Gane, Gabrielle;
Watters, Paul;
Wortley, Richard;
Prichard, Jeremy;
(2024)
Blurring the lines: the vague boundary between mainstream and deviant internet pornography tags for at-risk viewers.
Journal of Sexual Aggression
pp. 1-17.
10.1080/13552600.2024.2410352.
(In press).
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Abstract
Illegal material is increasingly appearing on popular mainstream websites. Many commentators worry about the impact of such material on adolescents' psycho-sexual development and the potential for some legal pornography to act as a gateway to child sexual exploitation material for users of any age. In this study, we collected publicly available data from a popular legal pornography website to assess the risk of adolescent exposure to content that may hinder healthy psycho-sexual development. We analysed over 27 million customer searches involving 149 video tags from this site. Five international experts on the effects of pornography rated the tags, categorising them into five overlapping genres: mainstream, incestuous, underage, aggressive and non-consensual. They also assessed the potential risk each genre posed. Our analysis found a significant positive correlation between the harm ratings and the frequency of tags used as search terms. Additionally, eleven of the twelve tags with the highest mean risk scores involved potential underage and/or incestuous content. This study highlights a concerning relationship between the harm ratings of various pornographic genres and their popularity as search terms. While exploratory, these results emphasise the need for regulatory measures to address the presence of harmful material on mainstream websites.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Blurring the lines: the vague boundary between mainstream and deviant internet pornography tags for at-risk viewers |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13552600.2024.2410352 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13552600.2024.2410352 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Pornography; pornographywebsites; pornographyregulation; CSEM; adolescentsexual development;pathways to CSEM |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Security and Crime Science |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10199239 |
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