Vile porn fuels attacks on women, warns MP

YOUNG people need to be protected from the “insidious influence” of extreme pornography to help combat abuse against women, a senior Conservative MP has said.

Caroline Nokes, chair of the Commons women and equalities committee, is gathering evidence of the cultures underpinning male violence against women. It comes in the wake of Sarah Everard’s death in March.

Ms Nokes said: “What has come through in the evidence that we heard is that much of the challenge comes around pornography, ease of access to pornography and the more extreme types of pornography that are available to young people on their phones.

“There’s a real challenge around the Government’s Online Harms Bill and what mechanisms they can use to protect young people from the insidious influence of ever more extreme forms of porn.”

Ms Nokes said lots of types of porn are “really extreme” and show women in “really vulnerable situations”.

She added: “A lot of it is showing them subjugated, demeaned and humiliated. And that’s not real life. But it’s so widely available that young people are getting a completely skewed impression of what grown-up sexual relationships are like and about.

“I don’t pretend that you can put the genie back in the bottle. But it’s really crucial that we do a better job of educating young people about how that isn’t real, and how decent relationships are based on mutual respect and trust.”

The committee will investigate what the Government is doing to measure progress on changing attitudes that normalise male violence, as well as why public campaigns are less prominent than health or road safety ones.

Ms Nokes supports the Daily Express Keep Women Safe On Our Streets crusade, which calls for public sexual harassment to be a specific offence. We have partnered with campaign group Our Streets Now and children’s charity Plan UK to make Britain’s streets safer.

Ms Nokes said: “It is clearly time for the Government to step up and legislate. It needs to do something, either in the Police, Crimes, Sentencing and Courts Bill that’s making its passage through Parliament, or a piece of standalone legislation that makes it clear that public sexual harassment is a specific crime and will not tolerated.”

She added: “We need to build an alliance between men and women, so that women can feel more confident and men can help women to feel more confident.”