All Porn Is ‘Violence Against Women,’ U.K. Parliamentary Committee Says

An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) studying sexual exploitation in the United Kingdom says that not only is porn a major contributor to real-world violence, it is violence. The group is calling on U.K. lawmakers to enact a bevy of new laws regulating porn.

Their concerns are not just about coercion in the porn industry, porn’s availability to minors, or other common worries. Rather, the group echoes old radical feminist tropes about pornography—that there is no such thing as ethical porn, that it’s all “exploitation,” and its mere existence is “a form of violence against women.”

Sigh.

All-Party Parliamentary Groups “have no official status within Parliament,” according to the Parliament website. Nonetheless, “these groups can sometimes be influential,” it says. A 2022 report from the House of Commons Committee on Standards called them “a vital part of how Parliament works.”

So it’s worrying to see statements like these from Diana Johnson, a member of Parliament and chair of the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation: “It’s now high time that Government acted and recognised the damage caused by the pornography industry to the lives and the safety of women.”

The committee calls for things such as mandatory age verification for porn websites (a scheme that may sound good but is almost impossible to implement—and has tons of privacy concerns, since it means all visitors turning over identification—in practice) and also more vague changes, like addressing porn “as commercial sexual exploitation, and a form of violence against women, in legislation and policy.”

The group also calls for giving all performers a right to veto their images being online at any time, even if they have previously consented and been paid for their work. This would not only create major problems for porn producers and distributors but be completely unworkable in practice, since something uploaded to the internet has a way of traveling even if folks later wish it wouldn’t.

The committee’s new report—Pornography regulation: The case for Parliamentary reform—repeats a number of unfounded or debunked theses about porn, like the idea that it’s a major driver of off-screen violence against women and sexist attitudes.

In fact, there’s research showing that people who watch porn may hold more egalitarian views than those who don’t.

And while some research has shown a potential link between high levels of sexual aggression and high levels of porn consumption (among both women and men), there’s nothing proving that this is causal (that is, that porn consumption drives aggression). Aggression could drive people to watch more porn, or some third factor could drive both.

And if pornography were really fueling real-world violence, we would expect to see violent crime rising as the internet has made porn much more widely accessible over the past three decades. Instead, this is a period in which murder, sexual assault, and other violent crime rates have largely decreased.

Some research has shown that people who commit rape actually consume less porn than those who aren’t rapists. And the failure to find links between viewing porn—in the olden days or now—and committing violence goes way back.

“Exposure to pornography during adolescence had little effect on persons who later became rapists and child molesters,” the Associated Press reported 53 years ago on the findings of a presidential commission on pornography. Rather, “sexual deviates generally came from homes where pornography was restricted and sex was never discussed,” and “most deviates had been severely punished as teenagers by their parents when caught with pornographic material.”

Taken together, evidence suggests that banning pornography or severely punishing people who watch it could even lead to an increase in violence against women. Meanwhile, cracking down on internet porn platforms could not only hurt the livelihoods of many independent performers and content creators, it could also drive people into