Pornography and Sexual Violence

Abstract

This chapter reflects on a central area of contemporary debate regarding pornography and sexual violence, namely issues of young people's consumption of pornography and children's exposure to pornography. As the context of pornographication – or the normalising and legitimising of pornography and pornography consumption – has become increasingly recognised, in both Australia and the UK, age verification has been proposed as a policy intervention to address potential harm. While there is merit in bringing online pornography under similar regulation to offline materials in order to prevent access for minors, such proposals have largely been separated from much longer running debates about pornography, the sex industry, and men's violence against women. Subsequently, much policy framing misses women's inequality as fundamentally important to understanding the harms of pornography and also tends to obscure the different and more burdensome harms that girls face in dealing with pornographic content. It is therefore critically important for policy work on violence against women and girls to make connections to existing work on pornography and sexual violence across these areas of popular and policy interest.