Pornography is fuelling sexual and gender-based violence that is leaving young women with serious physical injuries, doctors have been warned.
The annual conference of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) in Killarney heard Government regulation is critical, as children as young as 10 are being exposed to extreme pornography.
Roscommon GP Madeleine Ní Dhálaigh said the “scale and pace of change in pornographic material compared to just a few short years ago has been overwhelming and disturbing”.
She said aggressive intercourse and non-fatal strangulation are among the acts being “normalised” by being widely available to view online.
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“Now, pornography increasingly features extreme acts, including gender-based violence, which are not only potentially physically harmful to participants but also are changing the sexual norms in society among young people in particular,” Dr Ní Dhálaigh said.
The impact on young men and women has been “profound”, with many of them learning about sex from violent pornography, she said. This teaches young men to frequently push boundaries, have normalised coercion and condomless sex, and to frequently disregard a woman’s pain and discomfort, she said.
She told the conference of dealing with a young woman who could not walk after aggressive sexual activity and another who experienced bruising.
Dr Ní Dhálaigh said that on another occasion a parent brought a child to her surgery who was really distressed after viewing severe sexual activity that popped up on a smartphone.
She said the Government needs to urgently introduce regulations to prevent children viewing this material.
Eoghan Cleary, a teacher at Temple Carrig school in Wicklow speaks to teenagers aged 15 and 16 on the impact of pornography.
He told the conference that people he has spoken to had access to the internet since they were 11 or 12”, but the cohort coming behind them have had “unregulated access” since they were six.
“This upcoming generation of children will be robbed of the chance of developing their own natural sexuality because it will have been dictated to them by the porn industry before they even had their first sexual thought.”
“If we do not interrupt the pervasive role that porn is playing in the sexual development of our children, the difference between sex and sexual violence will cease to exist for the next generation of Irish young people. And we just cannot let that happen.”
Ruth Breslin, director at the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute, said the nature of pornography has evolved to become almost unrecognisable from the 1970s and 80s. She said content that was once considered niche and extreme is now mainstream and available on every pornography platform. She said it can be accessed by anyone, including children, with a couple of clicks.
She said widely available pornography now includes acts such as slapping and strangulation.
She said an analysis of pornographic content showed that nine out of 10 scenes involved physical aggression, which in 94 per cent of cases was targeted at a woman. She said women who experienced the aggression were required to respond either neutrally or with pleasure. She said it involved “the eroticising of sexual violence”.
