Dark Side of Porn

Page under construction

PornHub (one of the largest providers) in 2019 reported over 42 billion visits to the site that year, which means 115 million visits per day.

115 million visits per day, one of the ways in which sites keep people online is to direct users to increasingly more extreme content, to stop them becoming bored. Porn sites like Inhumanity have violent, dangerous, misogynistic, criminal sexual videos even killing scenes, rape and torture.

There are no meaningful age restrictions on access to this material (see below on age verification) and, with tablets, smartphones and so much activity moving online as a result of the pandemic, hardcore pornographic material is just a click away for many young people, who may be unprepared and ill-equipped to understand what they are viewing and, as a result, are vulnerable and could suffer adverse impacts.

## Dangers

Watching porn can cause damaging consequences for a user’s life, it can damage relationships , friendships and family .

Pornography use can produce a surge of the neurochemical, dopamine in anticipation of pleasure. If fear or taboo is added as a result of certain types of porn, the brain produces adrenaline that combines with dopamine to give a bigger sexual “high”. This can attract users to frightening or violent themes. Dopamine reacts to novelty. It stops responding as strongly over time to the same material. This can lead to a desire for something edgier. However, if a person tries to stop using porn, some users can start to experience withdrawal symptoms.

## Child abuse / Revenge porn

“Nonconsensual pornography” is when a sexually graphic image of you is shared without your consent.

It’s also commonly called “revenge porn.” These images can include:

* Images taken during the course of an intimate relationship (including images you took of yourself and shared with the intent to keep them private);
* Hidden recordings;
* Images stolen from electronic devices (phones, computers, tablets, etc.)
* Recordings of sexual assaults and other sexual content including editing and misuses images from victims

Sharing or publicizing intimate images without your consent is against both civil and criminal law.

Thousands of men use the anonymous chatting and media-sharing platforms like chatpic on a daily basis to post , share and illegally download pictures and videos of women for pleasure, for revenge, and to humiliate them for openly expressing and embracing their sexuality.

Personal images of mainly sexual content of women and girls (sometimes underage) have been uploaded, used, stored and possibly sold WITHOUT permission and WITHOUT the knowledge of these girls and women.

Girls and women who have been or will be victims could be in a serious emotional and physical danger, as their content, their phones, their social media usernames, their surnames and their location have been shared in various forms on various websites allowing annonimus users to post anything.

Civil right organization End Revenge Porn recently published detailed statistics that include some of the following information:

• 90% of revenge porn victims were women • 68% were 18-30 years old, 27% were 18-22 and vast majority of revenge porn victims said they had taken nude photos/videos of themselves and shared it with someone else .

Most of victims said their material was posted by an ex-boyfriend, or an ex-girlfriend, ex-friend . Information that was posted with the material most often also included full name , email address , social network links , physychal home address, phone numbers etc .

Almost all of victims said they have suffered significant emotional distress due to being a victim , suffered significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning and have had suicidal thoughts due to being a victim

( More data  : https://www.cybercivilrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/RPStatistics.pdf )

Entire servers are dedicated to finding and sharing non-consensual sexual images of girls and women housed and shared on private channels and popular servers like Discord that had many legal issues with members sharing those materials among certain groups . The largest danger associated with using Discord is that most users ( in gender over 73% males ) use an alias or nickname, and you have no way of knowing who you're talking to. Discord made international news in 2020 when one server revealed over 140,000 images of women and even minors had been widely shared and distributed.

Of the hundreds of millions of videos posted on the internet no one can say how many are illegal, for example featuring children or non-consenting adults. What we do know is that the sites are unregulated or minimally regulated, and even when illegal content is identified it is difficult to remove it or prevent it from being re-uploaded. Videos may be uploaded by sex traffickers or as “revenge porn” or by porn addicts seeking to gain membership to paedophile groups and then downloaded and saved on individuals’ personal computers.

For those whose images have been posted online without their knowledge or consent – including young people involved in sexting or victims of “revenge porn” - this can have a devastating effect on their lives.

This issue has been the subject of a 2019. New York Times investigation which told the story of young people finding videos and images of themselves online. The piece also cited that “a search for ‘girls under18’ (no space) or ‘14yo’ [on PornHub] leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos.”

Following the piece, Visa and Mastercard ceased processing payments on PornHub (with Visa dropping services from all of MindGeek’s sites).

This prompted PornHub to announce its ban of “unverified users from uploading or downloading videos” and on 14 December 2020, PornHub removed over six million videos from the site “pending verification and review in the New Year”.

It is not clear what the verification requirements will be, and although this is a positive step by the site to try and reduce the likelihood of illegal content being uploaded, the remaining videos – some of which imitate illegal and abusive conduct - remain easily accessible to children and the harms of exposure to this are very real.

**What to do if you're a revenge porn victim  ?**

1. Verify and change privacy settings.
2. Improve password security.
3. Save your evidence.
4. Make a record.
5. File a police report.