Online Pornography is now a Public Health Crisis

Trafficking, child-on-child sex abuse, videos of rape, deaths from rough sex and soaring levels of break-ups and erectile dysfunction

Online pornography has become ubiquitous in the UK, accessible with a few taps on a smartphone. It is so normalised it has not only crept into popular culture, it now dominates it.

The phenomena of the Kardashians proves this. Increasing numbers of ever younger women having increasingly extreme plastic surgeries to look more and more like sex dolls. The Kardashians are not famous for singing acting, sports or any other skill. They have been made on surgical tables precisely for selling sex.

Music videos are increasingly hypersexualised. P*** has become increasingly normalised.Women are being told it is empowering to sell their bodies. There is also a growing phenomenon of women conducting illegal and dangerous relationships with men, a result I believe to be a combination of a breakdown in commitment we're dating apps also provide an unlimited supply of potential partners, and the narrative that casual sex with a range of partners is a good thing. Psychologically for women, especially, this is deeply untrue.

As a result, there seems to have been an increase in newspaper stories about women who work on Only Fans - or aspire to look like they do - working in prisons and getting into relationships with male prisoners, or school teachers having relationships with their students. To me, this smacks of desperation due to the breakdown of healthy male and female relationships.

But it's not just cultural and societal consequences that concern me. Increasing levels of the worst forms of criminality from sex trafficking, to extreme child abuse to revenge p*** to bestiality to rape videos, are now being fed directly to porn users with zero consequence.

At the outbreak of the Ukraine war, where hundreds of thousands of women and girls fled for safety, there were people traffickers and criminal gangs waiting to kidnap these women and sell them directly into the sex industry. When a man watches extreme content, for example bukakke, which involves multiple men, degrading a woman by ejaculating on her sometimes urinating on her, how does the viewer know that the woman involved is not there under duress? I think we can all agree that the majority of mentally stable, secure women take zero pleasure in participating in such horrific acts. So we are left to conclude that these women, either psychologically vulnerable or potentially under the control of a pimp.

While often dismissed as harmless adult entertainment, today’s online pornography reveals profound societal, psychological, and criminal harms.

Unchecked Content and Criminality

Mainstream porn platforms host vast amounts of material with minimal moderation. Much content involves violence, degradation, or illegal acts, including non-consensual material, trafficking victims, and "barely legal" or incest-themed videos that blur into child exploitation territory. An overwhelming majority of pornographic content would be deemed extreme, if not illegal, in the real world.

Payment processors like Visa and Mastercard have been taken to court for enabling such material. In 2020, they severed ties with Pornhub after reports of child abuse material, rape, and trafficking videos, leading to mass removals. After being made to conduct an audit, Pornhub was forced to take down eighty eight percent of its content.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported record levels of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online in 2024, with proactive detections surging dramatically.

People trafficking and paedophilia intersect directly with the industry. Offenders use platforms to share CSAM, groom victims, or monetise abuse. The National Crime Agency (NCA) notes increasing complexity, with online platforms facilitating live-streamed abuse and AI-generated CSAM.

Up to 840,000 offenders in the UK pose a sexual risk to children, with hundreds of thousands of monthly searches for CSAM. On top of this, women are being exploited, blackmailed, degraded and forced to participate in extreme sexual acts. Most users of porn surely can have no idea of the provenance of the material. They cannot guarantee that the participants are consenting to what they are doing. In some cases, a woman's rape video has been monetised and put on pornography platforms to be viewed thousands upon thousands of times.

The likelihood is, if you are watching a porn video, you are actively participating and enabling a real world sex attack. Many men would like to think that if they saw a woman in the street being sexually assaulted or degraded or violently attacked or raped, they would intervene to stop it. And yet, by going on, user generated porn websites, they're actively encouraging it, and in many cases, financing the perpetrators.

Even without industrialised levels of sex crime being facilitated by online platforms, the overall impact on society and relationships is becoming clear.

Neurological Rewiring, Addiction, and the Brain

Online pornography like online gambling has been proven to have addictive qualities. Even rewiring the brain. Regular pornography users can swipe between tens if not hundreds of videos of increasinly extreme content in order to reach satisfaction.

There has been a huge increase in male erectile dysfunction among under forties, where once it was a niche condition among younger men. Estimated once to be a single digit percentage of the young male population, it is now recorded as being present in 1 in 3 young men as the direct result of watching pornography.

Neuroscience shows that frequent porn consumption can change neural pathways similarly to substance addictions. It floods the reward system with dopamine, leading to tolerance, escalation to more extreme content, and desensitisation to real-life intimacy.

