The model is simple enough.
It's like a slot machine: the brain gets used to it. The same experience stops working, so to keep consumers there, the product has to keep moving towards more extreme, more degrading and more violent than what came before.
Across pornography, prostitution and commercial sexual platforms, bodies and intimacy are packaged, marketed and sold. They all depend upon separating sex from the whole person and treating sexual access as something that can be bought.
Most young people meet sex through porn before they meet it anywhere else, and most of them were not looking for it when they did. It found them, on apps built to keep them there. Because they have nothing to compare it against, a lot of them take what they see as instruction rather than performance.
Children are seeing porn younger than any generation before them, most of them before anyone has taught them anything else about sex. Nearly half of boys aged 11 to 16 say it gave them ideas about sex they then wanted to try, and a quarter of 18 to 24 year olds now say porn was the most useful sex education they ever got. Sexual abuse between children is rising in British schools, which is not surprising once you accept that children copy what they are shown, and this is what they are being shown.
Pressure, aggression and strangulation are increasingly treated as a normal part of sex, including by people who never asked for any of it. When porn is the teacher, porn sets the lesson. What gets watched becomes what gets expected, and what gets expected becomes what gets done, usually to women and girls, usually in situations where everyone around them is calling it normal.
People lose hours first, then focus, then the ability to be present with anyone they love. It is built to pull you back and you need more of it over time, so somebody goes looking for closeness and gets handed something harder instead. What follows is well documented: anxiety, problems with sex, and a growing gap between what a person wants to feel and what they can still feel.
The more extreme the demand, the more the industry needs people who cannot say no. Which is why trafficking, filmed child abuse and images posted without permission keep turning up wherever this industry operates, in every country and under every set of rules anyone has tried so far. They are not accidents in the system. They are how the system gets its supply.
Women moved across borders. People in debt. People with nowhere else to go. People frightened into staying. "Teen" is the most common word in pornography titles, across an analysis of 131,738 of them (Vera-Gray et al., 2021). Organised crime is not lurking at the edge of this industry. It supplies it.
The official term is child sexual abuse material. In plain English, real children, abused, filmed, uploaded and sold, with every file a record of a crime that gets repeated each time somebody watches it. In 2023 alone there were 36.2 million reports, covering more than 100 million files.
Private photos posted by an ex. Faces stitched onto porn by AI. Videos somebody has spent years begging to have taken down, still online, still making money for other people. And the same technology has now been turned on children, at a scale that was not possible even three years ago.
This is the level almost nobody wants to talk about, because talking about it means admitting the problem is not only the criminals and the extremes. It is the thing itself. It also asks something of everybody, not just of the people breaking the law, and we understand why that lands badly.
You cannot sell intimacy without first turning a person into a product, and once somebody has learned to watch a human being as something to use and then close down, that habit does not stay on the screen. It comes with them. Into their relationships, into their workplace, onto the street.
Porn offers the feeling of closeness without the risk of another person, and where the cheap version is always available, the real thing gets harder to reach. So here we are, with more access to sexual content than any generation in history and, by every measure we have, rather less intimacy. It survives on silence, too, and the gap between what people do and what they can admit to has become its own kind of loneliness.
Carried on at this scale for this long, it stops being a private thing anyone does at home and becomes part of the background against which everybody else forms their expectations. Dignity, equality and care for each other do not survive very well in a country where a person can be bought, watched, and switched off.
We have officially responded to the government’s Call To Evidence with reference to the Online Safety Bill. The Call for Evidence we have completed is
Unless linked otherwise, all data can be found in our paper, which can be read for free HERE Last week we published our new law reform policy paper, I
By Lauren Agnew, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, CEASE CEASE'is'really pleased'to see'the Government have taken onboard recommendations from Barone
Here is where we stand, unedited.
No, and we never have been. We are against an industry that has installed itself between people and their own intimate lives and profits from the distance. Real sexual freedom does not need a marketplace, it needs another person, and sex tends to be at its best when it is about somebody rather than about a purchase. What we object to is not sex. It is the selling of it, and what that does to everybody involved.
Consent matters enormously, and we would defend it. Our worry is that it is now being asked to carry more weight than it can hold. In practice it works as a permission slip: if they agreed, the thinking goes, there is nothing left to ask, so arrangements we would once have called exploitation get renamed as choice, or preference, or just business. That is why we keep having to add words to it. Free. Informed. Uncoerced. Enthusiastic. Ongoing. Even then, consent cannot answer the questions that actually decide whether something is harmful. Who had the power. Who had another option. Who was fifteen when they learned this was expected of them.
That would be a reasonable position if there were a line between the two, but there isn't one. The same platforms that host this content also shape dating apps, advertising, influencer culture and what children see on their phones before breakfast. More directly, people bring it into their bedrooms. Young women consistently report being asked for things their partners learned somewhere other than from them, and a generation of teenagers is now telling researchers that porn was the most useful sex education they received. Nothing that reaches this many people stays a private fantasy.
Because the illegal content is produced by the same machine as the legal content, and by the same incentive. An industry that has to keep escalating to hold attention will always be reaching for material that is harder to source legitimately, which is why trafficking and abuse keep appearing wherever it operates rather than only in the places with weak enforcement. Prosecuting the worst of it is necessary and we support it. It does not touch what produced it.
We support age verification, takedown requirements and stronger enforcement, and we have campaigned for all three. None of them touches the money. Regulating the harm assumes the harm is an accident inside a basically legitimate industry, and our reading of the evidence is that the harm is the product working as designed. So every fix that leaves the incentive where it is produces the same loop. Harm appears. People get angry. Some regulation follows. The industry adapts, rebrands or moves, and the harm comes back somewhere else in a form nobody legislated for. We have been round that loop for twenty years. That is why we work upstream, on the thing causing the harm rather than on the harm alone.
Some people do choose it, and we are not in the business of telling anyone their experience is invalid. But a defence of an industry cannot rest on the people with the most options in it. The question that matters is what happens to everybody else: the people in debt, the people who were groomed into it at seventeen, the people who cannot get a video taken down. When an industry's best argument depends on ignoring most of the people in it, that tells you something about the industry rather than about them.
No. Most people using porn started as children who were shown something they did not go looking for, on a product engineered to keep them. We get asked fairly often why we do not take a harder line on this, and the answer is that shame does not work. The research is clear that guilt can prompt somebody to change whilst shame tends to drive the behaviour further underground, and anyone who has watched a person struggle with an addiction of any kind will recognise that. We want people out of this, not humiliated on the way.
We want it treated like every other industry that causes serious harm at scale, which is how this country already handles tobacco, gambling and alcohol. That means real accountability, real liability for what platforms host and profit from, and an honest public conversation about demand rather than only about supply. We also support the approach taken in Sweden, Norway and France, which targets the people buying rather than the people sold. What we are not willing to do is keep treating this as the one industry that gets to write its own rules.
No. We are a human rights charity, and we ground our work in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than in any faith position. This subject has an unhelpful habit of being sorted into political tribes, and we have deliberately refused to belong to one. Survivors, clinicians, teachers, researchers, feminist organisations, faith groups and MPs from every party are all part of this coalition. You do not have to agree with us about anything else to agree that children should not be learning about sex from an industry that profits from hurting them.
We would not do the work if we thought it cannot change.
Laws change when enough people ask for them to, and this year has already shown that.
Upstream, on the causes rather than the symptoms. Our approach, and why we chose it.
Tell us what happened to you, or what you have seen. Anonymous or named, in your own time.
Campaign with us, volunteer your skills, or bring this to a room that needs to hear it.
Wins, new research and what is moving in Parliament right now.
