Pornography depicting high levels of sexual and physical aggression against women is now mainstream and freely available to everyone, including children, with a few clicks online, Women’s Aid has warned.
This sexually violent content often features the strangling of women during sex, verbally degrading them and spitting in their faces, along with “countless other acts of callousness and cruelty”.
In turn, this content is fueling high levels of violence against women and girls, according to the national domestic violence organisation.
It has also warned that pornography and the multi-billion euro global industry is shaping the sexual expectations of children and young people in ways that normalise harmful, coercive, dangerous, and abusive behaviours.
Today, Women’s Aid is to publish new Irish research examining how pornography depicting high levels of sexual and physical aggression against women actively distorts and breaks the boundary between ‘sex’ and ‘sexual violence’.
The report also finds that the consumption of sexually violent content impacts negatively on the healthy sexual development and behaviour of adults and young people leading to sexual violence, unhealthy relationships, and hostile misogyny while compounding gender inequality.
Its findings “clearly” confirm that the vast majority of pornography does nothing to promote healthy sexuality, equality and intimacy but is instead creating a conducive context for violence and degradation, according to Women’s Aid chief executive Sarah Benson.
“This is directly relevant to our work, as women contacting Women’s Aid for support have identified their partner’s use of pornography as a component of the sexual coercion and abuse they are enduring.”
Women’s Aid is also “deeply concerned” about the increasing phenomenon of image-based sexual abuse, she added, whereby ‘porn culture’ leads boys and young men to feel entitled to ask or demand, and girls and young women feel they are expected to share nudes or to film, intimate videos as a ‘normal’ part of romantic relationships.
“Such images may then be shared without consent by their partners/ex-partners or held against them as forms of blackmail and coercion,” Ms Benson said.
By sharing these images, intimate partners are in practice creating more pornography for further consumption, as well as to harass, threaten and shame young women.
Pornography also has a hugely negative impact on young people and society more generally, she added.
“It reinforces misogynistic and disrespectful stereotypes and undermines any educational work on consent, on safe, healthy, and respectful relationships and towards gender equality.”
Meanwhile, the report’s authors have called for a wider conversation about the issue of sexual consent in the context of a “pornography saturated culture.”
Several dedicated programmes have helped Ireland make great strides when it comes to educating young people about consent, according to Ruth Breslin, director of the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute (SERP) and co-author of the report alongside Dr Monica O’Connor.
“However, this progress is being undermined by the fact that boys’ sexual expectations of girls are being molded by pornography, while at the same time girls have been groomed by pornography to submit to acts that they do not want and do not enjoy.”