Cambridge University research found brain activity in compulsive users mirroring drug addicts. Heavy use correlates with reduced grey matter in areas for impulse control and motivation, and weaker prefrontal cortex function. Younger users show stronger neural responses, raising concerns for developing brains. UK studies link this to not only erectile dysfunction in young men, but depression, anxiety, and preference for porn over real partners.

Addiction signs include failed quit attempts, escalation, and interference with daily life. Estimates suggest significant portions of users, especially men, struggle with problematic use.

Child Abuse and Exposure

Children in the UK encounter porn at shockingly young ages. Research from the Children’s Commissioner indicates many see it by age 9–11, with the average first exposure around 13 (some as young as 6–7). Not only online porn sites, but social media (e.g. X, Instagram) and search engines are common gateways, even if often accidental.

By ages 14–18, a substantial minority watch frequently; some report habits and addiction. Exposure links to distorted views of sex, body image issues, and earlier sexual activity. This has directly resulted in children raping abusing and sexually assaulting one another at increasingly younger ages, even between siblings.

Child-on-Child Sexual Offences

A direct and alarming link exists between porn exposure and harmful sexual behaviour among children. The Children’s Commissioner found that 50% of investigated child-on-child sexual abuse cases referenced acts common in pornography (e.g., violent or coercive elements).

Police-recorded child sexual abuse offences remain high (over 100,000 in England and Wales in 2023/24), with children comprising a large share of attackers. Group-based and online-facilitated abuse is rising. Early porn exposure increases risks of aggression, rape myth acceptance, and acting out scenes on peers.

Impact on Relationships and Divorce

Porn use also correlates with marital strain and higher divorce rates. US longitudinal data shows porn consumption roughly doubles divorce likelihood, with stronger effects for women.

It fosters unrealistic expectations, reduces emotional intimacy, increases dissatisfaction, and can lead to secrecy or escalation. UK practitioners report porn contributing to relationship breakdowns, and a notable percentage of divorces.

The Rough Sex Defence Scandal and Changing Attitudes

Porn’s normalisation of violence has influenced courts and culture. The "rough sex" or "sex game gone wrong" defence appeared in dozens of UK cases, often involving strangulation common in porn. Campaign group We Can’t Consent To This documented over 60 deaths (mostly women) where this was claimed, with a tenfold rise in such defences.

This led to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, clarifying that consent to serious harm for sexual gratification is not a defence. Yet reports persist of choking, slapping, and aggression becoming normalised among young people.

Extreme Practices Among Children and Teenagers

UK surveys reveal disturbing trends: many young adults (18–21) encountered violent porn (choking, aggression) before 18, with a significant minority seeking it out. Nearly half reported experiencing violent sex acts. A heartbreaking survey of teenagers conducted by the Daily Mail revealed that many young girls have had anal and oral sex, without even having had their first kiss.

Schools report injuries from teens mimicking porn (e.g., choking) but most gruesome of all is the increase in young girls reporting anal incontinence issues.

A fifth of surveyed teens watch frequently, linking to acting out extreme acts. This shifts attitudes: consent blurred, aggression romanticised, and pain and violence eroticised.

Online pornography’s ease, anonymity, and profitability have created an unregulated experiment with severe consequences. It is a multi-billion pound global industry. With almost no regulation, it is a nexus of extreme sexual crime. Even ordinary users simply by logging on to a user generated pornography website are contributing to this. Without the clicks the platforms wouldn't survive.

It has become clear that user generated content pornography websites, when nobody can know the provenance of a video, nobody can know the consent, and where there is extremely limited checking of the nature of the porn, has led us into a societal situation where damaging and extreme sexual practises are having an impact on child safety, attitudes towards women and a breakdown in normal, healthy human relationships. It is a public health crisis of significant and real magnitude.

My belief is online pornography websites must only use verified and paid actors and actresses. The content must therefore be paid for up front and the industry regulated. It must not be a situation where anybody can click on an online pornography website for free and watch whatever they want, regardless of the real world, collateral damage. In much the same way that it is illegal to make bootleg alcohol, my belief is it must be illegal to make unregulated pornography. Age verification does not go far enough. In my opinion, websites such as Pornhub should simply be shut down.

If people want to access adult content, it should have the same shame and taboo as it always did: Getting a video from an adult store or buying an adult magazine from a newsagents. If adults want to make and sell pornography, if adults want to buy and consume pornography, and that is in a regulated environment, that is one matter. But having a mass free-for-all where anyone can post a video of any nature and anyone can watch it, is plainly not only a grotesque indicator that the moral fabric of our society has been severely eroded, it is having a real world medical impact, societal impact, psychological impact and massive criminal consequences.

I implore anybody who ever uses such websites to simply stop. Because what you may think is harmless, a right and a freedom, is one of the most vile, dehumanising and uncontrolled industries today, where the victim count is innumerable.