One in eight porn videos promoted to first-time users of the UK’s leading adult sites is labeled with text describing sexually violent acts, researchers have warned.
A new study published in the British Journal of Criminology analysed titles and descriptions of 131,738 videos on the launch pages of Pornhub, XVideos, and XHamsterm, three prominent websites for pornographic content.
The researchers took hourly screenshots of the sites’ homepages over a six-month period between 2017 and 2018.
Descriptions and titles but not the content of the videos themselves were searched-for keywords that corresponded with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) definition of sexual violence.
These then excluded what they considered consensual BDSM (bondage, domination, and sado-masochism) videos from their findings. More than 8,000 titles referred to physical aggression or forced sexual activity.
About 2,966 titles described image-based abuse, including “hidden cams” and “upskirting” while 5,785 titles described sexual activity between family members, the most common category of “sexually violent” material identified in the report.
Pornhub, XHamster, and XVideos were identified as they are the three most visited porn websites in the UK.
According to the study, “teen” was the most frequently appearing word in the entire data, accounting for 7.7 percent of all videos. It was found that the common keywords included “forced”, “grope” and “molest”.
The content would be visible to first-time visitors and available to view with little or no age verification process.
Speaking on the findings, Clare McGlynn QC, a professor of law in Durham who co-authored the study, said: “It’s shocking that this is the material that the porn companies themselves are choosing to showcase to first-time users.”
The porn websites have challenged the study with Pornhub stating — in a transparency report issued last week — that it had taken off 653,465 videos for violating its rules.
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