By The Children’s Commissioner for England

This report draws together research from focus groups with teenagers aged 13-19 and a survey of 1,000 young people aged 16-21. Of the 64% who said that they had ever seen online pornography: • We find that pornography exposure is widespread and normalized – to the extent children cannot ‘opt-out’. The average age at which children first see pornography is 13. By age nine, 10% had seen pornography, 27% had seen it by age 11, and half of children who had seen pornography had seen it by age 13. • We also find that young people are frequently exposed to violent pornography, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts; 79% had encountered violent pornography before the age of 18. Young people expressed concern about the implications of violent pornography on their understanding of the difference between sexual pleasure and harm. Indeed, this report finds that frequent users of pornography are more likely to engage in physically aggressive sex acts. • Pornography is not confined to dedicated adult sites. We found that Twitter was the online platform where young people were most likely to have seen pornography. Fellow mainstream social networking platforms Instagram and Snapchat rank closely after dedicated pornography sites. At the time of publication, the UK’s landmark Online Safety Bill is making its way through Parliament. It holds the promise of, finally, regulating pornography sites and ensuring that they implement robust age verification to protect children. Now is a vital moment to ensure that we understand the impact of pornography on children’s lives, and to legislate for a commensurate response. This report is published as the Online Safety Bill passes through Parliament. The legislation, as currently drafted, imposes important age verification requirements (technical measures to establish someone’s age) on platforms which host pornography to prevent under-18s from accessing adult content online. The research contained within this report syntheses data from a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 young people aged 16-21 in England and two focus groups with teenagers aged 13-19. All research was conducted between November 2022 and January 2023 by the Children’s Commissioner’s Office (CCo) with an aim of understanding the prevalence of pornography exposure (both intentional and unintentional) among young people and its impacts on children’s safety and wellbeing. Differences between groups are only reported where they were statistically significant. The Commissioner intends for this report to aid Parliamentarians as they make crucial decisions about the protection of children from harmful content, including pornography, through the Online Safety Bill. The Commissioner also hopes that findings from this research will support the regulator, Ofcom, in their future enforcement regime, as well as parents, teachers and other key professionals, to understand and protect children from pornography’s impacts. The main research findings are set out below. Unless otherwise indicated, figures refer to young people who have ever viewed pornography. • Pornography consumption is widespread among children. The average age at which children first saw pornography was just 13 years old. • Many children are first exposed to pornography at a very young age. A significant minority of children access pornography at very young ages: 10% had seen it by age nine, 27% had seen it by age 11 and 50% of children had seen it by age 13. • Children often stumble accidentally across pornography online; 38% of 16-21-year-olds said that they had accidentally come across it online. In focus group discussions, young people told the CCo that accidentally viewing pornography for the first time made them feel ‘confused’, ‘insecure’, ‘troubled’ and ‘curious’. Chillingly, some young people spoke about the role of sexualised cartoons, depicting popular children’s characters and which appear in pop-up ads, in actively grooming young children towards adult pornography. • A significant minority of young people are sent explicit images involving a person known to them in real-life. Girls are disproportionately the target of ‘self-generated’ pornography, 51% of girls aged 16-21 had been sent or shown explicit content involving someone they know in real-life, compared to 33% of boys. • Twitter is the platform where the highest percentage of children had seen pornography; 41% of young people reported having seen it on Twitter. Dedicated pornography sites came next (37%), followed by Instagram (33%), Snapchat (32%) and search engines (30%). • Many young people seek out pornography online. Half (50%) of survey respondents, 58% of boys and 42% of girls, aged 16-21 said that they sought out online pornography themselves. • A significant proportion of males are frequent users of pornography. A fifth (21%) of males aged 16-21 viewed content at least once a day in the 2 weeks prior to the survey, compared to just 7% of girls. This is suggestive of a dependency which carries its own risk of interrelated harms. • Boys and those who first viewed online pornography at age 11 or younger were significantly more likely to become frequent users of pornography, consuming it twice or more per week. Focus group participants told us that pornography was sought for several reasons; sexual gratification, curiosity and to ‘learn’ about sex, and pressure to ‘fit in’ with peers. • Children are frequently exposed to violent pornography. The majority, 79%, of 18-21-yearolds had seen content involving sexual violence before turning 18. Early exposure to pornography and frequent consumption significantly increased the likelihood of viewing violent content. Young people are significantly more likely to see violence perpetrated against a woman (65%) than against a man (29%) in pornography. • A significant proportion of young people seek out violent pornography; 36% of young adults had sought out content involving at least one act of sexual violence. Again, a young age of first exposure and frequent consumption of pornography were predictors in the likelihood of actively seeking out violent content for sexual gratification.   

London: Children's Commissioner for England, 2023.   48p.

By Alan Martin

Illegal artisanal mining in South Africa is among the most lucrative and violent on the African continent, with lost production exceeding R14 billion (about USD$1 billion) a year. Current enforcement and policy responses, which criminalise illegal miners, are misguided, counterproductive and ignore the poverty and socio-economic drivers behind the phenomenon. A more holistic, nuanced and multi-faceted approach is required from government and industry to address the lack of formalisation and the marginalisation of the illegal mining sector. Key points ∙ Illegal mining in South Africa should be considered to be artisanal mining within large-scale mines, not separate from them. ∙ While Zama Zamas are members of, or associated with, criminal syndicates, they are not homogenous groupings. ∙ The violence and insecurity caused by the criminality associated with illegal mining makes some mining areas in South Africa more chaotic and conflict-ridden than those elsewhere in Africa. ∙ Rough estimates of Zama Zama outputs suggest that lost gold production may exceed R14 billion a year,2 making South Africa one of the biggest sources of illicit gold in Africa. ∙ The true cost of illegal mining activity includes damage to public and private infrastructure caused by vandalism or poor mining practices, as well as the costs of security upgrades undertaken by mining companies to address illegal breaches  

ENACT Africa, 2019. 12p.

