How porn breeds paedophiles
by Julie Bindel, UnHerd:
“Mainstream, freely available porn gives men permission to go that step further,” says Michael Sheath. “It’s what normalises the sexual abuse of children.”
Sheath, an expert in child protection, can rattle off the titles of mainstream pornography as well as any habitual user: “Daddy I don’t want to go to School!”; “Teen whore used and abused part 2”. These are real videos found on mainstream sites, and all are legal.
“But this legal stuff, accessed mainly by men who are surfing Pornhub or whatever site, can be a gateway to the illegal content in which real children are horrifically abused by adults,” says Sheath. “You can’t have child abuse images without child abuse having taken place.”
The scale of the problem is shocking. According to a major study released a couple of months ago, one in 10 men have carried out sex offences against children, either online or offline. And it is a problem that Sheath is determined to shine a light on, having dedicated the best part of his career to raising awareness about the link between freely available, mainstream pornography and illegal child abuse imagery.
Many feminists, including myself, have long made this connection ourselves. More than two decades before the arrival of the internet, Andrea Dworkin pointed out that it is ridiculously naïve to suggest that pornography doesn’t shape attitudes and sexual responses. And yet the phrase “porn is the theory, rape is the practice”, coined in the Seventies by radical feminist Robin Morgan, has been dismissed and derided by libertarians, who accuse Morgan of adopting a simplistic notion of “man watches porn, man goes on to rape”.
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