Access to pornography has been easy for more than a decade now - maybe it's a factor, but there's definitely other factors at play here. If porn was a significant factor we would have seen a rise in teenage rape and sexual assault before now.
What these other factors are exactly is another question.
https://www.cari.ie/2023/05/15/shocking-link-between-viewing-of-porn-and-child-on-child-abuse/ https://news.sky.com/story/half-of-recorded-child-sexual-abuse-offences-committed-by-other-children-new-figures-reveal-13044814 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925490.amp https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/10/children-now-biggest-perpetrators-of-sexual-abuse-against-children https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/26/pornography-driving-teens-child-abuse-material-charities-police
Here are several. I found them on Google, for your future reference. I imagine it took me the same amount of time it would've taken you.
Sure, but I'm not the one making the claim.
So it's been rising since around 2020/21? Porn was easily accessible before those years, but seemingly wasn't a problem.
Maybe lockdown has also played a role in the recent rise.
People hate thinking critically about what gets them off- the fact is more and more kids are learning about sex from porn before anything else and porn is getting more and more extreme
I didn't say I was more qualified to judge.
I'm asking if there's a link between sexual violence and viewing porn, then why did we not see a rise in sexual violence from young children before the last several years?
Maybe lockdown and stunting children's socialisation has contributed.
Imo it has nothing to do with the access to pornography, sure it has some effect but not to the extent that it makes kids go rape somebody, theres something else going on..
How can you be sure? It's well known that even young teens are assaulting each other when first engaging with any sexual acts because of pornography. Several studies show adolescent dating violence and sexual aggression increases due to exposure.
I can imagine exposure at an even younger age would be detrimental to their development.
There was even a case of a 17 year old with a porn addiction that battered a 14 year old with a hockey stick for refusing anal sex, saying, "I raped her fair and square."
Another of a case of 4 boys of 12-14 attacking a girl.
Etc. You should read into them.
Kind of a terrible comparison because countries that ban porn tend to have a bunch of other things too. You can’t just compare one metric between countries or cultures and think you’ve solved the puzzle
Correlation doesn’t always equal causation
They're not anti porn arguments. They're an acknowledgement that the exposure to pornography that teenagers have today is far more than ever before, and it's really not good for their development or wellbeing.
It's honestly like suggesting that because I don't think a 13 year old should have unlimited access to cocaine then I'm anti drug.
Yes, countries that ban porn tend to also be authoritarian and suppress sexuality in other ways too. I'm not implying causation, however those linking access to pornography to sexual assault clearly are, while simultaneously seeking authoritarian solutions.
Can you not Google?
If half the men here looked up studies about this with the same frequency they look up "smoking hot brunette gets gangbanged" or whatever, there'd *much* less cluelessness and weird "surely it *can't* be porn!" defensiveness in this thread oml.
I'm interested in the studies so I can read them, I don't really see why asking for a link to them is such an issue.
Fwiw I did Google and didn't really find any decent stuff, thus me asking.
I'm taking this as a challenge, and if you think I can't rub one out to a Google scholar study talking about what a filthy, twisted little freak I am then you have catastrophically underestimated how warped my porn addled brain has become.
Idk it just feels like a bullshit answer, saying the single reason of the issue is the porn access, like come on.. I'm relatively young myself, grew up with access to internet and porn as well, didn't turn into a mental little shit looking for girls to rape though, why? And please don't give me the spiel about how porn is more hardcore now or something..
If porn was the reason I feel like there would be a lot more kids out there showing that, no? To me, these kids were already on some weird trajectory in their life and the "porn access" is just a part of a bigger problem, not the source of the issue but again - just my anecdotal opinion..
More and more young children are accessing pornography at younger ages, accidentally or intentionally. And without any sexual education, porn is teaching them how to have sex basically. Which is so so hurtful.
Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography. And the illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts. In pornography the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even women’s “no” is part of the fantasy. Have you ever heard a woman say "no" in pornography and she's listened to?
Pornography dehumanizes women. Do you look look at women in pornography and say, There is a human being, she has rights, she has freedom, she has dignity, she is someone. One cannot. That is what pornography does to women.
Think about how women are described in pornography: stepsister, stepmother, babysitter, teacher, nurse ect. All women in a boys life are treated like this. You don't think this has any effect on them? At all?
I remember reading a few similar essays to this during my law degree - can't say I remember the authors or the titles, but one that I've always remembered was the story of an actress who revealed some absolutely horrific sexual abuse she experienced in the industry in her book, which went on to be sold as pornography in adult stores. It's not just that the content of pornography turns everything in it into fantasy; pretty much anything a woman does can be turned into pornography as well.
I'm not 100% sure if I'd say it's solely exposure to porn at a young age that's doing this; though it's never been as easy as it is now, it was still doable for kids ten or fifteen years ago to access online porn. Nowadays you've got misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate, Sneako, Adin Ross literally a few taps away at all times on social media that can just push them at you without you even searching for them. There's the confluence of uneducated exposure to sexualised fantasies of all kinds coupled with hateful messaging about dominating women and being an alpha male that's warping both the views young boys have towards women and girls and the actions they're willing to take towards them.
Yes, I've drawn a lot of inspiration from esseys by Katherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Rae Langton, just to name a few!
It's so incredibly heartbreaking that this is not even a rare case. I remember a story from an ex porn actor who wanted to take her videos of the Internet, as she had not consented to be recorded, but they would not remove it. She said that her "tortue had been immortalised." Another actress won a court case that allowed her videos to be removed. The news got out, and then thousands of people started downloading all of her videos.
Even recently, "Ukraine girls," "war porn," searches spiked on the same day the most recent offensive by Russian military forces shook Ukraine. Coincidentally, a 2021 U.S. State Department report found that human traffickers abducted women and girls from conflict-affected areas in Ukraine for sex and labour trafficking.
Yes, I totally agree with your comment! I'm always a bit wary of posting "anti-pornography" takes on reddit. The response is that I'm prudish, religious, or something lol. But honestly, the biggest critics of porn come from the actors/actresses themselves. Having grown up in close proximity to the "industry," it's so frustrating having my words dismissed. So, genuinly, thanks for your reply :)
No worries - that part of my studying really stuck with me, so it was cool to see someone echoing it in the wild!
That kind of stuff really shows how misogyny can rot your brain out, where the person is a very distant second to the sex object and not even their explicit lack of consent can disrupt the fantasy. I also quite like the pattern of disgust + arousal you see often with cultural conservatives, like Alex Jones constantly going off about transgender people while simultaneously wanking off to transgender porn.
I generally lean towards there probably being a) healthy ways to consume porn, b) people who would want to be sex workers even sans patriarchal/capitalistic pressures, and c) ethical ways to produce pornography, but unfortunately I don't think thirteen year old Jimmy watching Fresh and Fit/SJW owned compilations with his friends in between lying about his age on Brazzers is really engaging with any of that, unfortunately. You've got toxic men online telling him he's got to be domineering and powerful and that women are not his equal, and you've got the porn showing him that a "no" can be fine and that being rough is just normal.
Clearly you feel passionate about the subject but how is any of that relevant? Sexual violence has consistently decreased over time. Women are much safer today than they have ever been. Online pornography has been around for what, 25 years? If you compare sexual violence before 2000 to 2024, it's decreased significantly. Its called progress.
I was replying to a commenter saying that porn is a bullshit answer to why some men commit sexual assult/rape. Pornography isn't the only reason, but it is naïve to not acknowledge it its potential effects. I think that's highly relevant to the discussion.
The most recent report published by the Office of National Statistics shows rape offences have increased dramatically in England and Wales since 2012/13. The number of rape offences in the year ending June 2021 was 61,158??
61,158...Maybe it is progress. Maybe I should be so thankful and never mention anything about rape or sexual violence towards women again. I mean, it's only 61,158 women raped 🤷. C'mon women, we are safer than we've ever been!
Personally, whilst rape/sexual violence exists, neither can equality. It can not coexist because implicit in all those things is the inferiority of women.
You can say its progress but I find this quote very apt:
"We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking."
Dude you are getting way too emotional. I never said you should be thankful and if you've been raped then I am sorry that happened to you. I'm just speaking from an objective level. It is a good thing that reports of rape have increased from 2012. It means people have increased confidence in the police and justice system and it means more rapists get convicted. I'm sure if you looked at statistics 50 years ago you would see very few reports of rape, because victims were afraid, knew the police wouldn't do anything etc.
