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ResourceUK government-sponsored report on pornography
We welcome the publication of the Government-sponsored assessment of the legislation, regulation and enforcement of pornography and recommendations for government and regulatory bodies, carried out by Baroness Bertin @BertinGabby. We have not yet read the report in full, but at first glance we concur with her findings and recommendations.
“During the course of this Review, I have come across countless examples of just how deeply pornography and its influences have become embedded in our society. The schoolboy waiting for the police to arrest him in his headteacher’s office for sexual assault who was pleading to be told what he had done wrong. Boys as young as 14 asking a teacher how to choke girls during sex. A Lead Nurse at a Sexual Assault Referral Centre describing the increasing number of sexually inflicted injuries that her service deals with on a daily basis. Nobody will convince me that online pornography was not an influencing factor in the extreme fetishes uncovered in the Pelicot case. Nor was it remotely surprising that Dame Angiolini highlighted that the murderer of Sarah Everard had a history of viewing violent abusive pornography.
Despite the abundance of these harms, there has been a total absence of government scrutiny of the sector. No minister or department takes responsibility. The patchwork of laws that capture offences specific to pornography are mostly ineffective and rarely enforced. Policing in this area is low-priority and reactive. Collection of enforcement data is minimal and inconsistent. Prosecutions are low – the Review found that there were over 1,000 charges for extreme (illegal) pornography possession in 2018/19, but there was no further information on how many of these led to convictions.
Meanwhile, there is no external moderation, monitoring, or auditing of online pornographic content. Mechanisms for reporting and removing illegal content are not fit for purpose. It is remarkable that the closest to any kind of regulator the online pornography industry has is payment processors, which, on one occasion, refused to handle transactions for a major website due to concerns that it contained child sexual abuse material…”
Download the report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-world-the-challenge-of-regulating-online-pornography
Thank you for drawing attention to this. Of course this report was organised by a woman; I think that of anything is ever going to change women will have to be the ones to do it.
I really hope our sorry state of a government will finally do something right and act on this report.
Men seem content to watch the world burn, as long as their peepees feel good.
Unfortunately the only place that the word 'lesbian' is used is quoting Stonewall to justify the use of the word 'queer'. No mention of the impact of pornography on lesbians, i.e. harassment from men.
Thanks for posting this. One of the things that makes me feel so frustrated and helpless about the state of things is the inability of people in power to take a stand against porn and actually try to do something about banning it. It’s sick.