Violence against Women and Girls: Pornography Prostitution

Tracy Gilbert Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Westminster Hall

[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.”

[Tracy Gilbert (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab)]

I must congratulate and thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. This debate should be difficult to listen to, but it still does not compare to the violent impact of pornography on women and girls. Does she agree that the upcoming violence against women and girls strategy should explicitly recognise and address prostitution and pornography as forms of commercial sexual exploitation?

[Joani Reid]

I completely agree. I hope—and this is a point that I am sure the Minister will respond to later in the debate—that there is a section within the strategy to address these issues. That could possibly be advanced as a result of collaboration between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

I was talking about the abuse that women who are involved in online pornography have suffered: 56% were physically assaulted as a result of their online pornography, and 65% raped. No other industry in Britain would be allowed to operate with those statistics. Meanwhile, OnlyFans executives pay themselves handsomely and its owner reportedly takes home £1.3 million a day. That is the price of women’s pain. But the harm extends well beyond women directly exploited. Its cultural impact is shaping the attitudes and behaviours of an entire generation.