In the Daily Mail last week, leading British journalist Jenni Murray called for the banning of all adult content and the jailing of its producers and distributors.
The diatribe by Murray came in the midst of a widespread campaign launched by the media to sell the UK’s controversial Online Safety Bill to the public. In the article, the veteran journalist, made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to art and culture, demands that the full force of the state be brought against any person involved in the production or distribution of sexually explicit material.
Following her support for a high-profile anti-pornography study by Boris Johnson’s Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, the journalist writes: »Simply type ‘sex’ or ‘porn’ into the browser and you are bombarded by unimaginably horrific videos of men doing vile things to women, with little or no control over the age of the viewer and no demand for any payment.«
She goes on to highlight a highly dubious report published in the British Journal of Criminology, which claims to show »the extent to which popular porn sites show depictions of sex acts which are criminal.«
Murray then links consensual content depicting fantasies to illegal content and confronts her readers: »When boys and young men are seeing physical aggression, coercion, exploitation and women weeping, is it any wonder they believe, wrongly, that women like all that?«
he is absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as consensual sex work. Moving on from her anti-porn diatribe to her general anti-sex work agenda, Murray claims: »In all my years talking to women as a journalist for both regional TV in Southampton and Women’s Hour, I have never encountered a single sex worker who said she enjoyed selling her body, either as a prostitute or as a ‘porn star.’ Not one was doing her job because it was pleasurable. In every case they felt used, abused and harmed. They had not chosen such a career path.«
According to Murray, a total ban would not only prevent women from being violated in the porn industry but also reduce the belief by some in society that sexual violence against women is acceptable.
As she knows full well that previous attempts to ban pornography have never been successful, Murray tries to reframe the narrative of all sex work as one of sexual assault. The columnist is keen to censor not only “»adult sites« but also Twitter and any other website or platform on the internet. She is fully convinced that the controversial Online Safety Bill is »too weak in its definition of age verification« and leaves too much wiggle room for the industry.