Violence against Women and Girls: Pornography Prostitution

I will call Joani Reid to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. I remind Members that they may make a speech only with the prior permission of the mover of the motion and the Minister. There will not be an opportunity for the mover of the motion to sum up afterwards.

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the impact of pornography prostitution on violence against women and girls.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I begin by thanking two organisations that have been hugely helpful in preparing for today’s debate: UK Feminista, which provides the secretariat for the all-party parliamentary group on commercial sexual exploitation, and the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation—CEASE—and particularly Gemma Kelly, its head of policy.

Let me set out from the beginning precisely what I mean by pornography prostitution. It is the fusion of the pornography industry and the sex trade into one system. It is the buying, selling and consumption of sexual access to women, livestreamed, or filmed and uploaded, and monetised as entertainment. It is seen by many as a new and booming industry. I disagree: it is commercialised abuse, repackaged and sold as entertainment. It is a form of violence against women and girls.

Nowhere is that clearer than on OnlyFans, a UK-based company that has now become the global giant of online sexual exploitation. Last year, it generated $6.6 billion in revenue. It markets itself as a harmless subscription platform but, in reality, it is the largest pimping empire in the world today. I want to focus on three areas where OnlyFans is enabling violence against women and girls.

First of all, I commend the hon. Lady on bringing this forward. I spoke to her beforehand to ensure that my thoughts are similar to hers. There is no doubt that online platforms such as OnlyFans pose a potential threat to how young people perceive sexual relations. Does the hon. Lady agree—the Minister is here to answer this, of course—that the law needs to be brought up to date to ensure that OnlyFans and all other online pornographic platforms, including adult services websites, put proper age and consent checks in place to protect young people from damaging content online?

I agree. I think that age verification is hugely important in tackling children’s exposure to pornography. It is not just on those websites; it is found on mainstream websites as well, and I think that is something that we need to look at in the next regulations under the Online Safety Act 2023.

As I said, OnlyFans is the largest pimping empire in the world. It is a playground for child sexual abuse and exploitation. Harm and coercion are suffered by women who become so-called content creators, and there is a wider societal and cultural impact, particularly on children and young people.

I begin with the most damning evidence: OnlyFans claims to have a zero-tolerance approach to child abuse, yet Reuters has documented at least 30 criminal cases between 2019 and 2024 in the United States alone involving child sexual abuse material on the platform, including hundreds of videos and images, some depicting extreme abuse. In one horrific case, the graphic abuse of a 16-year-old girl was monetised for more than a year before it was taken down, and that was only after Reuters started asking questions. We should be under no illusion: OnlyFans is not a safe platform for consenting adults to express and enjoy themselves. As one survivor put it,

“A whole company has made money off of my biggest trauma”.

The truth is that all that is just the tip of the iceberg, because OnlyFans hides content behind millions of individual paywalls, and there is no meaningful way for independent investigators, charities, or even law enforcement to monitor the full scale of the abuse. That is not transparency; it is secrecy by design.

Ofcom fined OnlyFans for providing misleading information about age verification. While the company claims to set a global standard, the reality is stark. It has no meaningful age verification in the vast majority of the more than 100 countries in which it operates. How many of the 500,000 new users signing up every day are children? We do not know because OnlyFans will not say. OnlyFans likes to boast that every video is reviewed by a human moderator, but the figures just do not add up. Last month alone, 62 million pieces of content were uploaded. Independent experts have said that it would take tens of thousands of moderators to review it all, but OnlyFans employs just a few dozen staff. It outsources the rest to Poland and Ukraine, behind non-disclosure agreements, with no transparency. When the company tells us it has zero tolerance for abuse, we must ask: zero tolerance or zero credibility? The evidence suggests the latter. It is not a British success story; it is the British export of the abuse of children to the world.

I must congratulate and thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. This debate should be difficult to listen to, but it still does not compare to the violent impact of pornography on women and girls. Does she agree that the upcoming violence against women and girls strategy should explicitly recognise and address prostitution and pornography as forms of commercial sexual exploitation?

I completely agree. I hope—and this is a point that I am sure the Minister will respond to later in the debate—that there is a section within the strategy to address these issues. That could possibly be advanced as a result of collaboration between the Home Office and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

I was talking about the abuse that women who are involved in online pornography have suffered: 56% were physically assaulted as a result of their online pornography, and 65% raped. No other industry in Britain would be allowed to operate with those statistics. Meanwhile, OnlyFans executives pay themselves handsomely and its owner reportedly takes home £1.3 million a day. That is the price of women’s pain. But the harm extends well beyond women directly exploited. Its cultural impact is shaping the attitudes and behaviours of an entire generation.

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. Does she agree that the normalisation of violent porn can mean that these horrors come out of the screen and into real life, particularly when defence counsels argue that consent was given to crimes of strangulation? Does she welcome, as I do, the Government’s steps to make strangulation an aggravating factor when sentencing for murder?