By Romain Le Cour Grandmaison

This article explores the construction – or reconstruction – of brokerage channels by violent actors in Mexico. It focuses on the construction of the Autodefensas de Michoacán (SelfDefense Groups of Michoacán) and studies the process that put illegal armed leaders in active dialogue with the Mexican federal government, but also how they became brokers capable of controlling access to strategic political resources, economic markets, and the connections that tie local citizens and the central state. Through the concept of political intermediation, I investigate how coercion, as a skill and resource, has become central to governance in Mexico; and how this leads to consolidating intermediaries that participate in reproducing local, violent political order. This article shall contribute to the understanding of brokerage in contexts of violence, and shed new light on the political logic fueling the dynamics of violence in Mexico’s war on drugs. Keywords: drug cartels, brokerage, Mexico, war on drugs, state, violence

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 2021.

By Kara Miller

The Oklahoma Statistical Analysis Center (SAC), a unit located within the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), is tasked with analyzing and reporting crime data. In 2019, Oklahoma House Bill 2597 was passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor. Effective November 1, 2019, the bill modified Oklahoma law to permit anyone over 21 years or military services members and/or veterans over 18 to carry a firearm without first obtaining a self-defense act (SDA) license provided they are not disqualified based on their criminal history. In order to evaluate whether the change in law impacted crime in Oklahoma, the SAC chose to study violent, gun-related crimes in Oklahoma using State Incident-Based Reporting System (SIBRS) data for the offenses of “murder and non-negligent manslaughter” and aggravated assault. This initial report evaluates 2018 data to establish a baseline. Future reports will analyze data from 2019 and beyond comparing the results to this benchmark report. Key Findings:  For the 37 victims of murder where the sex was known: o Male victims (27) were killed by offenders whose sex was reported as male (17, 56.7%), female (8, 26.7%), or unknown (5, 16.7%). o Female victims (10) were killed by offenders whose sex was reported as male (9, 90.0%) or female (1, 10.0%).  The majority (540, 79.3%) of victims of aggravated assault with a gun were reported with no injury. Victim-to-offender relationship: o For 73.7% of victim-to-offender relationships for victims of murder/non-negligent manslaughter, the victim was within the family of the offender (42.1%), or the victim was outside of the family but known to the offender (31.6%). o For 64.8% of victim-to-offender relationships for victims of aggravated assault, the victim was within the family of the offender (17.8%), or the victim was outside of the family but known to the offender (47.0%).  Victims of Aggravated Assault and Injuries of Aggravated Assault is defined as the presence of a weapon that could cause serious injury or presence of severe injuries.  Nearly 80.0% of victims were reported with no injury. 

Oklahoma City: Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. Office of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2020. 81p. 

By John K. Roman,  Anthony Washburn,  Sofia Rodriguez; Caterina G. Roman, .; Elena I. Navarro; Jesse T. Brey; Benjamin M. Reist

The HAVEN Project (Harms After Victimization: Experience and Needs) was launched in 2020 by researchers at NORC at the University of Chicago and Temple University with support from the National Institute of Justice1 to address three gaps in the violence literature. First, the project was designed to update the pioneering 1996 NIJ study, Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look using data, measurement and analytic tools that were not available thirty years ago, and that is the subject of this report2. In the same spirit, the project developed an expanded taxonomy of harms from victimization and develops a survey instrument and methodology to facilitate the collection of self-reported data on the harms from violent victimization across multiple dimensions that are commonly excluded from violent crime harms measurement. Finally, advances in criminology have included a growing reliance on causal models to estimate the effectiveness of crime and justice interventions and reforms: the HAVEN project introduced a regression-based cost-benefit model that can be integrated into causal models3  

Chicago: NORC, 2023. 37p.

Edited by Diana Maltz

In 1896, author Arthur Morrison gained notoriety for his bleak and violent ‘A Child of the Jago’, a slum novel that captured the desperate struggle to survive among London’s poorest. When a reviewer accused Morrison of exaggerating the depravity of the neighborhood on which the Jago was based, he incited the era’s most contentious public debate about the purpose of realism and the responsibilities of the novelist. In his self-defense and his wider body of work, Morrison demonstrated not only his investments as a formal artist but also his awareness of social questions. As the first critical essay collection on Arthur Morrison and the East End, this book assesses Morrison’s contributions to late-Victorian culture, especially discourses around English working-class life. Chapters evaluate Morrison in the context of Victorian criminality, child welfare, disability, housing, professionalism, and slum photography. Morrison’s works are also reexamined in the light of writings by Sir Walter Besant, Clementina Black, Charles Booth, Charles Dickens, George Gissing, and Margaret Harkness. This volume features an introduction and 11 chapters by preeminent and emerging scholars of the East End. They employ a variety of critical methodologies, drawing on their respective expertise in literature, history, art history, sociology, and geography. Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End throws fresh new light on this innovative novelist of poverty and urban life.

Abingdon, Oxon, UK: New York: Routledge, 2022.