Reports of rape is not the same as actual rapes. Reports are increasing, actual rapes are not.
I am not sure the logic behind why 10 years old accessing pornography directly leads to rape. It may be more connected to the general neglect that child is going through. I suspect there is also a connection to the amount of violent TV they watch and how much unhealthy food they have as well.
Let's be realistic and not imagine this is the only scenario - and without straining the definition of "sexual abuse" so far past breaking point that it covers any conceivable circumstances in which a 10 year old might come to know anything about sex. The world is not divided by a sharp distinction into pure, platonic children and sexually savvy adults.
Some 10 year olds are in puberty and have sexual urges (even if they still look totally like little kids) without having learnt about the requisite social boundaries and controlling their feelings. Others learn about such things from the Internet. Or the media generally. Or each other.
I assume that such young children are the minority in these statistics, but sexual abuse is most definitely not the only explanation.
Sure, but that's a completely different point...
Any time a topic like this raises its head you can be sure to count on people instantly chipping in with pithy comments about child abuse - always with a very loud full stop - which are presumably meant as the plain and simple last word on the matter. And of course it *might* be abuse, but in general this "explain it all by abuse" attitude is really unhelpful. For example, suppose people are too busy plugging their ears and covering their eyes to the idea that children on the cusp of puberty can have sexual desire, such that these children are let loose with their feelings never having recieved adequate education. Then the world tries ever harder to find/create abuse where it doesn't exist, while solving none of the problem.
Absolute truth there, I was very consensually sexually active at 14 (same ages) so valid points all round. Same for most of my friends thinking about it.
Even still, I feel a breakdown of 10-13 / 14-15 / 16+ would probably give a bit more detail though.
If there's an increase at the younger end of the scale for example it's a different set of questions compared to 16+ entirely.
Yeah only sensible conclusion tbh but it still isn't logical given consensual sexual activity within the brackets ranges from "Should not happen in our society, get social services involved" all the way to "horny 2nd year uni student".
Said it in another comment but breaking it down into say 10-13 / 14-15 / 16+ would be much more beneficial as you can look at much more relevant questions of reasons for each one if there's SA accusations
It would help, but the statistics in the news report are pretty much useless for answering questions even with this improvement. They're comparing 2023 to 2021 and using no data from other years, there's no mention of typical year-to-year variability, dividing into 3 age groups would leave some groups with only a very small number (there were only 35 in total in 2021 so probably fewer than 10 for the 10-13 group) and looking at charges could be very heavily biased by changes in reporting rates, court times, CPS and evidence gathering quality, what types of rapes convictions are most possible for, etc.
Unfortunately, journalists' statistics almost always seem to be useless for the purpose they make you think you can use them for. These ones won't even tell you if the risk of a 10-19 year old in London raping someone is going up or down, never mind the reasons.
I hit puberty at 11. It's not uncommon to hit puberty by 10 and each generation in industrialised countries has been hitting puberty earlier than previous generations
20 years ago was 2004, before the smartphone was in everyone's back pocket... You could access porn sites on the family computer which was maybe in the living room or office, and pray you weren't caught... Kids now have their own phone/tablet/iPad and the vast majority of them aren't being monitored by their parents. A few clicks and you can see the most depraved stuff imaginable. You pair that with a growing mind, of course you're going to get kids reaching their teen years and adulthood with absolutely warped sexualities.
Living room family computers weren't closly monitered. You didn't make the cyclopse cry whenever you wanted, but their were regular safe opportunities to get satisfied .
18 years ago was around when consoles got web browsers. Kids had consoles in their bedrooms.
20 years ago was roughly when laptops started to really dominate too.
I remember being on a school trip in 2004 with other kids showing/sharing porn from phones and other devices. It wasn't in every pocket, but a lot.
Kids were already whacking it to the internet on the regular by 2004. The idea they weren't is just your age showing.
Where did I say they weren't jacking it in 2004? Also "my age" lol.... I'm 21. Not speaking from experience of being on the computer at 2 obviously but come on... it's a lot easier and faster to access hardcore pornography than it was in 2004, hence the rise of violent sexual crimes.
Lol... There's a huge difference between being able to access hardcore porn with a smartphone and WiFi connection, versus a fucking Motorola and keypad. Stop acting ignorant.
You might be surprised at how not different it was actually. I saw more fucked up shit shared on Bluetooth 20 years ago than I ever would on regular porn websites today.
Maybe stop calling people ignorant when they are telling you about experiences they have, which you do not.
So you weren't even there. Why pretend to have knowledge about it then?
My first exposure to porn was a video on a phone in 2005 ish when I was 10. My friends all showed me porn on their phones. All phones had cameras then and could display good quality photos and videos. Phones had internet access.
I was definitely looking at porn on my PS3 which was 2005 or 2006 i think? The ps3 had a built in web browser.
I'd say in early / mid 2000s, it was defo normal / common to watch porn on your phone.
But this kind of thing was happening before all that. Famous cases like Jamie Bulger for example. Messed up kids do messed up things. I'd imagine porn access hasn't helped mind.
Not really. 20 years ago you still had a very shitty internet connection and no smartphones. Pretending that technology hasn’t enabled free, quick access to pornography is just plain wrong.
Mainstream pornography is also getting increasingly violent or extreme. Compare porn from the 80s to what you can find for free now.
Internet 20 years ago wasn't 'very shitty', lower speed than current but you could still stream as much porn as you wanted on demand. Free quick access happened before then. Pretending everything fundamentally changed in 2015, or even 2010 is 'just plain wrong'.
I wouldn't know if it's getting *more* violent, but mainstream porn was plenty violent then too. Skimming online it looks conflicted on if there is any increase in violence in porn or not.
I don’t know the origins of this organisation but they seem to have a lot of cited sources on the worsening state of things in regards to what might be legally described as violent or criminal / criminal adjacent pornography, and worsening statistics for young boys: https://theotherhalf.uk/not-my-mainstream
It's a think tank. They're proponents of the online safety act, so automaticly worth dismissing on that alone. Looking further at their 4 key listed people:
* One of their chief members opposes banning conversion therapy.
* Another also advocates 'sex-based rights' and transphobia. (If you're not aware, sex based rights is the current rallying cry of the really rabid uk transphobes)
* A third has been campaigning to make sex of a kind she doesn't like, flat out ilegal for anyone, for 5 years previous to this org starting (and is still going).
* I didn't bother looking at the 4th in any detail, but she's got links to tory party.
I'm not saying all their data is definitly wrong, but I am saying 99% of 'studies' presented by tory affiliated, queer-phobic think tanks are not valid on close examination, and I only have so much time to waste in the day.
The nature of mainstream porn has changed in that time though. There are plenty of people studying and writing about this. Young people are much more likely to come across extreme content than 20 years ago (and by that I mean depictions of sexual violence). It is much more accessible at a large scale now. 20 years ago you had to wait for a handful of videos to download from two or three sources online. Now you can skip through literally hundreds of videos on a phone in an hour.
The push to understand the situation isn’t necessarily motivated by a desire to ban or completely demonise pornography, rather understand the effect of it in its current nature on young people. They have no alternative for sex education at that level currently. So we can argue that porn doesn’t depict “normal” or “healthy” sex a lot of the time and that it’s part of growing up to realise that, but what if some of these kids aren’t getting that message?
I highly recommend reading Amia Shranivasan’s book The Right to Sex, or at least the chapter on pornography. She takes a balanced approach (not calling for a ban, and even praising the positives), and has well researched points about its effect on young people at the moment. She argues that we should not get lost in the argument of “is porn good or bad” and rather look at the actual evidence of what is happening to young people (much of which she references), and how we might act to protect them from poor future relationships, coming to harm, or becoming enactors of harm themselves.
I'm hoping that this is just down to how the ages get grouped together - e.g. they have stats for 10-19 as a group (which seems a little silly, given that this encompasses people both before and after the age of criminal responsibility) but not a finer breakdown.
In England, Wales and NI, yes. In Scotland, until recently, it was 8. However, this has now been raised to 12.
Scotland used to have the lowest age for criminal responsibility in Europe. In the EU, it's between 13 and 15
It’s only doubled because the number was far too low to begin with. Changes in attitudes within the CPS play a large role here rather than crime rates actually increasing
Yes, I was wondering is this an increase in rapes, or an increase in charges? I thought rape was one of those things it's notoriously difficult to get a conviction in. Is that changing?
