This week, the Daily Telegraph published an article titled “‘Mental torture’: Shock rise in revenge porn, online abuse”, which revealed that “Three quarters of Australians had at least one negative experience online in the last year, with more than one in five perpetrators targeting their victims for fun”:

By Dr Emma Wood

In the last month, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) released a research report, titled: “A Life Course Approach to Determining the Prevalence and Impact of Sexual Violence in Australia.” The report summarised findings from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health.

Despite a considerable effort by the Australian Football League (AFL) to reform its culture in recent years following negative media reports of sexual assault and intimate partner abuse by players, the emergence of a number of damaging leaks and allegations have once again brought into question whether real reform has actually been achieved and the possibility that serious measures are needed.

The link between the normalisation of sexual violence through pornography and actual violence against women has been borne out by the research for some time now:

A US District Court has denied a motion from tech organisation MindGeek, the parent company for the pornography website PornHub, to dismiss a class action lawsuit against the Montreal-based tech giant.

Grammy award winning singer Billie Eilish has opened up about her addiction to pornography, which started when she was just 11 years old, saying that the abusive content gave her nightmares and warped her ideas of sex and body image.

After almost taking her own life on finding out that a video of her was uploaded to Pornhub without her knowledge, a Chinese woman is fighting back with an app to help survivors of non-consensual pornography.

A group of 34 brave women from several countries around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Thailand, have filed a lawsuit against Montreal-based company MindGeek, the adult entertainment empire that runs Pornhub. The women claim that the company has knowingly profited from material that depicts rape, sexual exploitation, including of minors, and trafficking and other non-consensual sexual content.

New research by University of Melbourne Professor Laura Tarzia and RMIT University’s Dr Meagan Tyler has found that “pornography features prominently in the accounts of women experiencing Intimate Partner Sexual Violence (IPSV)”.