Online pornography telling teenage boys inflicting violence and degrading sex acts on girls 'is normal'

Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, told a webinar in Dublin that adolescent boys were being told by pornography that inflicting violence on girls, and degrading them, is 'normal and part of sexual relations'.

The normalisation and widespread availability of online pornography is “cementing and solidifying” gender stereotypes and violence against women and girls, a UN expert has said.

Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, told a webinar in Dublin that adolescent boys were being told by pornography that inflicting violence on girls, and degrading them, is “normal and part of sexual relations”.

She said countries should not tolerate a situation where they have laws against gender violence in the offline world, but a “jungle free-for-all” online.

Ms Alsalem also condemned the “unfolding genocide” against Palestinians which, she said, involved the “large-scale killing of Palestinian women” in Gaza.

She said there were specific international protections for women under the Geneva Convention and other humanitarian laws and said Palestinian women in Gaza were being targeted to limit their “reproductive capacity” to bear children that are Palestinian.

The UN independent consultant said the level at which this was being done was “unprecedented” in any conflict and was being used as a “genocidal tool”.

Speaking more generally, she told a webinar organised by the Institute of International and European Affairs, she felt the world had entered a worrying period for women and girls.

“I think we are actually in a phase where we seem to be cementing and solidifying gender stereotypes rather than undermining them or fighting them,” she said.

“Some of the most pernicious, sexist stereotypes that fuel violence against women and girls are those that objectify females, that sexualise them, that commodify females, eroticise violence, due to things like normalisation and immense dissemination of pornography and consumption of pornography and attempts to normalise the purchase of sexual acts and buying of women.” 

Ms Alsalem said a report she published last year put forward the proposition that “pornography is actually online prostitution” and could be described as “crime scenes”.

She said there was “no effective” age verification online in terms of what children could access.

“Adolescent boys, even younger boys, access pornography at liberty," she said. 

It creates views in their head that inflicting violence on girls, sexualising them, subjecting them to degrading and violent and humiliating acts — some of them life-threatening, like strangulation — is normal and part of sexual relations.

“And girls, on the other side, are feeling this tremendously, they are feeling hyper-sexualised, [that] this is a normal part of what society expects of them, to attend to male sexual needs.” 

She said a comprehensive approach was needed to combat the problem beyond regulation and criminalisation: “[We need a] lot more education, how to talk about gender equality, disseminate sex education [that] focuses more on equal dignified relationship between men and boys and women and girls. 

"I don’t like the word ‘toxic masculinity’, [but] how to be male in a society that doesn’t glorify violence and misogyny.” 

On trans' rights, she said everyone should be free and have the right to assume a gender identity that is different than what it was at birth.

But she argued for the protection of women-only safe spaces, whether in sports, in changing rooms or quotas for political representation.

She said while there were “tensions in human rights”, it was “very clear” protections for women and girls against discrimination was “based on sex” and that was understood to be biological sex.