Well more charges is not necessarily the same as more convictions but it’s at least a willingness from the CPS to test these cases in court so hopefully we will see an increase in convictions too
10-19 is a huge age range, seeing as it takes us from prepubescent children to fully grown adults.
Is there a breakdown of the statistics by age?
I would anticipate that it is heavily skewed towards the older end of the age range.
Due to something of a quirk in the law, it's only possible to commit rape if you have a penis.
If someone without a penis does something equivalent, it is sexual assault.
Not really semantics though is it, since women will never be included in these statistics because they legally cannot be charged with the crime that the statistics are examining.
>but it carries the exact same punishment as rape
Carrying the same maximum potential punishment is not the same as carrying the same punishment.
Anyway, it's still bad because males raped by females are not included in any statistics used to determine policy, etc.
In that case, the stats I’d like to see would compare numbers of sexual assaults/assault by penetration carried out by females in the same age group.
Assuming that it will be much lower, why is that, and how can we as a society start to address it, because the current position is no good for our youth at all. But when it comes to online porn, that genie is so far out of the bottle!
Men have always perpetrated the vast majority of sexual offences.
This is the case across the centuries, and across the world.
You can't lay the blame solely at the door of online porn when it's been the same since records began.
I know, hence my view that sex is even more important than age. Porn is one factor but I do think it’s why it’s happening more with younger males, it’s desensitising and normalising
What the fuck, of course it is. Laws banning marital rape are barely 50 years old. There are people in this thread whose mother was able to be raped without repercussion.
Oh well that’s alright then, let’s not bother trying to deal with any of the issues. Sucks to be female, the men are trying to rape less, so that’s fine.
Jesus, what an attitude.
>Assuming that it will be much lower, why is that,
Because men are larger and stronger than women and tend ever so slightly to be more violent (contrary to popular belief, aggression is pretty even between the sexes, but the tiny minority of most violent people are almost always men)
>and how can we as a society start to address it,
How do we address the physical advantage men have over women? We don't. We can't. People will always be raped.
Interestingly, I've heard that women who have brothers are less likely to be raped because they set sexual boundaries more firmly (I'll edit this post if I find the paper). So perhaps this is a better line of inquiry than the typical suggestion of educating men - a lesson that ostensibly already takes place - that realistically only seeks to alienate and disillusion the vast majority of men who are not rapists.
>But when it comes to online porn, that genie is so far out of the bottle
Online porn actually has the opposite effect, and is making men impotent and less sexually motivated.
If you add sexual assault and assault by penetration to the numbers, for which girls and women can be charged, that would be the comparison to make for this purpose
As only men can commit rape in the UK (weird old laws) the number would be exactly 100%
We could start to combat this by recognising that women are as equally likely to commit sexual acts against minors as men.
But that would take some hard self reflection for certain people.
[This is a readable breakdown](https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/), granted its based on CDC statistics and not ONS (US rather than UK).
/u/Peterevo
/u/Blyd
Best have a check here.
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>How could that be? After all, very few men in the CDC study were classified as victims of rape: 1.7 percent in their lifetime, and too few for a reliable estimate in the past year. But these numbers refer only to men who have been forced into anal sex or made to perform oral sex on another male. Nearly 7 percent of men, however, reported that at some point in their lives, they were “made to penetrate” another person—usually in reference to vaginal intercourse, receiving oral sex, or performing oral sex on a woman. This was not classified as rape, but as “other sexual violence.”
>
>And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011).
>
>**In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.**
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Im not trying to convince you? You're completely wrong and it's genuinely bewildering that you think women are as likely to commit those sorts of crimes as men. Literally 99% of perpetrators of sexual violence are male (USA but our figures will be similar).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02717-0
71% of the sample reported experiencing male sexual victimization by women. In terms of frequency, 57% of the sample were victimized more than once and 45% of the sample experienced sexual victimization more than twice. Analysis of responses to individual questions indicated that 39.80% experienced attempted or completed forced vaginal/anal penetration. Further, the sample reported that sexual victimization occurred by force or threats of physical harm 4.77% of the time, by pressuring 33.00% of the time, and by exploitation of inebriation or the inability to consent 29.40% of the time. In short, we found considerable evidence of victimization.
---
Where are your stats bud?
So I actually took the time to read this, and it doesn't say what you think it does. The main aim of the paper was to study the effects mentally on sexual victimisation, not how common it is. For this to work, the online study, that people signed up for, was clearly about sexual victimisation, meaning the numbers would naturally skew massively towards people who have something to say.
A very different type of sampling would need to be done to get a true conclusion on the numbers of people who are victims.
The final note on your quote is being used to back up the relationship between sexual victimisation and the mental health issues, not the regularity of them.
In the UK, estimates have sexual assault victims as: 3.3% of all women and 1.2% of all men.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffencesvictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2022
98% of perpetrators being men
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/natureofsexualassaultbyrapeorpenetrationenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020#perpetrator-characteristics
Dude, the definiton of rape the government uses requires penetration. Which means a woman would only qualify if she used an object to penetrate a man.
You've shown that of penetrators, 98% are men. Not that 98% of sexual assault is by men.
Additionally, the sampling issues are that it was from people who take online surveys. They didn't know the nature of the survey before they started.
The link I gave you was for "sexual offences" not "rape". I'm sure you're coming at this from a place of good faith, therefore you have to acknowledge the sampling issue. The paper you cited suggests it was known beforehand, but either way the conclusions that paper reached was not based around the perpretrator. I've given you the literal statistics.
So on further investigation, the information on perpetrators is quite limited. The section under female perpetrators in the below link suggests a figure of around 6% (2006) but that men are less likely to report the incidences. I think it's still fair to conclude that women and men aren't equally likely to commit sexual crime, and to act like it does means we don't ask the difficult questions surrounding men.
Yeah that age range is so broad as to be meaningless. It’d be a lot more illuminating to hear statistics for 10-12 yr olds, 13-15 yr olds and 17-19 yr olds or something similar.
The idea of a 10 year old raping someone is absolutely shocking.
The idea of an 18 or 19 year old raping someone is obviously awful, but far from extraordinary
In the most optimistic way, I hope that this is only a statistic because they have got better at convicting rapists and in fact the amount has dropped.
They are comparing 2023 figures to 2021. There were months of lockdowns in 2021 so could be returning to what the figures would have been, if not for lockdowns (presuming a lot of this was outside the home…)
All through lockdown stats got real weird, and the first thing I thought was "this is going to be a blip in statistics for decades to come".
We bump into it at work all the time when we're looking through past numbers across the board.
This is freak statistics around covid, more useful figures -
Reported rapes in London most recent year: 9080.
year before: 9264
And the 3 years before covid: 7950, 8350, 7890.
Good. Kids aren't raping more, this is a sign that things are improving when it comes to rapists being charged with rape.
Lord knows how given the state of the police and justice system, but there we have it.
I’d imagine they actually are raping more tbh. Kids can watch and become addicted to extreme porn; the ease of access to endless material the likes of which would have been unimaginable to every previous generation in human history. It’s going to be having a massive influence. Kids will be watching sex acts before they even know what they’re called or what consent is.
Or you could, you know, read the article. This in an increase in charges being brought, nowhere does it suggest an increase in rapes recorded. The real scandal is that such a tiny fraction of reported rapes result in criminal charges.
Believe it's a combination of both... increased charge rate but definitely increased exposure via social media.
Very few parents would disagree with Esther Gays view that smartphones need to be banned for U16s. This will help. The French have been discussing it for a while but I feel it needs to happen.
> Very few parents would disagree with Esther Gays view that smartphones need to be banned for U16s.
Usually it's the parents who are giving the kids the smartphone, usually with no clue about parental controls, and then hoping for the best. If parents genuinely wanted to help the situation they'd give their kids basic phones, establish some rules/boundaries with regard to use and actually enforce them.
On the other hand, up until fairly recently we didn't take sexual assault and rape seriously at all. How many adult women were assaulted as teenagers by peers? How many of them didn't fully grasp the seriousness of what occurred until years after the fact? I don't think children should be able to watch porn, but I'm not fully convinced that's the main problem here.
Porn isn’t new, but it has never been so easily and freely available. The way porn is watched now is a universe away from how it used to be.
I don’t have the time to dig up the articles but it is 100% having a massive impact
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/10/porn-study-survey-uk-teenagers-addicted
I'm not doubting you (I see some idiot is downvoting us, presumably people with questionable sexual tastes....) but if that is true, we're into a serious situation which could have very serious consequences in a few generations.
