A report by the French Senate presented last Wednesday (28) examines the practices of the pornographic industry in France and makes about 23 proposals to alert the government and society. According to the parliamentarians, there is a strong link between pornography, pimping (exploitation, stimulation or favoring the illicit carnal trade) and prostitution. The videos would be a gateway to a “predatory” industry, as highlighted by the senators.
To produce the 150 report pages, Alexandra Borchio -Fontimp (Republican), Laurence Cohen (Communist), Laurence Rossignol (Socialist) and Annick Billon (Centrist) heard dozens of witnesses over six months. Among them, porn actors and actresses, doctors, specialized journalists, police officers, lawyers and filmmakers X.
“ Pornography today is violent, degrading and humiliating content. We denounce an industry that generates systemic violence against women and we are especially concerned about the access of minors to this content”, summarized Annick Billon, senator and chairman of the delegation responsible for the report at a press conference.
With the initiative, the parliamentarians intend to make sexual violence committed in the context of pornography a crime with greater punishment and to impose fines on broadcasters for the dissemination of illegal content. “There will be legislative follow-up to this report,” Laurence Cohen promised.
“There is an urgent need to find solutions because entire generations have pornography as their only reference,” Annick Billon concluded.
Risks for viewers
The internet has profoundly transformed both the production and consumption of this industry in recent years. The report highlights that, in addition to being massive, consumption has become precocious in the country. “Two-thirds of children under 12 and one-third of children under 12 ) years have been exposed to pornographic images, voluntarily or involuntarily. Nearly a third of boys under the age of visit a porn site at least once a month,” the document states.
From an estimated audience of 19, 3 million unique visitors in 2021, pornographic sites are consulted by ” 36% of French Internet users, including 2.3 million minors”, almost 12% of the audience , according to research presented to the Senate.
On the Pornhub website, the monthly audience in unique visitors would include “1.6 million minors, or 17% of the site’s total monthly audience on average”. An exhibition that exploded with the increasing presence of mobile devices since elementary school.
Children are exposed to trauma, disorders and eating and sleep complexes, given the physical and verbal violence present in 90% of pornographic scenes, as described by the senators. Against this exposure, the report presented in France urges websites to find an effective technical solution to verify the age of people accessing the pages and activate the parental control system, reinforcing that this content is prohibited to minors.
“The pornographic films that children and adolescents are watching while they are developing and socializing will influence their relationships with women in general and their sex lives,” noted Simon Benard-Courbon, prosecutor -deputy of the Judicial Court of Bobigny, to the French newspaper Le Monde.
Exposure to these videos encourages the creation of amateur pornographic content through social networks such as WhatsApp and Instagram. With the emergence of other applications, such as Only Fans, which promotes pornography in exchange for remuneration, the problem becomes even greater: it is an incentive to transition to prostitution.
Risks for those who produce
The production of porn films, now in the sights of the French Senate, has been the target of investigations by the Justice for some years, especially two large websites in the sector, Jacquie et Michel and French Bukkake. About business owners, producers and actors are responsible for aggravated pimping, human trafficking in organized gangs, rape and complicity in rape, rape with torture and acts of barbarism.
An actress interviewed during these investigations told about the degrading conditions of the recordings. “This scene ended, so I went to the bathroom and had a bleed. A second scene started soon after. From the beginning, they tried to dehumanize me”, said the actress, whose identity was preserved, as revealed by the RFI portal.
Other victims say that they were deceived on dating sites and when they arrived at the hotel where they had booked. with a partner were required to have recorded sex with several other people. Then, they were extorted if they wanted to take the videos off the air.
To combat abuse, the French senators propose in the text that producers be obliged to inform consumers about the real conditions in which filming takes place. They also recommend police training to collect reports from porn actresses, following domestic violence investigation standards.
