The Guardian reported about the trial of Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare who were convicted in the Becky Watts murder trial: Matthews and Hoare harboured disturbing sexual fantasies. They exchanged intimate messages about
kidnapping petite girls. Their phones and computers were used to access pornography focused on teenagers, young women dressed as schoolgirls, and threesomes.
The Daily Mail adds that Matthews regularly viewed porn via the massively
popular website, PornHub:
After the verdicts, campaigners warned that the case showed how violent pornography is fuelling deadly attacks on young women.
Dubbed the YouTube of porn , Pornhub is the world's largest sex site. It hosts more than three
million videos and claims more than two million visits an hour. Founded in Montreal in 2007, it is one of a handful of sex aggregator sites that boast more monthly visitors than Twitter, Amazon and Netflix combined.
Under its
terms and conditions, those appearing in videos must be at least 18 and there is a ban on illegal or obscene footage.
But Clare McGlynn, an expert in the regulation of internet pornography, said new UK legal strictures against
scenes of violence and rape had little effect.
The possession offence applies only to this country, it doesn't stop this stuff being made and uploaded in other countries, said the Durham University professor. These sites
aren't considered extreme but they host content in categories like brutal sex or forced sex. It's normalising sexual violence.
They said sickening images of rape and extreme violence against women have increasingly become part
of mainstream porn on sites like Pornhub, used regularly by Matthews, or YouPorn, and are freely available to anyone with a computer or smartphone despite attempts to tighten the law.
Following a campaign by the Daily Mail, it was
made illegal to possess rape porn . But websites making such sickening material available to users are based abroad and not subject to British laws.
Another Guardian article cites a criminologist working with the Met police,
but it all seems a bit cut and paste with arbitrary and seemingly irrelevant conflation with child porn:
But there is no consensus in the published research on whether the viewing of violent pornography or child abuse images increases the likelihood of an individual carrying out contact abuse or even murder.
Dr Elena Martellozzo,
senior lecturer in criminology at Middlesex University, who works with the Metropolitan police and specialises in studying sex offenders, said while there were certainly links between the viewing of such images and the violence an individual might go on
to perpetrate, not everyone who viewed such abuse images would go on to commit violent sexual acts themselves. She said:
We have been working very closely with a number of sex offenders where once they have been
arrested they were found in possession of a very large collection of indecent images of children. But this is not to say that generally speaking, when people watch something particularly horrendous like this he or she may go on to commit an act of
violence.
Her colleague Dr Jeffrey DeMarco, forensic psychologist at Middlesex University, added:
We do talk about it as being a potential risk factor. So viewing violent
digital literature, photographs, videos, images arguably -- if these actions are in the narrative of this particular individual -- would mean there's an increased probability that their behaviour may go on to be of a violent nature. But there are a lot
of people that are exposed to these kind of images that do not engage in violent acts.