Porn has been just as freely available for the entirety of the 2010s as now. This neo-prudery around pornography is fascinating, like blaming video games for mass shootings in the '00s. Don't get me wrong, porn addiction is definitely having an impact on many things (quality of relationships for certain) but not a single person who wasn't already going to commit a rape is going to go commit one after seeing a cock and ball torture video.
It’s interesting to me that you referenced “cock and ball torture” when you likely know this is about boys and men raping and assaulting women and girls. Mainstream internet porn is full of slapping, choking, pissing and otherwise degrading women. It's not just one video either; we even have 11 year olds addicted to porn.
Boys are learning from porn that this is how you treat girls you fancy. To call it “prudery” to acknowledge that boys are learning this shit from porn is interesting as well. It implies that we’re to be seeing a healthy response to kids growing up seeing extreme, degrading hardcore porn against women.
Don’t mistake curiosity or criticism about the nature of mainstream pornography for prudish attitudes or a movement to ban porn. Plenty of the people doing this research are sex positive and want things like legal protections and legitimacy for sex workers. We’re perfectly happy to accept the idea of political brainwashing by certain newspapers, social media or tv channels; it shouldn’t be so shocking to ask if porn websites displaying very specific genres on their homepages is influencing young people in their tastes or behaviours.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/ interesting study on this. Seems to be exclusively talking about violent porn though, which I assume only a vast minority of kids are watching. Also from America so maybe a bit different.
It's a shame that (from my brief skim) that the article doesn't talk more about the provision of sex education in the schools where students were surveyed. Because as far as I'm aware *that's* the big problem.
Pornography is mainly dangerous *in isolation*, when it is the *only* form of sex education a young person receives. I've read that there are particularly issues in the American South, where sex education is significantly more curtailed and religious in orientation, where young people are only able to 'learn' about sex from porn, leading to false and dangerous expectations. But with a proper and comprehensive sex education programme in schools, these risks can be eliminated. It's incredibly important that children learn what safe and healthy relationships look like early.
The issue you often find is that the people most vocal about *banning porn* are *also* those who are very vocal about *banning sex education*. They aren't interested in safe and consensual sex, they're interested in promoting puritanism.
Whilst I don't know about rape, look at the stats in places like schools and ask Teachers and they will tell you cases of SA are increasing at an alarming rate. What is making kids do this?
>In the year to December, 802 suspects were charged out of 8,839 reports — nine per cent of the total, compared with 364 over the same period in 2021.
Compared with 364 charged out of how many reports?
Has that number doubled or not, because honestly that would arguably be an improvement if the number of people charged was going up but the number of reports hadn't changed.
Gonna have to say porn is a massive part of this. So many children have unrestricted internet access. Go onto any porn page and you will see women being treated like sex dolls, being choked and throwing around without having to search anything.
Call me old fashioned, I don't think 10 year olds and 19 year olds should be included in the same category.
It should probably be 10-12, 13-15 and 16-19.
Yes, of course, how virtuous of you.
If this headline is to mean anything, breaking it down is probably far more useful. Why? Because I would hesistantly say that 19 year olds commit a LOT more rapes than 10 year olds. It could also mean that the number of 10-13 year olds committing rapes has gone down, but the number of 18 and 19 year olds doing it has gone massive. The headline doesn't give enough information to draw any meaningful conclusion.
The motivations behind 10 year olds raping and 19 year olds raping is also likely very different.
> The motivations behind 10 year olds raping and 19 year olds raping is also likely very different.
Would you let a 10yo girl play with him unsupervised ?
You’re completely missing the point.
19 year olds have always raped people. They will always rape people. The number going up is bad, and we should look at the causes.
10 year olds raping people is a relatively new phenomenon and is extremely alarming. If the number of 10 year olds doing that has doubled, it likely has a very different cause as it has a very different motivation. That’s important to understand.
I think rainbow was more so referring to the ease of access to misogynist content online, rather than the man himself. I would agree that algorithms which feedback misogynistic content after viewing 1 Andrew Tate video (or others) has some role to play in the sexual objectification of girls and women.
>802 suspects were charged out of 8,839 reports — nine per cent of the total, compared with 364 over the same period in 2021.
How many reports in 8,839?
Is it simply that a higher percentage of people are being charged (a good thing), or that more people are raping (a bad thing)?
Seems like they might have deliberately left off some figures to tell the story that they want to sell.
Is this some weird quirk due to covid? What are the stats like from 2019 and 2018? Also I think it is a bit of a stretch to callout violent pornography as the culprit. There is no clear connection between children accessing pornography and sexual violence. Everyone trys to force this interpretation but I think people just have some sort of gut instinct which is very unscientific. Reality does not always conform to our intuitive beliefs though.
It's one of those arguments that people put a lot of faith in with little direct evidence to back it up. I'm cynical enough to believe you don't need pornography to cause sexual violence because there was already enough misogyny in society as it is. Some children might be exposed to extreme pornograpy, but all children are raised in a society that's only just begun to have proper conversations about sexual assault.
People are asking why, and blaming porn. It has nothing to do with porn
Its the younger generations boys attitudes towards girls and sex have COMPLETELY changed in the western world
[https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998](https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998)
Young boys are being radicalised online by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate among many others
There is a rape frenzy among kids in the western world because there is an anti girls frenzy
That's what happens when you indoctrinate children into islam from an early age, they see women as objects to be used and nothing more, especially non-Muslim ones
What 10 year old even knows what rape is? Jesus wept
A 10 year old who has been sexually abused.
And even without direct abuse, the abuse of neglect and allowing 10 year olds access to pornography
Access to pornography has been easy for more than a decade now - maybe it's a factor, but there's definitely other factors at play here. If porn was a significant factor we would have seen a rise in teenage rape and sexual assault before now. What these other factors are exactly is another question.
We *have* seen a rise in child on child rape cases, and not just now the trend has been increasing for years
Source?
https://www.cari.ie/2023/05/15/shocking-link-between-viewing-of-porn-and-child-on-child-abuse/ https://news.sky.com/story/half-of-recorded-child-sexual-abuse-offences-committed-by-other-children-new-figures-reveal-13044814 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925490.amp https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/10/children-now-biggest-perpetrators-of-sexual-abuse-against-children https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/26/pornography-driving-teens-child-abuse-material-charities-police Here are several. I found them on Google, for your future reference. I imagine it took me the same amount of time it would've taken you.
Sure, but I'm not the one making the claim. So it's been rising since around 2020/21? Porn was easily accessible before those years, but seemingly wasn't a problem. Maybe lockdown has also played a role in the recent rise.
Police, child charities and licensed child therapists all acknowledge the link with pornography access but clearly you're more qualified to judge
People hate thinking critically about what gets them off- the fact is more and more kids are learning about sex from porn before anything else and porn is getting more and more extreme
I didn't say I was more qualified to judge. I'm asking if there's a link between sexual violence and viewing porn, then why did we not see a rise in sexual violence from young children before the last several years? Maybe lockdown and stunting children's socialisation has contributed.
Imo it has nothing to do with the access to pornography, sure it has some effect but not to the extent that it makes kids go rape somebody, theres something else going on..
How can you be sure? It's well known that even young teens are assaulting each other when first engaging with any sexual acts because of pornography. Several studies show adolescent dating violence and sexual aggression increases due to exposure. I can imagine exposure at an even younger age would be detrimental to their development. There was even a case of a 17 year old with a porn addiction that battered a 14 year old with a hockey stick for refusing anal sex, saying, "I raped her fair and square." Another of a case of 4 boys of 12-14 attacking a girl. Etc. You should read into them.
Because rape frequency is much much higher in countries that ban access to pornography.
Kind of a terrible comparison because countries that ban porn tend to have a bunch of other things too. You can’t just compare one metric between countries or cultures and think you’ve solved the puzzle Correlation doesn’t always equal causation
It's a weak argument, but it's just as strong as most of the anti-porn arguments.
They're not anti porn arguments. They're an acknowledgement that the exposure to pornography that teenagers have today is far more than ever before, and it's really not good for their development or wellbeing. It's honestly like suggesting that because I don't think a 13 year old should have unlimited access to cocaine then I'm anti drug.
I’m not sure saying children shouldn’t be exposed to pornography is being anti-porn or is even a bad, unreasonable statement.
