As much as 90% of pornographic content online features verbal, physical and sexual violence towards women, and a significant amount of violence shown is punishable under existing laws in France, a report by the government-nominated equality watchdog has found.
France’s high council for equality between women and men on Wednesday handed the government a damning report on illegal porn-industry practices, urging changes to the law to prosecute makers of pornography and to take down content in order to protect those who have been filmed.
The report said: “The women are real, the sexual acts and the violence is real, the suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.”
The report also cites the French state prosecutor’s own view that the vast majority of pornography contained verbal and physical violence that contravened French law.
The report condemned “inaction” by the French state and authorities in the face of decades of lobbying by the pornography industry which argued for freedom of expression. The report said there must be an end to what it called “blindness and denial” by the state, which had given the pornography industry “total impunity”.
Source: French equality watchdog finds 90% of online pornography abuses women | France | The Guardian