Sebastian Robinson lived in a “fantasy world” of porn. Last year, aged 20, he was sentenced at Teesside Crown Court to seven years in a youth offender institution for repeatedly raping and assaulting a child. The court heard that his regular porn habit had shaped his attitudes towards women and girls. His victim went on to suffer a mental breakdown because of the abuse.
Alexander Davies was 18 when, in January, he was jailed for nine years after grooming children online. He ordered one girl to send him a video spanking herself with a hairbrush and penetrating herself with “foreign objects”. He possessed more than 1,000 images of child porn. He said he was “addicted” to porn and found it “therapeutic”.
The typical child sex offender is a spotty, gangly, sad teenage boy. According to police, the most common age of these offenders in Britain is 14. Another study found that a quarter of today’s 16- to 21-year-olds first saw internet porn while still at primary school, and half had been exposed to it by 13. Would the kids who abuse other kids do so if they hadn’t seen porn?
Tough times lie ahead for Pornhub, the most visited porn website in the world. Since July last year the platform has had to put in place robust age verification measures due to the Online Safety Act, resulting in its UK traffic plummeting 77 per cent. (It’s not surprising that people balked at the idea of uploading their ID to a porn website.) But now, only those who had registered an account with the site before 2 February will be able to access its explicit content. Users who have not created an account will not be able to access the site at all.
In 2020, Pornhub was accused by the New York Times of hosting a large amount of non-consensual and underage content. The company denied the allegations, calling them “irresponsible and flagrantly untrue”, though it removed millions of unverified videos. While many of the videos uploaded to its site depict sex that is lawful, it does not mean it is not brutal (“aggressive cruel sex porn”, for instance, is a category on Pornhub). Few watchers care that the female pleasure performed isn’t real. There may be far darker and more violent corners of the internet, and Pornhub could easily be a stop on a user’s journey to sexual horror.
It’s likely too late to save the already addicted adults. I hope that they know enough about sex off-screen by now to understand that boobs don’t always point like that; that women don’t orgasm in such a way; that your stepsister probably isn’t interested. But any regulation that makes porn less accessible to children and tries to protect the innocent from watching some of the most depraved manifestations of human sexuality imaginable is worth exploring – especially when porn is putting so many young girls at risk.
I can remember what it was like to be a 13-year-old girl who wanted to kiss a boy for the first time. You might send flirty messages; you might feel things you don’t fully recognise. Your understanding of how to best act on these impulses – which haven’t likely been felt before – is limited, in large part because your cultural references are narrow: romantic comedies, rude song lyrics and dirty jokes, a rumour about what a girl in the year above might have done with an older boy. You might have googled “how to kiss” (“stay at a manageable level of saliva”).
Meanwhile, the teenage boys were spending their evenings and weekends watching hours of violent, degrading, absurd sex.
In 2023, research by Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, revealed that one in ten children had seen porn by nine years old. I remember the porn addicts at school: boys who showed everyone videos of blowjobs on their Blackberrys; the boy who posted long Facebook rants about pubic hair; the boy who announced each morning how many days since he last touched himself; the boy who told everyone on a school trip to the First World War trenches that he had masturbated until his penis bled.
As a teenage girl, I often felt like a hunted animal. Parks, parties, the bus after school were all fraught with danger of sexual humiliation or assault. I wonder if the boy who called me a “whore” for having a hole in my tights aged 11 learned that word from porn. I can only assume that the older boy who made my friend, aged 15, dress up as a crying schoolgirl and then hit her repeatedly in the face got that image from the internet. Porn might have played a part in why a boy locked another friend in a bathroom at a party until she did what he wanted (what he wanted was a blowjob).
It’s difficult to imagine things are any better for teenage girls today, given that the internet is a cruder place, and in some corners, a more misogynistic place than ever. But this is clearly damaging boys too. I remember, aged 16, thinking about some of the most violently sexist boys I knew. I imagined them getting bald, beer-bellied and lazy, one day laughing to themselves about how idiotic they used to be. I thought they would grow up and move on from being the predators I knew. Now I think some of the harm can never be undone.
[Further reading: Please let me rent your house]
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This article appears in the 04 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Mandelson affair
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Subscribe here to commentAs a Christian I strongly believe that people can change for the better. This isn’t just a wild fantasy but proven by science around how to treat addiction. You’re dismissal of a chunk of society as “probably too late for them” also takes away agency. Many people who have had traumatic experiences don’t commit violent acts – they do have a choice and that is why those who choose that path get punished.