Continuing Patterns of Trauma

Thomas Colsy writes:

A major Swedish study has found that nearly all individuals who have been filmed for commercial pornography reported severe childhood abuse, with 88 per cent experiencing sexual abuse as children, adding weight to concerns that many participants in the adult industry may be continuing patterns of trauma rather than exercising fully free choice.

The research, titled “The experience of individuals filmed for pornography production: a history of continuous polyvictimisation and ongoing mental health challenges”, was published in 2025 in the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry by Meghan Donevan, Linda S Jonsson and Carl Göran Svedin. It examined the experiences of 120 adults, the vast majority of them women, who had appeared in pornography. Nearly all participants, 95.8 per cent, had suffered at least one form of childhood abuse, including sexual abuse reported by 88.3 per cent, psychological abuse by 90 per cent and physical abuse by around 79 per cent. Roughly one-third had been placed in foster care or institutionalised during childhood.

The consequences extended into their time in pornography production itself. Participants reported high levels of further abuse, including verbal abuse in 87 per cent of cases and rape in 65 per cent of cases. Mental health outcomes were particularly stark: 84 per cent showed clinically significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, 60 per cent had significant dissociative symptoms, 69 per cent had attempted suicide and 80 per cent had received at least one mental health diagnosis. The authors described a pattern of continuous polyvictimisation and called for stronger mental health support and legal reforms to better protect vulnerable people in the industry.

These findings align with a broader body of research linking early trauma to later involvement in prostitution and pornography. Multiple earlier studies have documented elevated rates of childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress among women in the sex trade, suggesting that what is often presented as autonomous adult choice can instead reflect the long shadow of prior victimisation.

The Swedish data has added fuel to public debate over extreme content on platforms such as OnlyFans. Performers including Tiffany Wisconsin, also known as Tiffany Goodtime, have drawn attention after participating in high-risk “challenges”. Following one widely publicised scene involving multiple men, she underwent reconstructive anal surgery and later filmed herself from her hospital bed discussing her recovery while reassuring followers she would soon return to producing content. Similarly, the British creator Bonnie Blue, whose real name is Tia Billinger, has gained a large following and significant earnings while using promotional language that invites men to “destroy” her and “rearrange my insides”, presenting such statements as part of an empowered brand.

In an April article in The Critic titled “The limits of choice”, Josephine Bartosch argued that society sometimes knows better than individuals who are harming themselves. She pointed out that government bodies and regulators continue to consult participants in the sex industry as if they were neutral stakeholders, despite evidence of widespread prior trauma and clear financial incentives to downplay harm. Bartosch contended that consent, while important, is a flimsy shield when deep psychological vulnerability, past abuse or economic pressure is involved, and that normalising extreme acts as liberation ultimately reshapes societal standards around sex and violence.

Defenders of the industry maintain that adult performers are capable of making their own decisions and that criticism or regulation does more harm by increasing stigma. Yet the Swedish study, alongside visible cases of physical injury and public affirmations of extreme practices, has intensified questions about where the boundary lies between personal autonomy and the need for societal protection against self-harm and exploitation.

The full study is publicly available through the Nordic Journal of Psychiatry.

And Clement Harrold writes:

During my first year of graduate studies at Notre Dame, the university introduced Grubhub robots to its campus. The move encapsulated so much of the moral schizophrenia that afflicts this great academic institution.

On the one hand, students are endlessly informed – in school-wide emails, in bulletin boards, in homilies – that the university cares about their physical, mental and spiritual health. Yet this messaging is belied by the fact that the administration simultaneously chooses to sully its beautiful campus with ugly bots whose sole purpose is to spare students the immense inconvenience of having to take a short walk to collect their fast food.

If the university were actually sincere about supporting the health of its students, it would recognise that it is a good thing to be forced to step away from your laptop and get some sunlight and exercise before tucking into your Chick-fil-A sandwich. This kind of logic used to be obvious to reasonable people – but no longer, apparently, at Notre Dame.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the slavish defenders of the robots attempt to justify their existence on the grounds that a student might be sick, or disabled, or… lazy and overweight. It never seems to occur to these apologists to ask themselves what it says about Notre Dame as a Catholic community if students with sickness or disability feel so isolated that their only recourse is to receive their dinner from an insentient droid.

