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 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)”.

It has been reported that Australian children as young as 12 have been caught up in an international online pornography ring operating out of Bangladesh. The children involved were blackmailed on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook into sending explicit images of themselves, which were then sold on the dark web.

The Australian Border Force has started blocking the importation of Hentai (a popular form of animated Japanese pornography) due to its depiction of sexual violence and child sexual abuse material.

By Rachael Wong

A 46-year-old man from South Australia has been jailed for nine months after sending videos of child pornography involving acts of bestiality to an undercover officer.