If you walked past a primary school and saw boys passing bottles of whisky around, you’d snatch them away, march inside and demand to see the headteacher. Yet that’s effectively what’s been happening. The addictive substance, however, is pornography. It won’t leave users with a hangover but it will change them forever. And it has warped an entire generation. Until age verification came into force this summer under the Online Safety Act, any child with an internet connection could find videos so depraved even the titles couldn’t be printed here.
The acts now presented as “normal” would, in any other context, result in a prison sentence. Incest, women dressed as children and scenes of choking and rape are served to first-time users on the world’s biggest platforms. Terrifyingly, half of young men and a third of young women say pornography is their main source of sex education.
The consequences are everywhere – in classrooms, bedrooms and police stations. Last year the National Police Chiefs’ Council reported a 7.6% rise in child sexual abuse offences – and, for the first time, most perpetrators were under 18.
Earlier this year the Bertin Review found 38% of young women had been throttled by a partner during sex, 34% gagged and nearly 60% slapped. Violence is no longer a deviation from sex – it is sex. B elatedly, the Government acted.
Age verification isn’t perfect – children can still reach sites through VPNs or an adult’s login – but it will stop most accidental exposure, which is how two-thirds first encounter porn.
Figures reported in the Financial Times show that UK visits to pornography sites have fallen sharply since the checks started. Traffic to Pornhub, the world’s largest free pornography site, has dropped by 77%, and overall visits from the UK are down by nearly a third.
VPN use briefly doubled but soon fell back. Even Pornhub’s Canadian owner Aylo admits there has been no mysterious spike to suggest Britons are simply masking their location. In other words, fewer Britons, and crucially fewer children, are logging in.
That’s good news. But the damage is done. While politicians dithered, unvetted relationship, sex and health education materials told children that pornography was harmless – even “fun” or “a treat”.
As with gender ideology, so-called experts weren’t protecting children – they were using them to promote a “sexpositive” adult agenda. Pornography has also become a staple of sexual abuse.
Some of the Pakistani grooming gangs who terrorised – and still operate in – towns across England filmed their crimes and used the footage to humiliate and blackmail victims.
Undoubtedly, that material will have found its way on to mainstream sites – watched by respectable members of society, from police officers to teachers and judges. Meanwhile, politicians looked the other way.
Terrified by the spectre of Mary Whitehouse, they left Silicon Valley to build a business model out of children’s curiosity and innocence. The Left was too squeamish to judge, the Right too cowardly to regulate. Between them, they sacrificed a generation.
Had the victims belonged to any other minority group but children, there would have been social cachet in defending them. The damage shows up not only online but in our moral instincts.
According to research by the End Violence Against Women Coalition, only 42% of 18 to 24-year-olds recognise that being married or in a relationship doesn’t mean automatic consent – compared with 87% of over-65s.
For all the progressive talk about consent in schools, the generation raised on porn holds more backward views about rape than their grandparents. The consequences will play out on the bodies of the vulnerable: boys taught that real men hurt the women they desire, and girls taught that pain is proof of love.
Many no longer even recognise abuse when it happens – that’s how effective our collective denial has been. The Online Safety Act is a start, but only that. Pornography has already rewritten what sex means for millions.
Protecting children is not prudishness; it’s civilisation’s most basic act of decency. But if we’ve lost the courage to say what’s right and wrong, pornographers will go on teaching morality for us. Just as we shield the young from alcohol because it poisons the body, we must protect them from pornography because it poisons the soul.
Josephine Bartosch is co-author with Robert Jessell of Pornocracy, published today by John Wiley and Sons Ltd
