one survivor put it,

“At first I told myself, I’ll just sell a foot photo. And before you know it, you’re drawn in step by step.”