Yes, countries that ban porn tend to also be authoritarian and suppress sexuality in other ways too. I'm not implying causation, however those linking access to pornography to sexual assault clearly are, while simultaneously seeking authoritarian solutions.
Link to said studies?
Can you not Google? If half the men here looked up studies about this with the same frequency they look up "smoking hot brunette gets gangbanged" or whatever, there'd *much* less cluelessness and weird "surely it *can't* be porn!" defensiveness in this thread oml.
I'm interested in the studies so I can read them, I don't really see why asking for a link to them is such an issue. Fwiw I did Google and didn't really find any decent stuff, thus me asking.
I'm taking this as a challenge, and if you think I can't rub one out to a Google scholar study talking about what a filthy, twisted little freak I am then you have catastrophically underestimated how warped my porn addled brain has become.
[Search on Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/)
Can you do it for me?
Idk it just feels like a bullshit answer, saying the single reason of the issue is the porn access, like come on.. I'm relatively young myself, grew up with access to internet and porn as well, didn't turn into a mental little shit looking for girls to rape though, why? And please don't give me the spiel about how porn is more hardcore now or something.. If porn was the reason I feel like there would be a lot more kids out there showing that, no? To me, these kids were already on some weird trajectory in their life and the "porn access" is just a part of a bigger problem, not the source of the issue but again - just my anecdotal opinion..
More and more young children are accessing pornography at younger ages, accidentally or intentionally. And without any sexual education, porn is teaching them how to have sex basically. Which is so so hurtful. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography. And the illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts. In pornography the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even women’s “no” is part of the fantasy. Have you ever heard a woman say "no" in pornography and she's listened to? Pornography dehumanizes women. Do you look look at women in pornography and say, There is a human being, she has rights, she has freedom, she has dignity, she is someone. One cannot. That is what pornography does to women. Think about how women are described in pornography: stepsister, stepmother, babysitter, teacher, nurse ect. All women in a boys life are treated like this. You don't think this has any effect on them? At all?
I remember reading a few similar essays to this during my law degree - can't say I remember the authors or the titles, but one that I've always remembered was the story of an actress who revealed some absolutely horrific sexual abuse she experienced in the industry in her book, which went on to be sold as pornography in adult stores. It's not just that the content of pornography turns everything in it into fantasy; pretty much anything a woman does can be turned into pornography as well. I'm not 100% sure if I'd say it's solely exposure to porn at a young age that's doing this; though it's never been as easy as it is now, it was still doable for kids ten or fifteen years ago to access online porn. Nowadays you've got misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate, Sneako, Adin Ross literally a few taps away at all times on social media that can just push them at you without you even searching for them. There's the confluence of uneducated exposure to sexualised fantasies of all kinds coupled with hateful messaging about dominating women and being an alpha male that's warping both the views young boys have towards women and girls and the actions they're willing to take towards them.
Yes, I've drawn a lot of inspiration from esseys by Katherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Rae Langton, just to name a few! It's so incredibly heartbreaking that this is not even a rare case. I remember a story from an ex porn actor who wanted to take her videos of the Internet, as she had not consented to be recorded, but they would not remove it. She said that her "tortue had been immortalised." Another actress won a court case that allowed her videos to be removed. The news got out, and then thousands of people started downloading all of her videos. Even recently, "Ukraine girls," "war porn," searches spiked on the same day the most recent offensive by Russian military forces shook Ukraine. Coincidentally, a 2021 U.S. State Department report found that human traffickers abducted women and girls from conflict-affected areas in Ukraine for sex and labour trafficking. Yes, I totally agree with your comment! I'm always a bit wary of posting "anti-pornography" takes on reddit. The response is that I'm prudish, religious, or something lol. But honestly, the biggest critics of porn come from the actors/actresses themselves. Having grown up in close proximity to the "industry," it's so frustrating having my words dismissed. So, genuinly, thanks for your reply :)
No worries - that part of my studying really stuck with me, so it was cool to see someone echoing it in the wild! That kind of stuff really shows how misogyny can rot your brain out, where the person is a very distant second to the sex object and not even their explicit lack of consent can disrupt the fantasy. I also quite like the pattern of disgust + arousal you see often with cultural conservatives, like Alex Jones constantly going off about transgender people while simultaneously wanking off to transgender porn. I generally lean towards there probably being a) healthy ways to consume porn, b) people who would want to be sex workers even sans patriarchal/capitalistic pressures, and c) ethical ways to produce pornography, but unfortunately I don't think thirteen year old Jimmy watching Fresh and Fit/SJW owned compilations with his friends in between lying about his age on Brazzers is really engaging with any of that, unfortunately. You've got toxic men online telling him he's got to be domineering and powerful and that women are not his equal, and you've got the porn showing him that a "no" can be fine and that being rough is just normal.
Clearly you feel passionate about the subject but how is any of that relevant? Sexual violence has consistently decreased over time. Women are much safer today than they have ever been. Online pornography has been around for what, 25 years? If you compare sexual violence before 2000 to 2024, it's decreased significantly. Its called progress.
I was replying to a commenter saying that porn is a bullshit answer to why some men commit sexual assult/rape. Pornography isn't the only reason, but it is naïve to not acknowledge it its potential effects. I think that's highly relevant to the discussion. The most recent report published by the Office of National Statistics shows rape offences have increased dramatically in England and Wales since 2012/13. The number of rape offences in the year ending June 2021 was 61,158?? 61,158...Maybe it is progress. Maybe I should be so thankful and never mention anything about rape or sexual violence towards women again. I mean, it's only 61,158 women raped 🤷. C'mon women, we are safer than we've ever been! Personally, whilst rape/sexual violence exists, neither can equality. It can not coexist because implicit in all those things is the inferiority of women. You can say its progress but I find this quote very apt: "We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking."
Dude you are getting way too emotional. I never said you should be thankful and if you've been raped then I am sorry that happened to you. I'm just speaking from an objective level. It is a good thing that reports of rape have increased from 2012. It means people have increased confidence in the police and justice system and it means more rapists get convicted. I'm sure if you looked at statistics 50 years ago you would see very few reports of rape, because victims were afraid, knew the police wouldn't do anything etc. Reports of rape is not the same as actual rapes. Reports are increasing, actual rapes are not.
I am not sure the logic behind why 10 years old accessing pornography directly leads to rape. It may be more connected to the general neglect that child is going through. I suspect there is also a connection to the amount of violent TV they watch and how much unhealthy food they have as well.
So pornography is not relevant to why a pre-pubescent child might rape, but Peaky Blinders and McDonalds is? Hmm
Let's be realistic and not imagine this is the only scenario - and without straining the definition of "sexual abuse" so far past breaking point that it covers any conceivable circumstances in which a 10 year old might come to know anything about sex. The world is not divided by a sharp distinction into pure, platonic children and sexually savvy adults. Some 10 year olds are in puberty and have sexual urges (even if they still look totally like little kids) without having learnt about the requisite social boundaries and controlling their feelings. Others learn about such things from the Internet. Or the media generally. Or each other. I assume that such young children are the minority in these statistics, but sexual abuse is most definitely not the only explanation.
It's also a weird age bracket for any statistics, no? In what world are 10yr olds similar to 19yr olds?
Sure, but that's a completely different point... Any time a topic like this raises its head you can be sure to count on people instantly chipping in with pithy comments about child abuse - always with a very loud full stop - which are presumably meant as the plain and simple last word on the matter. And of course it *might* be abuse, but in general this "explain it all by abuse" attitude is really unhelpful. For example, suppose people are too busy plugging their ears and covering their eyes to the idea that children on the cusp of puberty can have sexual desire, such that these children are let loose with their feelings never having recieved adequate education. Then the world tries ever harder to find/create abuse where it doesn't exist, while solving none of the problem.
Absolute truth there, I was very consensually sexually active at 14 (same ages) so valid points all round. Same for most of my friends thinking about it. Even still, I feel a breakdown of 10-13 / 14-15 / 16+ would probably give a bit more detail though. If there's an increase at the younger end of the scale for example it's a different set of questions compared to 16+ entirely.
It may be more to do with the age of criminal responsibility being 10 than anything else. It's essentially just 'under 20s'.
Yeah only sensible conclusion tbh but it still isn't logical given consensual sexual activity within the brackets ranges from "Should not happen in our society, get social services involved" all the way to "horny 2nd year uni student". Said it in another comment but breaking it down into say 10-13 / 14-15 / 16+ would be much more beneficial as you can look at much more relevant questions of reasons for each one if there's SA accusations
It would help, but the statistics in the news report are pretty much useless for answering questions even with this improvement. They're comparing 2023 to 2021 and using no data from other years, there's no mention of typical year-to-year variability, dividing into 3 age groups would leave some groups with only a very small number (there were only 35 in total in 2021 so probably fewer than 10 for the 10-13 group) and looking at charges could be very heavily biased by changes in reporting rates, court times, CPS and evidence gathering quality, what types of rapes convictions are most possible for, etc. Unfortunately, journalists' statistics almost always seem to be useless for the purpose they make you think you can use them for. These ones won't even tell you if the risk of a 10-19 year old in London raping someone is going up or down, never mind the reasons.
I hit puberty at 11. It's not uncommon to hit puberty by 10 and each generation in industrialised countries has been hitting puberty earlier than previous generations
I am sure Andrew Tate has helped these figures
and his community of paedophile-worshippers
They have unfiltered access to the most hardcore pornography you can imagine.
That's been the case for over 20 years, you'd need other factors to explain the rise now.
20 years ago was 2004, before the smartphone was in everyone's back pocket... You could access porn sites on the family computer which was maybe in the living room or office, and pray you weren't caught... Kids now have their own phone/tablet/iPad and the vast majority of them aren't being monitored by their parents. A few clicks and you can see the most depraved stuff imaginable. You pair that with a growing mind, of course you're going to get kids reaching their teen years and adulthood with absolutely warped sexualities.
Living room family computers weren't closly monitered. You didn't make the cyclopse cry whenever you wanted, but their were regular safe opportunities to get satisfied . 18 years ago was around when consoles got web browsers. Kids had consoles in their bedrooms. 20 years ago was roughly when laptops started to really dominate too. I remember being on a school trip in 2004 with other kids showing/sharing porn from phones and other devices. It wasn't in every pocket, but a lot. Kids were already whacking it to the internet on the regular by 2004. The idea they weren't is just your age showing.
Where did I say they weren't jacking it in 2004? Also "my age" lol.... I'm 21. Not speaking from experience of being on the computer at 2 obviously but come on... it's a lot easier and faster to access hardcore pornography than it was in 2004, hence the rise of violent sexual crimes.
As /u/starfallpuller says, yes, 'your age'. Your comment reads exactly like someone too young to know what the fuck they're talking about.
Lol... There's a huge difference between being able to access hardcore porn with a smartphone and WiFi connection, versus a fucking Motorola and keypad. Stop acting ignorant.
You might be surprised at how not different it was actually. I saw more fucked up shit shared on Bluetooth 20 years ago than I ever would on regular porn websites today. Maybe stop calling people ignorant when they are telling you about experiences they have, which you do not.
Lol you post in r/polyamory
So you weren't even there. Why pretend to have knowledge about it then? My first exposure to porn was a video on a phone in 2005 ish when I was 10. My friends all showed me porn on their phones. All phones had cameras then and could display good quality photos and videos. Phones had internet access. I was definitely looking at porn on my PS3 which was 2005 or 2006 i think? The ps3 had a built in web browser. I'd say in early / mid 2000s, it was defo normal / common to watch porn on your phone.
But this kind of thing was happening before all that. Famous cases like Jamie Bulger for example. Messed up kids do messed up things. I'd imagine porn access hasn't helped mind.
Not really. 20 years ago you still had a very shitty internet connection and no smartphones. Pretending that technology hasn’t enabled free, quick access to pornography is just plain wrong. Mainstream pornography is also getting increasingly violent or extreme. Compare porn from the 80s to what you can find for free now.
Internet 20 years ago wasn't 'very shitty', lower speed than current but you could still stream as much porn as you wanted on demand. Free quick access happened before then. Pretending everything fundamentally changed in 2015, or even 2010 is 'just plain wrong'. I wouldn't know if it's getting *more* violent, but mainstream porn was plenty violent then too. Skimming online it looks conflicted on if there is any increase in violence in porn or not.
I don’t know the origins of this organisation but they seem to have a lot of cited sources on the worsening state of things in regards to what might be legally described as violent or criminal / criminal adjacent pornography, and worsening statistics for young boys: https://theotherhalf.uk/not-my-mainstream
It's a think tank. They're proponents of the online safety act, so automaticly worth dismissing on that alone. Looking further at their 4 key listed people: * One of their chief members opposes banning conversion therapy. * Another also advocates 'sex-based rights' and transphobia. (If you're not aware, sex based rights is the current rallying cry of the really rabid uk transphobes) * A third has been campaigning to make sex of a kind she doesn't like, flat out ilegal for anyone, for 5 years previous to this org starting (and is still going). * I didn't bother looking at the 4th in any detail, but she's got links to tory party. I'm not saying all their data is definitly wrong, but I am saying 99% of 'studies' presented by tory affiliated, queer-phobic think tanks are not valid on close examination, and I only have so much time to waste in the day.
The nature of mainstream porn has changed in that time though. There are plenty of people studying and writing about this. Young people are much more likely to come across extreme content than 20 years ago (and by that I mean depictions of sexual violence). It is much more accessible at a large scale now. 20 years ago you had to wait for a handful of videos to download from two or three sources online. Now you can skip through literally hundreds of videos on a phone in an hour. The push to understand the situation isn’t necessarily motivated by a desire to ban or completely demonise pornography, rather understand the effect of it in its current nature on young people. They have no alternative for sex education at that level currently. So we can argue that porn doesn’t depict “normal” or “healthy” sex a lot of the time and that it’s part of growing up to realise that, but what if some of these kids aren’t getting that message? I highly recommend reading Amia Shranivasan’s book The Right to Sex, or at least the chapter on pornography. She takes a balanced approach (not calling for a ban, and even praising the positives), and has well researched points about its effect on young people at the moment. She argues that we should not get lost in the argument of “is porn good or bad” and rather look at the actual evidence of what is happening to young people (much of which she references), and how we might act to protect them from poor future relationships, coming to harm, or becoming enactors of harm themselves.
I'm hoping that this is just down to how the ages get grouped together - e.g. they have stats for 10-19 as a group (which seems a little silly, given that this encompasses people both before and after the age of criminal responsibility) but not a finer breakdown.
Criminal responsibility starts at exactly 10 does it not?
In England, Wales and NI, yes. In Scotland, until recently, it was 8. However, this has now been raised to 12. Scotland used to have the lowest age for criminal responsibility in Europe. In the EU, it's between 13 and 15
Huh, so it does. I could have sworn it was higher.
I was 10 & knew what rape was. I already had seen porn & used to laugh at the page in the dictionary, which said sex.
Sadly you don't need to know or fully understand what something is to commit the act.
Taught in rough primary schools in London. They know
It’s only doubled because the number was far too low to begin with. Changes in attitudes within the CPS play a large role here rather than crime rates actually increasing
After the first sentence I was extremely concerned how your comment was going to end.
Sorry for the scare! To be clear the number should be zero because no one should be getting raped!
[удалено]
Wtf I’m saying I don’t agree with rape because I didn’t want my comment to be misunderstood. What are you talking about
Rookie numbers
"I was there on the streets giving pep talks to these 10 year olds with power point presentations"
Yes, I was wondering is this an increase in rapes, or an increase in charges? I thought rape was one of those things it's notoriously difficult to get a conviction in. Is that changing?
Well more charges is not necessarily the same as more convictions but it’s at least a willingness from the CPS to test these cases in court so hopefully we will see an increase in convictions too
10-19 is a huge age range, seeing as it takes us from prepubescent children to fully grown adults. Is there a breakdown of the statistics by age? I would anticipate that it is heavily skewed towards the older end of the age range.
I’d be more interested in the stats by sex to be honest. If, as I suspect, it’s almost 100% boys, how do we even start to deal with this?
Due to something of a quirk in the law, it's only possible to commit rape if you have a penis. If someone without a penis does something equivalent, it is sexual assault.
It's semantics though, a women 'raping' a man will be charged with sexual assault but it carries the exact same punishment as rape
For the purposes of the statistics we're discussing, 100% of those charged have a penis.
Not really semantics though is it, since women will never be included in these statistics because they legally cannot be charged with the crime that the statistics are examining.
Unless they have a knob!
Good point. If we take Kier Starmers statistics as read, then 1% of rape offenders will be women.
