The mere act of reading details of the ordeal that a 17-year-old girl was put through, by 5 adult men in December 2016, is enraging and deeply upsetting to the point that it is a struggle to even gather my thoughts.
The victim in the case of course cannot be named for legal reasons, but the words she wrote in her victim impact statement are moving to say the least.
The Irish Examiner published excerpts from that victim impact statement where the girl, now a 23 year old woman, described how she felt in the aftermath of the vicious sexual assault, heartbreakingly she even says she blames herself for thinking the men would simply drive her home.
I think we’ve all been told not to get in cars with strangers, indeed the girl says that one of her attackers called her by name: the Irish Examiner writes that he ‘recognised her from social media’, and that she thought the occupants of the car must have been her friends.
Despite having received this ‘age old’ advice I think a lot of us have still made mistakes. Hoping for a lift home on a cold December night possibly isn’t the silliest thing anyone has ever wished for, but what happened to that girl who was ‘naive’ enough to believe that human decency might win, in a situation where she says she found herself unable to get a taxi home after a night out, is utterly horrific.
I strongly encourage you to read the excerpts published in the Irish Examiner detailing what the girl was put through, how she tried to say no, how she was groped, vaginally, and orally raped by her attackers. How all but one of them denied what they did to her. It’s harrowing, it’s sickening, but I think we owe it to her, and to ourselves to read every word, as a reminder of the type of evil perversion that exists in this broken world.
What motivates 5 young men to treat a defenseless girl like a mere sex toy? Like something to pleasure themselves with and discard? To post on social media about assaulting her like it’s something to be proud of? She is someone’s daughter, perhaps someone’s sister, certainly someone’s friend.
I don’t know if pornography influenced what was done, but I do know that the women who are filmed being disrespected, used, dehumanized and degraded by the porn industry are also someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s wife or someone’s mum.
I wonder if consumers of porn ever think about that? What if that was their beloved being exploited for cheap pleasure?
As a society we should by now be aware of the proliferation of pornography. It’s practically everywhere, with the ubiquity of smartphones it’s in our very own pockets: accessible all the time.
A study conducted at a rape crisis centre in the US (Violence and Victims Volume: 15 Issue: 3 Dated: Fall 2000 Pages: 227-234) has revealed that of 100 victims of sexual assault, 28% said they were aware that their abuser used pornography, and 12% said pornography was “imitated during the abusive incident”. Significantly 58% of the survivors said they were “unaware”whether their abuser used pornography or not.
I don’t watch porn – I’ve seen it around me, especially when I lived in Japan – It made me feel something that just isn’t adequately describable as mere disgust. I remember strolling down the aisle at a Tsutaya – Japan’s answer to the late Xtra Vision – and coming across a DVD featuring a young woman holding a sword dressed in a uniform. I thought it was some kind of action film, so I picked it up and turned it over to discover an image of the same girl having her intestines pulled out by a man who was straddling her. I had accidentally strayed into the ‘adult video’ section.
Sexuality is a normal and healthy part of human life: let’s face it – it’s how we all got here, but news reports and academic analysis confirm that the kind of ‘sexual expression’ popular today is something far more insidious, far more dangerous than what past generations might have been hiding under their beds.
An analysis of violence and ‘degrading behaviour’ in 304 scenes of pornography revealed that “88.2% contained physical aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while 48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name-calling.”
The study shows that there is a clear pattern of women being on the receiving end of this abuse, “Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female. Targets most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression.” (Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update)
The findings of positive or neutral reactions to being subjected to violence and disrespect is disturbing. Are a whole generation of young people ‘learning’ that violence and degrading behaviour are natural parts of human sexuality?
It might be easy for some to shrug their shoulders and say ‘well that kind of thing mustn’t be that commonplace’ but let me take this opportunity to remind readers of the ‘PornHub scandal’.
In 2020 The NewYork Times reported that pornhub is “infested” with rape videos and pointed out that the side receives 3.5 billion visits a month.
The article lists categories such as “child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.”
It is also written that using search terms specific to underage girls produced more than 100,000 results, “ Most aren’t children being assaulted, but too many are.”, the article states.
Shockingly it has also been reported that the mother of a missing 15 year old girl ‘found’ her daughter in videos on pornhub.
Just yesterday the Washington Examiner published an article detailing how the girl, who had been missing for a year, was featured in 58 videos of her own rape and abuse. It is reported that the girl’s mother received a ‘tip off’ that her missing child had been seen on the site.
CSO data from 2020 shows that 79.2% of reported sexual assault victims were female, “More than three-in-five (61.6%)” it says “were under 18 at the time the offence occurred”.
So there are an estimated 3.5 billion hits per month on a site that carries video of child rape.
Even if certain users do not view content containing minors (but then again how, I ask, do they actually know what they watch doesn’t feature underage or trafficked individuals) billions of people are frequently viewing images that, according to the study cited above, contain graphic images of violence and degradation. Is it any wonder that incidents like the sickening assault that led to the writing of this piece happen?
The Rutland Center, which provides treatment for those addicted to pornography posted this on their website, “The effects of pornography addiction on the brain are similar in many ways to substance-based addictions such as cocaine.”
“Like with many drugs, prolonged exposure to a stimulus such as pornography leads individuals to gain increased tolerance levels – thus leading them to gain addictive tendencies towards the substance.”
Does increase in ‘tolerance’ lead users to seek greater highs by seeking out more and more extreme imagery? The center’s list of porn addiction symptoms includes:
“Viewing pornography with progressively more intense or bizarre sexual content – typically meaning there is an increasing tolerance level to porn developing within the individual.”
It also lists increases in “aggressive, dominant, or emotionally disconnected.” behaviour.
If you read the details of the way those men treated that unfortunate 17 year old girl, you will likely come to the conclusion that their behaviour was quite clearly symptomatic of at least some of those traits.