WHEN I was a teenager, the only generally available pornography or erotica was surreptitiously traded postcards of coyly posed, naked women or under-the-counter magazines with innocuous titles like Health and Beauty. Not exactly uplifting visual material, but hardly damaging.

Today, we are living in a world where access to extremist material of all kinds of sexual depravity is readily available on the internet. Pornography has taken on a new and frightening significance. It is also a perfect paradigm of capitalism in that it exploits the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies, engenders huge profits and cultivates urges and desires no-one knew they had.

As a recent article by Harriet Grant in the Guardian showed, many of the men convicted of online child abuse say that they began by logging on to one of the many “mainstream” porn sites, but were, over time, taken to increasingly more abhorrent material, involving violence and child abuse by the inbuilt algorithms and without their conscious desire for such material.

Every month, in Britain, 850 men (and they are all men) are arrested for online child abuse offences, and that is probably only the tip of the iceberg. But even more concerning is the impact extreme porn sites are having on children.

Children are learning about sex and forming attitudes to sexual behaviour and to women primarily from porn sites. A report by the Children’s Commissioner for England from May 2023 found that almost half of 16 to 21-year-olds they spoke to thought girls expected sex to involve physical aggression.

The government is looking at plans to bring in tighter controls on the industry, which would demand age verification processes being in place by July and monitored by Ofcom, but they have waited too long before considering even this timid action.

While our government dithers over appropriate regulation, the purveyors of pornography continue to rake in big profits. Pornhub, one of the chief purveyors of pornography globally, is owned by the cynically named Ethical Capital Partners. They have despatched lobbyists to press the British government not to implement an age verification procedure or any other legislation to prevent children viewing porn sites.

Much of the extreme porn material involves the abuse of children in poor countries — they come cheap and regulation barely exists.

Unicef is alarmed by the massive quantity of pornography now available online, including increasingly graphic and extreme content that is easily accessible to children of all ages. Efforts to regulate content and restrict children’s access to pornography have not kept pace with technological sophistication that has profoundly altered the landscape for the consumption of pornography.

For years, evidence has built up that extreme material is too easily available for first-time viewers, served by powerful algorithms, and it is having a powerful impact on how boys, particularly, view girls and women and is determining their sexual behaviour.

While many jurisdictions have effectively restricted children’s access to pornography in non-digital media, including by making it illegal to distribute pornography to children or knowingly expose them to it, efforts to do the same in digital environments have not been effective.

Pornographic content can seriously harm children. Exposure to pornography at a young age can lead to poor mental health, sexism and objectification, as well as violence. When children view pornography that portrays abusive and misogynistic acts, they may come to view such behaviour as normal and acceptable.

Barnardo’s senior policy adviser Jess Edwards and development children’s service manager Laura Tomsa emphasise that viewing pornography and other pornographic content can have a big impact on young people and children. “From their understanding of sex and relationships, to the way they think about their own body, pornography has the powerful ability to distort understandings,” they say.

“Barnardo’s is very concerned about the impacts of pornography on children. In our services, we see how viewing pornography can harm children, affecting their mental health, and perceptions of healthy relationships, sex, and issues like consent.” Edwards adds, “Content that would be prohibited offline is prevalent online, and considered mainstream.”

Physical aggression in pornography is a big issue. A study that analysed heterosexual scenes published on Pornhub and XVideos found that 45 per cent of scenes from Pornhub and 35 per cent from XVideos contained at least one act of physical aggression. Concerningly, the study found that women’s responses to the aggression were either positive or neutral, and rarely negative.

The government’s own research has found that there is a “widespread consensus about the harmful role that violent pornography can play in violence against women and girls.”

In light of this evidence, “we are calling for the regulation of online pornographic content to be brought in line with how it is regulated offline and look forward to working with the government through the Review into Pornography on this,” Edwards emphasised.

The Finnish organisation Protect the Children notes that 20 per cent of children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence, 33 per cent of abused children never tell anyone about their experience, and 36 million global reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation were registered in 2023.

Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, from the Department of Sociology, Durham University, addresses the way women are depicted on-screen and the real-life consequences.

“Recent research conducted by myself and others at Durham University found that one in every eight titles on the front pages of Britain’s most popular porn websites described sexual violence against women and girls,” she explains.

“This isn’t sexually violent porn hidden in some dark recess of the internet, only accessed by a few bad men. This is mainstream pornography on mainstream sites with the mainstream message that sexual violence is sexy. And there are companies behind it making millions.

“We are living in a world where women’s humanity is constantly undermined. Where what we look like is more important than what we do, and where what is done to us is more important than who we are.

“Research on men’s sexual aggression has shown that the denial of women’s ‘human uniqueness’ is a driving factor for some men who commit sexual offences. This means that, to make it harder for these men to offend, we need to make sure women are represented at all times as individuals with full lives. Unfortunately, that’s often not what we see.

“We know that men are the majority of consumers (and producers) of online porn, but my own work has found that women’s use may be much higher — and more complicated — than we think. Research from Britain suggests that porn use begins during the early teenage years, though first-time viewing can be much earlier.

“And the kind of porn that everyone is seeing should be worrying us all. It has been claimed that porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.”

If we wish to prevent coming generations from being indoctrinated by extreme and violent pornography and misogynistic attitudes, strong and effective regulatory legislation is vital and urgent.