In the absence of any plausible justification for the robots’ presence on campus, one is forced to conclude that the only reason Notre Dame permits it is so that it can benefit financially from feeding the unhealthy habits of its student body. Sure, the desperately shy and lonely freshman now has no reason to leave his dorm room for anything other than class, but apparently that is acceptable as long as the people at the Golden Dome can make a quick buck. And if you thought a $20 billion endowment would be enough to dissuade them from resorting to such crass profiteering, you would be mistaken.

This is not the only instance of Notre Dame pursuing policies that directly contradict its stated desire to care for its students. On April 14, the university finally agreed to implement a pornography filter for its campus Wi-Fi following years of lobbying from different student groups. At long last, Our Lady’s University can take pride in achieving the moral clarity of McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Except, it cannot even do that. Because whereas McDonald’s, Starbucks and countless other Fortune 500 companies have the sense to block all sexually explicit content on the simple basis that ‘this content is disgusting and you should not be consuming it in our restaurants’, for Notre Dame this was a step too far. And so the Wi-Fi filter was established on a purely optional basis, leaving students to decide for themselves whether they wish to use the university’s broadband to access the ocean of moral filth that exists online.

What could possibly justify such a spineless policy? One argument is that open access to pornography is part and parcel of academic freedom. The proponents of this view seem to purposefully ignore the fact that the kinds of ‘scholars’ who are using hardcore porn for research purposes are almost always creepy weirdos who should not be employed at a Catholic university. But even if they have good intentions, there is no reason for their research to negatively affect the entire student body.

Another argument is of the defeatist type, which says that there is no point in blocking porn because students will still access it over mobile data. The objection undermines itself: if the porn filter makes no difference, then why are you so opposed to it? But in fact, experience shows that such measures do make a difference.

A key element in overcoming an addiction is to make the drug less convenient to access. There would, moreover, be a profound pedagogical value in the university choosing to block all porn. Lex magistra vitae. The law is a teacher, and when porn is prohibited over the communal Wi-Fi students are consciously and subconsciously reminded that this content is both gravely evil and socially unacceptable.

At the end of the day, all of the attempted justifications for keeping porn accessible stem from the same place: they wilfully or naively ignore just how depraved the porn industry actually is. Abortion, divorce, child trafficking, gender dysphoria and atheism are all its hideous legacy. In a just society, the corporate bosses at PornHub would not just be ostracised; they would be rounded up and sentenced to life in jail for crimes against humanity.

Scripture tells us that God will hold teachers and priests especially accountable for how they have looked after those under their care. The president and board of trustees at Notre Dame should take this to heart when they choose to stand by the current policy. Like all of us, they will one day stand before the judgement seat of the One who said it would be better to be cast into the sea with a millstone around one’s neck than to cause one of His little ones to stumble.

On that fateful day, all those who have been complicit in the spread of pornography will be confronted with the victims whom they failed to protect. The little boy robbed of innocence in what should have been his happiest years. The actress who is exploited and abused from a young age. The husband who despairs of ever finding healing and whose marriage has fallen apart. The wife whose sense of self-worth is permanently shattered. The child in the womb who is cruelly murdered as a result of a promiscuous culture that treats persons as objects.

Internet porn has ravaged an entire generation – my generation – and I am fed up hearing effeminate boomers pretend otherwise. Never before in human history has a sector been so effective at normalising the most abhorrent violations of human dignity. This is the modern slave trade, dealing not only in bodies but in the millions of souls who have fallen into its snares.

In order to begin healing a culture that is awash with evil, we must begin by turning off the tap. Pornography is that tap, and it is high time for Notre Dame to get with the programme and start protecting its students.

Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. It was in 2000, under Tony Blair, that the introduction of the R18 rating effectively legalised hardcore pornography. As with the downgrading of cannabis to a Class C drug between 2004 and 2009, and as with the mercifully failed attempt to set up supercasinos while successfully permitting gambling companies to advertise on radio and television, that was what the replacement of Clause IV wrought.

Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today, both by means of drugs, and specifically among young males by means of pornography. In Ukraine, when they tore down statues of Alexander Pushkin and renamed streets that had been named after him, they legalised pornography to help pay for the war. Even before then, some people had already been taking payment to strip on camera via the “charity project” Teronlyfans, to fund the Armed Forces.

Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side. The same side as the Green Party.