The French High Council on Equality recently released a report that found a staggering 90 per cent of online pornography shows violence that is illegal under French law. Previous research has documented that children typically access online pornography from as early as 13 years old.
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Despite these alarming findings, the role of violent pornography is largely absent from public and policy discussions around the prevention of violence against women.
It is time for governments and practitioners to grapple with how Australia can reduce gender-based violence at the same time as children and young people are growing up with easy access to sexual content normalising violent behaviour directed at women and girls.
This finding should spark a global conversation on the harms of increasingly violent pornography, and the need to prevent all forms of violence against women.
We must remember that pornography involves real people in real situations. The French High Council report stated, "the women are real, the sexual acts and the violence is real, the suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised". While participants may have signed contracts to participate, in the view of the French State Prosecutor, such contracts would be void given people cannot legally consent to torture and sexual exploitation - much of which the content reviewed for the report amounted to.
When it comes to violence against women, including sexual violence, Australia has put in place a raft of hard-won and valuable reforms. These include laws designed to prevent workplace sexual harassment, and the introduction of affirmative consent laws in several states and territories.
Coupled with the phenomenal work of victim-survivor advocates, including Chanel Contos, Saxon Mullins and Grace Tame, we have seen an unprecedented national conversation on the harms of sexual violence and child sexual abuse, and the need to improve responses.
Sadly, the very violence these reforms seek to stop is hiding in plain sight online. Every single day the worst forms of sexual violence are portrayed in the name of adult entertainment. The current generation of children and young people won't even remember a time when violent pornography wasn't available to everyone with a mobile phone or a computer.
In the context of the Commonwealth Government's 10-year National Plan which aims to end all forms of gender-based violence within one generation, we cannot ignore the impact of violent pornography that perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes, and violence-supportive attitudes.
To prevent violence against women in one generation, we need to understand the impact of all forms of online violence, across generations and demographic groups across the community.
In Australia, thanks to work led by the eSafety Commission, we know that young people between the ages of nine and 16 are regularly exposed to sexual images, that 13 is the average age at which a young person encounters online pornography, often unintentionally, and that pornography use increases throughout the teenage years. Boys are more likely to seek out pornography and this seeking increases over time.
We also know that pornography use is associated with more permissive sexual attitudes. Holding permissive sexual attitudes is not an issue in and of itself, and it's important to acknowledge the long history of feminist debates about pornography, the embrace of more sex positive stances, and the complexity of debates about sexual autonomy and pornography.
Increasingly however one significant change is that we are now seeing greater access to more violent forms of pornography that are exploitative and depict acts that cause significant risks to another person (such as the use of choking and strangulation). As Chanel Contos writes in her new book, Consent Laid Bare, ''porn is shaping the brains and tastes of generations who were born into a world where it is easily accessible''.
The negative impact of pornography on the formation of healthy ideas about consent, sexuality, pleasure and what it means to be masculine and feminine is not a new issue. While we do not yet have clear consensus in this country about the way forward in addressing the harmful impacts of pornography. Thanks to victim-survivor advocates, Maree Crabb, the Australian e-safety Commissioner and many other tireless advocates - we do have enough knowledge to know that efforts to prevent violence against women compel us to act.
We live so much of our lives online, so efforts to prevent violence against women need to extend to our online lives. If we are to end violence against women, we need to have an open and honest conversation about pornography.
We need to face the uncomfortable truth that most of the pornography available reinforces the underlying conditions that allow violence to occur. This conversation represents one critical component of the broader efforts underway to prevent violence against women across the Australian community.
It's a tough conversation to have, but now is the time to have it.
- Serina McDuff is acting CEO of Respect Victoria. Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon is a professor of Social Sciences and member of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre at Monash University, and chair of Respect Victoria.