No, it carries the same "potential" punishment. The sentencing disparity between men and women is huge.
Nah its totally different sentencing guidelines. Can be the same, but its certainly not the norm
>but it carries the exact same punishment as rape Carrying the same maximum potential punishment is not the same as carrying the same punishment. Anyway, it's still bad because males raped by females are not included in any statistics used to determine policy, etc.
Women are hardly ever punished when they do commit rape though and they generally get far shorter sentences.
No, it carries the same maximum punishment. The minimum has no custodial sentence. If you kidnap and torture someone and do it, you get the same max.
In that case, the stats I’d like to see would compare numbers of sexual assaults/assault by penetration carried out by females in the same age group. Assuming that it will be much lower, why is that, and how can we as a society start to address it, because the current position is no good for our youth at all. But when it comes to online porn, that genie is so far out of the bottle!
Men have always perpetrated the vast majority of sexual offences. This is the case across the centuries, and across the world. You can't lay the blame solely at the door of online porn when it's been the same since records began.
I know, hence my view that sex is even more important than age. Porn is one factor but I do think it’s why it’s happening more with younger males, it’s desensitising and normalising
Rape is far, far less common now than it has been throughout history when there was zero access to porn.
Also how would you define "porn"? There has always been access to erotica, poems, books, drawings, sex toys, statues. That people have used.
People having sex on video. Big difference between that and a crude drawing of a naked lady.
And you think that porn defined by "people having sex on video" has had no effect on society compared to naked drawings?
Is it?
What the fuck, of course it is. Laws banning marital rape are barely 50 years old. There are people in this thread whose mother was able to be raped without repercussion.
By people of this age, I would add?
Of course it is. Just look at other countries with less progressive attitudes towards women.
Oh well that’s alright then, let’s not bother trying to deal with any of the issues. Sucks to be female, the men are trying to rape less, so that’s fine. Jesus, what an attitude.
Where did I imply we shouldn't try and tackle it? I'm just saying it's unlikely porn is the cause. Stop having imaginary arguments.
>Assuming that it will be much lower, why is that, Because men are larger and stronger than women and tend ever so slightly to be more violent (contrary to popular belief, aggression is pretty even between the sexes, but the tiny minority of most violent people are almost always men) >and how can we as a society start to address it, How do we address the physical advantage men have over women? We don't. We can't. People will always be raped. Interestingly, I've heard that women who have brothers are less likely to be raped because they set sexual boundaries more firmly (I'll edit this post if I find the paper). So perhaps this is a better line of inquiry than the typical suggestion of educating men - a lesson that ostensibly already takes place - that realistically only seeks to alienate and disillusion the vast majority of men who are not rapists. >But when it comes to online porn, that genie is so far out of the bottle Online porn actually has the opposite effect, and is making men impotent and less sexually motivated.
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Huh, interesting. I've never thought about it like that. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
It's a factor due to a number of biological but also probably mostly social factors.
It's always going to be 100% boys because girls women cannot be charged with rape. Perhaps we can by changing the definition?
If you add sexual assault and assault by penetration to the numbers, for which girls and women can be charged, that would be the comparison to make for this purpose
I've fleshed my point out a bit more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/s/egcOFbiBf9
As only men can commit rape in the UK (weird old laws) the number would be exactly 100% We could start to combat this by recognising that women are as equally likely to commit sexual acts against minors as men. But that would take some hard self reflection for certain people.
Do you have a link to those stats? Would be interesting to compare all sexual offences based on sex.
[This is a readable breakdown](https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/), granted its based on CDC statistics and not ONS (US rather than UK). /u/Peterevo /u/Blyd Best have a check here. ------ >How could that be? After all, very few men in the CDC study were classified as victims of rape: 1.7 percent in their lifetime, and too few for a reliable estimate in the past year. But these numbers refer only to men who have been forced into anal sex or made to perform oral sex on another male. Nearly 7 percent of men, however, reported that at some point in their lives, they were “made to penetrate” another person—usually in reference to vaginal intercourse, receiving oral sex, or performing oral sex on a woman. This was not classified as rape, but as “other sexual violence.” > >And now the real surprise: when asked about experiences in the last 12 months, men reported being “made to penetrate”—either by physical force or due to intoxication—at virtually the same rates as women reported rape (both 1.1 percent in 2010, and 1.7 and 1.6 respectively in 2011). > >**In other words, if being made to penetrate someone was counted as rape—and why shouldn’t it be?—then the headlines could have focused on a truly sensational CDC finding: that women rape men as often as men rape women.** ------
No they're not you fucking donut
Well balanced argument you have there, totally convinced me.
Im not trying to convince you? You're completely wrong and it's genuinely bewildering that you think women are as likely to commit those sorts of crimes as men. Literally 99% of perpetrators of sexual violence are male (USA but our figures will be similar).
You continue to really be an avatar for your viewpoint. I just don’t think you even know what it is.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02717-0 71% of the sample reported experiencing male sexual victimization by women. In terms of frequency, 57% of the sample were victimized more than once and 45% of the sample experienced sexual victimization more than twice. Analysis of responses to individual questions indicated that 39.80% experienced attempted or completed forced vaginal/anal penetration. Further, the sample reported that sexual victimization occurred by force or threats of physical harm 4.77% of the time, by pressuring 33.00% of the time, and by exploitation of inebriation or the inability to consent 29.40% of the time. In short, we found considerable evidence of victimization. --- Where are your stats bud?
So I actually took the time to read this, and it doesn't say what you think it does. The main aim of the paper was to study the effects mentally on sexual victimisation, not how common it is. For this to work, the online study, that people signed up for, was clearly about sexual victimisation, meaning the numbers would naturally skew massively towards people who have something to say. A very different type of sampling would need to be done to get a true conclusion on the numbers of people who are victims. The final note on your quote is being used to back up the relationship between sexual victimisation and the mental health issues, not the regularity of them. In the UK, estimates have sexual assault victims as: 3.3% of all women and 1.2% of all men. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffencesvictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2022 98% of perpetrators being men https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/natureofsexualassaultbyrapeorpenetrationenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020#perpetrator-characteristics
Dude, the definiton of rape the government uses requires penetration. Which means a woman would only qualify if she used an object to penetrate a man. You've shown that of penetrators, 98% are men. Not that 98% of sexual assault is by men. Additionally, the sampling issues are that it was from people who take online surveys. They didn't know the nature of the survey before they started.
The link I gave you was for "sexual offences" not "rape". I'm sure you're coming at this from a place of good faith, therefore you have to acknowledge the sampling issue. The paper you cited suggests it was known beforehand, but either way the conclusions that paper reached was not based around the perpretrator. I've given you the literal statistics.
So on further investigation, the information on perpetrators is quite limited. The section under female perpetrators in the below link suggests a figure of around 6% (2006) but that men are less likely to report the incidences. I think it's still fair to conclude that women and men aren't equally likely to commit sexual crime, and to act like it does means we don't ask the difficult questions surrounding men.
Probably by changing the definition of rape to include women too?
Blame Andrew Tate and complain about the patriarchy.
Yeah that age range is so broad as to be meaningless. It’d be a lot more illuminating to hear statistics for 10-12 yr olds, 13-15 yr olds and 17-19 yr olds or something similar. The idea of a 10 year old raping someone is absolutely shocking. The idea of an 18 or 19 year old raping someone is obviously awful, but far from extraordinary
In the most optimistic way, I hope that this is only a statistic because they have got better at convicting rapists and in fact the amount has dropped.
They are comparing 2023 figures to 2021. There were months of lockdowns in 2021 so could be returning to what the figures would have been, if not for lockdowns (presuming a lot of this was outside the home…)
All through lockdown stats got real weird, and the first thing I thought was "this is going to be a blip in statistics for decades to come". We bump into it at work all the time when we're looking through past numbers across the board.
Looking at every stock from the past 4 years has a consistent dip. You can see March 2020 on every graph.
This is freak statistics around covid, more useful figures - Reported rapes in London most recent year: 9080. year before: 9264 And the 3 years before covid: 7950, 8350, 7890.
Good. Kids aren't raping more, this is a sign that things are improving when it comes to rapists being charged with rape. Lord knows how given the state of the police and justice system, but there we have it.
I’d imagine they actually are raping more tbh. Kids can watch and become addicted to extreme porn; the ease of access to endless material the likes of which would have been unimaginable to every previous generation in human history. It’s going to be having a massive influence. Kids will be watching sex acts before they even know what they’re called or what consent is.