Again, I agree with my hon. Friend’s point. I am delighted that the Government have brought forward plans to ban strangulation in pornography, but there is a whole host of behaviours within pornography that we know affect real-life abuse.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does she agree that, having created the ban on non-fatal strangulation in pornography, the Government now also need to ban depictions in pornography that encourage a sexual interest in children—so-called paedophilic-adjacent porn—as well as depictions of step-family incest?

Let me take the opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that she did with other members of the APPG to get the Government to make that commitment around strangulation. Yes, I think it should extend to those categories as well. We have to tackle pornography that normalises and glamourises child abuse. It is not niche; we know from the work that we have done and through the Bertin review that, on Pornhub, incest porn is a main category. It is absolutely repugnant and should be tackled through Government intervention.

The impact extends into the behaviours of children and young people: eight in 10 children have seen violent pornography by the age of 18. Increasingly, children’s first exposure to sex is not a healthy relationship but online abuse marketed as entertainment.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Pornography is nothing new, but access to the kind of content she has described is something that previous generations did not have to deal with. The most responsible and vigilant parents are struggling to prevent access to it. Does she agree that we need action from the companies that promote and disseminate this type of material, in addition to the work of parents, and the important work that the Government are doing?

We have recently seen a step forward in the age verification process but, as we know, parents cannot be omnipresent, particularly online. Companies such as Facebook, Meta and Instagram are allowing pornographic content to be pushed and used within algorithms, and it is completely unforgivable. Yes, I completely agree with my hon. Friend.

The academic Dr Elly Hanson talks about a parasitic ecosystem, which refers exactly to what my hon. Friend mentioned: OnlyFans feeds off mainstream social media platforms, where sexualised clips are pushed to children by algorithms, which pushes them on to their sites. Teenagers are bombarded with adverts and the grooming is blatant. Children have reported seeing OnlyFans content creators appearing alongside exam revision ads on their feed, the content of which was so graphic when I looked at it in preparation for this debate that I cannot bring myself to quote it. Children are being pushed this content, and it is being normalised. It is not a bug in the system; it is the business model. One child said,

“The amount of porn and fights I get on twitter is just horrible.”

The result of all this is that girls report feeling coerced to imitate what boys expect, and boys describe being desensitised, seeing violence and degradation as normal. Doctors link the 40% rise in non-fatal strangulation during sex to pornography consumption. As a result, as we have already mentioned, the Government have announced that the depiction of strangulation in pornography will be banned, in a move to protect women and girls from violence. CEASE’s report “Profits Before People” makes clear that pornography is harmful not just for those in it but for society. It grooms boys to perpetrate violence and grooms girls to accept it. It is not a fringe issue; it is a public health crisis.

Let me briefly address an argument sometimes presented by so-called progressive voices, particularly on the left, who claim that they are advocating for the rights of sex workers. Let me be clear: what they are really doing is prioritising a tiny minority of privileged individuals—people like Bonnie Blue—who pursue this work out of commercial choice rather than desperation. In doing so they ignore, and in fact further marginalise, the vast majority of women trapped in cycles of abuse, violence and poverty. Elevating the voices of those who profit from glamorising exploitation is not progressive; it is regressive, and it fundamentally betrays the women, girls and children who are suffering.

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this important debate. One of the issues with OnlyFans is the way that it does its marketing. Content creators can only market their content by pushing it out on to other platforms. Does the hon. Member agree that we absolutely have to keep the law up to date with modern technology—pornography laws are now well out of date—to stop pornography not only being available on OnlyFans but creeping out on to regular social media platforms?

I completely agree with the hon. Lady. Social media companies should not be allowed to push pornography and sexual content to under-18s, and they should be banned from doing so.

The wider tech industry is crucial to this issue—it is not just OnlyFans. It should not be allowed to profit from directing children towards pornography. If it does not comply, economic levers could be considered. If OnlyFans refuses to reform, it could face a levy on profits to fund services for survivors and education for young people.

We should learn from Sweden. On 1 July this year, Sweden became the first country to criminalise the purchase of sex online. The OnlyFans law sends a clear message that buying exploitation is not a digital game; it is a crime. The UK could look seriously at following that path. However, I appreciate that much work needs to be done before we reach that point. We must acknowledge that the prostitution laws in our country remain rooted in Victorian values and were designed in a different age.

In my view, prostitution and sexual exploitation are inherently violent. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is right that we shift the criminal burden on to those responsible for sexual exploitation and violence, and that more should be done to criminalise those who buy sex, whether it is through prostitution or OnlyFans?

What my hon. Friend describes is the Nordic model, which I fully support and hope to see implemented in this country some time in the future. Ash Regan, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, brought forward a private Member’s Bill there that made a serious attempt at trying to implement that way of doing things. We should modernise the system and appreciate that vulnerable women should not be criminalised—those who create the demand should.

Ultimately, we must be clear about the principle. For too long, it is the women who have paid the price while the men who purchase and the corporations that profit walk free. We need to turn that around. As survivors in Sweden put it: “It feels like redemption.” This is not about prudishness; it is about confronting violence and exploitation in plain sight. Pornography prostitution is not a career and is not harmless entertainment. It is abuse—filmed, monetised and uploaded.

Order. I urge the hon. Member to give the Minister some time to respond.