This week, 26-year old former soldier Kyle Clifford was convicted of the rape of his former girlfriend Louise Hunt in July last year. Clifford had already been found guilty of murdering Louise and her mother Carole and sister Hannah in a horrifying attack that shocked the nation.
The court heart that, after Louise ended the relationship with Clifford, he sought revenge, purchasing a crossbow online and alongside other items to restrain, torture and kill his victims. As the judge noted, this was not a crime of passion but carried out in cold blood after meticulous planning. Police investigators found that during the planning of this hideous crime, Clifford consumed pornographic material online, and watched videos of self-confessed woman-hater Andrew Tate.
Why is this detail so important? Are a person’s internet viewing habits—however distasteful—relevant to a crime they commit? The evidence suggests that, when it comes to violence against women and girls, the online world is playing a significant role in driving up rates of rapes and sexual assaults to shocking levels.
For those over a certain age, “pornography” is associated with titillating magazines hidden under the mattress or perhaps a dodgy VHS tape passed around teenage boys. But modern online pornography bears absolutely no relationship to the adult material of the past. It is almost exclusively violent, and 94% of the violence is targeted against women and girls. Videos of real rapes and violent sexual torture abound. PornHub, one of the largest adult sites, has been described as a crime scene, hosting millions of images of trafficked women and children being abused. Internet pornography—like social media—uses algorithms to feed users more and more of the content they consume. When it comes to porn, some of the most searched for terms are ‘teen’ and ‘incest’. Not only is modern pornography extreme, it is also prolific. Pornhub is the sixth most visited website in the world, with more visits than X (Twitter) or Bing or ChatGPT. In the UK, 13.8 million adults visit porn sites every month.
Those who maintain that pornography is a private issue that has no bearing on wider society are living in a fantasy.Research has proven a causal link between consuming violent pornography and real-life sexual violence. Most recently, the government’s pornography review, chaired by Baroness Gabby Bertin concluded that online pornography contributes to some of the "gravest issues in our society, from domestic violence to toxic masculinity to the mental health crisis among young people.”
One of the most popular features of internet pornography is the practice of strangling women during sexual activity. It is shocking, but not surprising, that nearly 40% of 18 – 35 year old women have been strangled during sex, compared to just 3% of over 55s. In so many of the recently reported cases of extreme sexual violence, pornography use has been a contributing factors, for example in the rape and murder of Sarah Everard.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the link between pornography and sexual violence is the relationship between broadband use, mobile phone data consumption and reported rapes. Very obviously, like all video content, internet pornography depends on a fast data connection. Increasingly, individuals consume videos predominantly on their smartphones, thanks to huge improvements in mobile connectivity technology such as 5G. Broadband usage began to grow rapidly from 2014, increasing from 30 Gigabytes per month per fixed residential user in 2013 to 535 GB per month in 2023. Mobile phone data usage followed a similar pattern, averaging well under 50GB per user per month in 2013 and increasing to over 1100GB per user per month in 2023, a 22-fold increase. And, interesting, reported rapes followed the same pattern. Numbers were consistent at around 18 000 per year until 2013, then increased steadily each year to reach over 70 000 per year by 2022.
When I posted these statistics on social media, many commentators claimed that it is not pornography that is increasing sexual violence, but immigration of young men from countries where women are not widely respected. I completely agree that it is a terrible thing to allow tens of thousands of unvetted men from misogynistic cultures to come into our country, and many horrific sexual crimes have been committed, including by anAfghan asylum seeker who was convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl in Scotland this week.
Yet levels of non-EU immigration were steady until 2021, after which they ballooned rapidly under the so-called ‘Boris wave’. If non-EU migration was the principal cause of the increase in reported rapes, we would expect to see sexual assaults begin to rise after 2021, but that is not the case. Instead, the inflection point is in 2014. We are all painfully aware of the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs who groomed and abused white British girls for years, possibly starting as far back as the 1970s. But higher levels of gang rape amongst particular ethnic minorities do not explain why there has been such a significant annual increase, year on year, from 2014. And of course, immigrants watch pornography too—many of the sickening crimes committed against the girls in Rotherham, Telford etc. seem to have been inspired by online porn.
Of course, correlation is not causation, but it seems far-fetched to imagine that it is pure ‘coincidence’ that the pattern of increase in real sexual violence matches the pattern of pornography consumption. One of the reasons why online pornography has such a devastating effect is the young age at which users first encounter it. The average age at which boys first view online porn is just 12 years old. It is one thing for grown men, who already have an understanding of what is ‘normal’ in a sexual relationship, to encounter violent porn. It is an entirely different phenomenon for a pubescent child, who is yet to develop an ‘imprint’ or ‘script’ of sexual tastes and behaviour, to be immersed in a world of extreme and violent sexual imagery.The Children’s Commissioner found that nearly half of young people think that girls ‘expect’ violence during sex. Perhaps it is no surprise that there has beenan 80% rise in sexual assaults and rape in schools in the last five years alone. Young people are painfully aware of the impact of pornography; polling by Whitestone for the CSJ found that 71% of young women and 60% of young men think porn is undermining relationships. And 62% of young women think young men are ‘pretty frightening.’
Ultimately, internet pornography is all about the money, netting porn companies an eye watering $97 billion a year. Porn platforms use algorithms to drive increasingly extreme content to their users, so that boys and men seek out increasingly violent material in order to become aroused. At a time when society struggles to find anything positive to say about masculinity, and when influencers like Andrew Tate encourage boys to demonstrate their ‘manhood’ by abusing women, it’s a toxic combination.
So what’s the answer? Well, if we want to put out a fire, we must first cut off the fuel supply. It is illegal for under 18s to watch pornography, and yet through smartphones and almost non-existent enforcement, porn is just a click away for most children. When it comes to ‘offline’ pornography—DVDs—and dedicated ‘adult sites’, the UK has long-standing and effective regulations, and all content that is dangerous, or looks non-consensual or under age is completely prohibited. These rules do not apply online, and one of the recommendations of the Bertin Review is to bring legal parity between online and offline porn, alongside proper age-gating on all platforms where porn is available (yes effective age verification is possible—just ask any internet bank).
But online rape culture has not grown in a vacuum. In recent years, British media and political elites, and our education system, have denigrated masculine virtues. We have made huge efforts to ‘break down inequality’ when it comes to girls and young women, but ignored the plight of boys who are falling behind. With 2.5 million children now growing up in homes with no father figure, many young boys have no male role model, no man to teach them what it looks like to treat a woman with respect, how to control and restrain sexual urges appropriately, and providing a positive vision of manhood and masculinity. Andrew Tate and others are sowing in fertile ground when boys are more likely to own a smartphone than have a dad. Tellingly, two thirds of young men think fatherlessness is a principal cause of bad behaviour in boys.
Yes, we must crack down on the crime scene of online pornography that is so corrupting our boys and putting women and girls at risk. But we must also find ways to reverse the epidemic of family breakdown, and the trashing of traditional male virtues that is robbing young men of a positive vision of manhood. Men like Kyle Clifford who commit sickening rapes, murders and sexual assaults are criminals and should be locked up for a very long time. But we cannot just sit by and shake our heads as these shocking crimes continue to rise, or pretend that the only cause is immigration. The evidence very strongly suggests otherwise.