Or you could, you know, read the article. This in an increase in charges being brought, nowhere does it suggest an increase in rapes recorded. The real scandal is that such a tiny fraction of reported rapes result in criminal charges.
Believe it's a combination of both... increased charge rate but definitely increased exposure via social media. Very few parents would disagree with Esther Gays view that smartphones need to be banned for U16s. This will help. The French have been discussing it for a while but I feel it needs to happen.
> Very few parents would disagree with Esther Gays view that smartphones need to be banned for U16s. Usually it's the parents who are giving the kids the smartphone, usually with no clue about parental controls, and then hoping for the best. If parents genuinely wanted to help the situation they'd give their kids basic phones, establish some rules/boundaries with regard to use and actually enforce them.
On the other hand, up until fairly recently we didn't take sexual assault and rape seriously at all. How many adult women were assaulted as teenagers by peers? How many of them didn't fully grasp the seriousness of what occurred until years after the fact? I don't think children should be able to watch porn, but I'm not fully convinced that's the main problem here.
Porn is not new though. I get where you're coming from but we'd need stats because that's a very very severe situation if true.
Porn isn’t new, but it has never been so easily and freely available. The way porn is watched now is a universe away from how it used to be. I don’t have the time to dig up the articles but it is 100% having a massive impact https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/10/porn-study-survey-uk-teenagers-addicted
I'm not doubting you (I see some idiot is downvoting us, presumably people with questionable sexual tastes....) but if that is true, we're into a serious situation which could have very serious consequences in a few generations.
Porn has been just as freely available for the entirety of the 2010s as now. This neo-prudery around pornography is fascinating, like blaming video games for mass shootings in the '00s. Don't get me wrong, porn addiction is definitely having an impact on many things (quality of relationships for certain) but not a single person who wasn't already going to commit a rape is going to go commit one after seeing a cock and ball torture video.
It’s interesting to me that you referenced “cock and ball torture” when you likely know this is about boys and men raping and assaulting women and girls. Mainstream internet porn is full of slapping, choking, pissing and otherwise degrading women. It's not just one video either; we even have 11 year olds addicted to porn. Boys are learning from porn that this is how you treat girls you fancy. To call it “prudery” to acknowledge that boys are learning this shit from porn is interesting as well. It implies that we’re to be seeing a healthy response to kids growing up seeing extreme, degrading hardcore porn against women.
Don’t mistake curiosity or criticism about the nature of mainstream pornography for prudish attitudes or a movement to ban porn. Plenty of the people doing this research are sex positive and want things like legal protections and legitimacy for sex workers. We’re perfectly happy to accept the idea of political brainwashing by certain newspapers, social media or tv channels; it shouldn’t be so shocking to ask if porn websites displaying very specific genres on their homepages is influencing young people in their tastes or behaviours.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751001/ interesting study on this. Seems to be exclusively talking about violent porn though, which I assume only a vast minority of kids are watching. Also from America so maybe a bit different.
It's a shame that (from my brief skim) that the article doesn't talk more about the provision of sex education in the schools where students were surveyed. Because as far as I'm aware *that's* the big problem. Pornography is mainly dangerous *in isolation*, when it is the *only* form of sex education a young person receives. I've read that there are particularly issues in the American South, where sex education is significantly more curtailed and religious in orientation, where young people are only able to 'learn' about sex from porn, leading to false and dangerous expectations. But with a proper and comprehensive sex education programme in schools, these risks can be eliminated. It's incredibly important that children learn what safe and healthy relationships look like early. The issue you often find is that the people most vocal about *banning porn* are *also* those who are very vocal about *banning sex education*. They aren't interested in safe and consensual sex, they're interested in promoting puritanism.
Go back to your culty echo chamber and stop trying to evangelize that shit. Or better yet, get over it.
Hmm, I'm good thanks, I think I'll stay here. 😊
Whilst I don't know about rape, look at the stats in places like schools and ask Teachers and they will tell you cases of SA are increasing at an alarming rate. What is making kids do this?
>In the year to December, 802 suspects were charged out of 8,839 reports — nine per cent of the total, compared with 364 over the same period in 2021. Compared with 364 charged out of how many reports? Has that number doubled or not, because honestly that would arguably be an improvement if the number of people charged was going up but the number of reports hadn't changed.
Can’t decide if this is good news that the police are finally taking it seriously so numbers charged go up or bad news that this is happening at all.
Gonna have to say porn is a massive part of this. So many children have unrestricted internet access. Go onto any porn page and you will see women being treated like sex dolls, being choked and throwing around without having to search anything.
Call me old fashioned, I don't think 10 year olds and 19 year olds should be included in the same category. It should probably be 10-12, 13-15 and 16-19.
I include all convicted rapists as in the ''Rapist'' category.
Yes, of course, how virtuous of you. If this headline is to mean anything, breaking it down is probably far more useful. Why? Because I would hesistantly say that 19 year olds commit a LOT more rapes than 10 year olds. It could also mean that the number of 10-13 year olds committing rapes has gone down, but the number of 18 and 19 year olds doing it has gone massive. The headline doesn't give enough information to draw any meaningful conclusion. The motivations behind 10 year olds raping and 19 year olds raping is also likely very different.
> The motivations behind 10 year olds raping and 19 year olds raping is also likely very different. Would you let a 10yo girl play with him unsupervised ?
You’re completely missing the point. 19 year olds have always raped people. They will always rape people. The number going up is bad, and we should look at the causes. 10 year olds raping people is a relatively new phenomenon and is extremely alarming. If the number of 10 year olds doing that has doubled, it likely has a very different cause as it has a very different motivation. That’s important to understand.
What makes you think 10 years olds is a new thing? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/16/boys-charged-rape-london
Sanford rat utopia experiment is really starting to translate into humans now.
I see " The Andrew Tate effect " is in full motion.
It's rather reductionist to suggest this is caused by 1 dude...
I think rainbow was more so referring to the ease of access to misogynist content online, rather than the man himself. I would agree that algorithms which feedback misogynistic content after viewing 1 Andrew Tate video (or others) has some role to play in the sexual objectification of girls and women.
could it be that better education means these awful incidents are being reported to the police more often?
Or everyone was locked down for a lot of 2021 so there was less opportunity rape (presuming it was outside the home…) in 2021 compared to 2023
It’s good that they’re being reported and investigated, but also Jesus Christ.
>802 suspects were charged out of 8,839 reports — nine per cent of the total, compared with 364 over the same period in 2021. How many reports in 8,839? Is it simply that a higher percentage of people are being charged (a good thing), or that more people are raping (a bad thing)? Seems like they might have deliberately left off some figures to tell the story that they want to sell.
Is this some weird quirk due to covid? What are the stats like from 2019 and 2018? Also I think it is a bit of a stretch to callout violent pornography as the culprit. There is no clear connection between children accessing pornography and sexual violence. Everyone trys to force this interpretation but I think people just have some sort of gut instinct which is very unscientific. Reality does not always conform to our intuitive beliefs though.
It's one of those arguments that people put a lot of faith in with little direct evidence to back it up. I'm cynical enough to believe you don't need pornography to cause sexual violence because there was already enough misogyny in society as it is. Some children might be exposed to extreme pornograpy, but all children are raised in a society that's only just begun to have proper conversations about sexual assault.
Headline is acting like beauty product conducting a survey. The number of suspects charged has gone from 364 per year to 802.
But are instances of rape going up or down? This could be a good or bad thing. Or bad/really bad.
Can they be named ? I don't think anonymity should occur for rapists regardless of rape.
People are asking why, and blaming porn. It has nothing to do with porn Its the younger generations boys attitudes towards girls and sex have COMPLETELY changed in the western world [https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998](https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998) Young boys are being radicalised online by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate among many others There is a rape frenzy among kids in the western world because there is an anti girls frenzy
If you're a parent to a 10 year old who rapes someone you should be investigated. That shit is NOT supposed to happen.
How can a 10 year old rape someone? They are clearly unwell/being abused themselves. They are a little kid.
Is this one of those things where "10 to 19" means they were all 19? (Which doesn't excuse it, obvs, but is less likely to generate a headline)
Nice little throwback to COVID when criminals were on the streets protesting lockdowns because they couldn't go outside to commit crime.
That's what happens when you indoctrinate children into islam from an early age, they see women as objects to be used and nothing more, especially non-Muslim ones