All Porn Is Exploitation, UK Inquiry Concludes Without Speaking to Any Sex Workers

All pornography should be treated as commercial sexual exploitation in law and policy, a group of UK politicians has concluded after an inquiry that heard from leading figures in the US Christian anti-porn lobby but no sex workers. 

Pornography Regulation: The case for Parliamentary Reform said that “the epidemic of male violence against women and girls cannot be ended unless the government confronts the role pornography plays in fuelling sexual violence.”

The report, from the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, said current legislation on pornography was “piecemeal” and “wholly inadequate with respect to preventing and providing redress for harms perpetuated as part of the trade”. But there were no hearings from participants in the industries they were describing. 

Dr Carolina Are, an innovation fellow at the Centre for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University, told VICE World News: “It’s concerning to see that quite a lot of the witnesses that have taken part in the inquiry, and as a result the report, are the people with known anti-porn views and to balance that out it doesn’t seem that the committee has actually invited sex workers to speak and who make a living with this kind of work.”

The inquiry did hear from individuals specialising in children’s safety like the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, and Lynn Perry MBE, the acting CEO of charity Barnardos. But the inquiry also heard from prominent figures in anti-porn advocacy, such as Dr Gail Dines, and figures associated with the Christian-backed anti-porn lobby in the US.

Laila Mickelwait leads Traffickinghub, a campaign powered by and advanced in conjunction with Exodus Cry, a US-based Christian non-profit that calls for the abolition of the sex industry in the name of protecting trafficking victims. In 2020 the group had its exhibition pulled by Britain’s International Slavery Museum after a backlash over Exodus Cry’s involvement.

The inquiry also heard from Haley McNamara, vice president for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, which has been a powerful force in persuading 17 US states to write resolutions calling porn a “public health crisis.” Such resolutions are not binding, but are designed to raise awareness amongst the public and legislature.

Among the APPG report’s recommendations are also suggestions to legally require age verification for consuming pornography online, legally require online platforms to verify that every individual featured in pornographic content on their platform is an adult and gave permission for the content to be published there, giving individuals who feature in pornographic material the legal right to withdraw their consent to material in which they feature being published and/or distributed, and conducting a comprehensive review of laws on pornography and obscenity.

Dr Fiona Vera-Gray, the deputy director of London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, told VICE World News that despite the debate around pornography, there is a lot of agreement from all sides about preventing children from seeing it and protecting victims of abuse, and that recommendations making platforms more accountable represent the broad public view.

“However,” she added, “after spending the last five years talking to women about their experiences of and relationships to porn, I do think that the ways in which the debate being framed in terms of ‘all porn is bad’ or on the other side ‘all porn is good’ just works to shut women who use porn or make porn down.”

“It actually makes it harder for us to have the conversations we need about where there is agreement and what can be done. It’s a thorny, messy area and we need to get better at representing that complexity.” 

A UK-based pornography director and actor who wishes to remain anonymous as her colleagues have been harassed online in the past for speaking on this issue told VICE World News: “Unfortunately this is another case of conversations about porn happening only with people at the very extreme end of the spectrum, people whose whole livelihoods are built on the demonisation of porn and the dehumanisation of the people who work in it.”

“Lots of those interviewed for this report see the kind of porn that serves their narrative, that porn is a scapegoat for all the ills of society, when in fact the vast majority of sexual exploitation content of adults AND children is shared using networks like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp without them receiving anything like the same public outrage or calls for censorship.”

Max Hovey, an OnlyFans creator and LGBTQ activist said, “It’s a known fact porn can be damaging, and creates an unrealistic expectation around sex. I think this is almost a way of the government shifting blame and responsibility to the porn industry for the content they are seeing rather than taking their own accountability for how dire the sex education system is.” He added that comprehensive sex education that teaches about consent in detail would mean individuals ”would kind of see that stuff and know that you have to ask for consent.”

VICE World News has previously reported on the lack of robust resources for teaching the Relationships and Sex Education curriculum in England, especially around the online world. We also revealed that the government withdrew nearly half of planned funding to teachers to train them to deliver the curriculum, which was updated a couple of years ago when it was made compulsory for schools to deliver. 

Associate Professor Joshua Grubbs at Bowling Green State University, who specialises in psychology around addiction and morality including investigating pornography use, said that the report “does indeed cite a number of very high quality academic sources, but even so, it ignores the controversies in pornography related research almost entirely.”

He added: “Pornography is most often produced for the male gaze and does indeed often portray women as objects rather than autonomous agents in sexual encounters. Undoubtedly, these are things that contribute to preferences for porn-like sex that research has demonstrated is occurring at concerning levels. Even so, none of the research cited in this piece is entirely conclusive on its own, and the inquiry clearly (and seemingly intentionally) ignored research contradicting what appears to be their predetermined conclusions.”

British Christian advocacy groups have been active lobbying in Parliament around pornography over the last year. In June 2022, two Christian organisations, Christian Action Research and Education (CARE) and CEASE UK, hosted an event on “the harms of porn” for MPs in Westminster with Tim Farron MP and the Naked Truth Project, an initiative run by a church in the north of England which says they work “to open eyes & free lives from the damaging impact of porn.” 

CARE is experienced in lobbying the UK government, running its own internship scheme for parliamentarians and has been lobbying against abortion rights. 

The CEO of CEASE UK, Vanessa Morse, also offered testimony at the APPG inquiry.

At the time of the Westminster event, CEASE UK announced a new website gathering the stories of those who have viewed “nonconsensual pornography,” which was shared by Mickelwait, of Traffickinghub, on Twitter.

The group frequently reference quotes from Fight the New Drug on their website, another US anti-porn group which describes porn as an addictive drug (which research has not yet established an evidence base over) and was founded by Mormons, though today says it has no religious affiliation.Both Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation were involved in the The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA/SESTA) signed into law by the Trump administration in 2018.

Billed as an anti-trafficking law, it has been widely criticised for rolling back internet freedoms and putting sex workers at risk of trafficking and exploitation. 

In reference to FOSTA/SESTA, Are, who is also a certified pole dancer who has had her content removed several times by social media platforms, said it “lumped in sex trafficking with sex work and was stemming from a very anti-porn, anti-sex approach. So do we want that here in the UK? Do we want more laws that are going to deplatform bodies all over the place?”

“If we’re not careful in trying to regulate the porn industry which I’m sure will need regulating, we’re actually deplatforming all bodies, putting people out of work, putting them in dangerous circumstances and pushing them further underground.”

Correction 06/03/2023: This article has been updated to clarify that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation does not campaign against same-sex marriage and comprehensive sex education in the US. The organisation previously operated under the name Morality in Media. Morality in Media once submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court stating safer-sex information was indecent, released a statement entitled “Connecting the Dots: The Line Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders”, and boycotted Disney for extending benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees.