AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
How much tragedy does it take before action is taken to curb the harm done to victims? It took an outcry over the number of brain-injured children to look at stricter measures to be taken on e-scooters, but these have yet to be implemented. It took the death of 16-year-old Grace Lynch from Dublin’s Finglas, who was fatally struck by a scrambler, before the bikes were banned from public spaces. How long will it take before the horrific toll taken by violent and abusive porn on the lives of women and girls is controlled?
It is hardly a coincidence that the sharp rise in domestic abuse has happened at the same time as increased access to porn, which is becoming ever more violent and abusive towards women. Women’s Aid found a 33% increase in the number of reports of domestic abuse last year, with the highest figures ever. Among these were 381 involving rape and 512 cases of non-fatal strangulation.
Women’s Aid Chief Executive Officer, Sarah Benson, said: “The number and nature of the disclosures of abuse to our frontline services is utterly appalling. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” noting research showing that nearly one third of women in Ireland experience physical, psychological or sexual abuse from an intimate partner. The violence goes further. The eight women murdered this year here has already surpassed the number for the whole of 2025.
The contributory effect of hard-core porn, featuring degrading or violent acts like strangulation, is far wider than that. Driving home a message of male dominance and female submission, they influence attitudes and expectations around sexual behaviour between the sexes, especially those of young men. Taken to extremes, the malign influence of hard-core porn can contribute to addiction or be one of the factors involved in murder.
The details of the sexploits of Lorcan Murphy, convicted earlier this month in Hungary of the murder of American nurse Mackenzie Michalski in 2024, make for grim reading. Clinical psychiatrists involved in assessing Murphy found that he had a serious porn addiction dating from his teens. His computer diaries revealed that his goal was to pick up and have sex with as many women as possible in different cities. In his defence, Dubliner Murphy, who strangled the nurse, restraining her with a belt and assaulting her, claimed falsely that Mackenzie had asked to have ‘rough sex’ with him on their fatal one-night stand.
The observations of John Douglas, the FBI’s pioneer in investigative profiling, make equally chilling reading. “With most sexually based killers it is a several step escalation from the fantasy to the reality, often fuelled by pornography. Manipulation, domination, control, these are the three watchwords of violent serial offenders,” he writes in his book Mindhunter, co-authored with Mark Olshaker.
Dealing with the issue of the harm done by porn comes up against questions around definition, access and policing of content in an industry which is huge, bigger than the film industry, with an estimated value of $80-100 billion and thousands of different sites. And porn is enormously popular, with around 60% of the overall population using it and access predominantly via mobile or smartphones. Males are twice as likely as females to access it, with top sites like Pornhub recording billions of views a month.
Nothing wrong with looking at sites to satisfy curiosity, for a turn-on or to spice up sex lives goes the argument. But when content crosses the line from portraying mutual enjoyment into violent, degrading sex, the effects can be damaging. Availability has greatly increased via smartphones and streaming sites, and much of this mainstream porn features female degradation and violence.
One content analysis of more than 300 scenes from popular pornographic videos found that nine in 10 scenes contained physical aggression towards women, with 94% of aggressive acts showing them reacting neutrally or with pleasure.
As for porn watchers: a report by the UK Equalities Office on the relationship between porn use and harmful sexual behaviour towards women spells out four effects. Desensitising men to see women as sex objects, shaping porn-like expectations of sex, acceptance of sexual aggression towards women and influencing the likelihood of sexual aggression towards women.
Abusive porn is bad for us, but how to end its malign effect? Remember that it took 15 years after the report showing cigarette smoking causes cancer for governments to begin to take action.
