By Ruby Sharkie, Associate News Editor
TW: This article includes references to sexual violence, pornography, and harmful sexual behaviours, which some readers may find distressing.
Last month (December 2025), a new government strategy was announced in the House of Commons, its aim; to tackle Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).
The strategy’s main focus is teaching boys about healthy relationships and pornography.
This comes after the next regulation under the Online Safety Act in which more ‘rigourous’ age checking systems were implemented for explicit sites such as PornHub, etc.
Pornhub has stated that the number of UK visitors to its website is down by 77% compared to early July, before the regulations were put in place.
According to Statistica data, “in 2022, 10 percent of respondents to a survey on adult content consumption reported they were between 12 and 13 years old when they first accessed this type of content online.”
“Overall, only half of online users recalled being of legal age when first accessing pornographic content online.”
Consuming pornography has been seen to link toward sexual violence and agressive behaviours, as it often caters to the largely male audience, depicting male dominating sexuality and perpetuating sexist stereotypes.
Additionally, a study of university students featured in Frontiersin.org found that “low levels of cognitive and affective empathy were associated with heavy consumption of pornography.”
In a 2014 article from The Orbital, a survey of more than 2500 students found that 60% of university students have used porn to attempt to fill the gaps in their knowledge about sex and of that 60% of students, 75% admitted it gave them unrealistic expectations.
Many argue this could be due to a lack of sex education in secondary schools and higher, pushing young people to seek information online.
In the 2014 article Damian, a first year psychology student at Royal Holloway, said he was introduced to porn “from an extremely young age, around 10 or 11” and wished he had not seen it until a later time when he was ready: ‘now at the age of 19, I can see how totally wrong my initial assumptions of sex were due to porn”.
The Labour government plans to tackle this growing epidemic by educating children at secondary school age on consent and the dangers of sharing sexual images.
But many people are worried about the pressure this will put on teachers and educators, saying there is not enough funding to tackle such a large problem.
So, as Starmer moves towards regulating online spaces and reforming sex education the effects of these decisions will be felt long before students arrive at university.
However, those in higher education, where ideologies around sex and relationships are first challenged, many question whether earlier intervention could prevent these issues from developing in the first place.
Image by Jordhan Madec via Unsplash