With pornography accounting for huge volumes of internet traffic, it’s a subject ripe for analysis. But a new academic journal is causing outrage among campaigners against hardcore porn, writes Carole Cadwalladr

When the Guardian announced the planned launch next year of Porn Studies, the world’s first peer-reviewed academic journal on the subject, there were more than a few guffaws. One headline suggested it was a “new discipline” for academics.

What it concealed, however, is a bitter and contentious academic war over the status and nature of porn research, a war almost as bitter and contentious as the status and nature of porn itself.

Campaigners working to amend the extreme pornography laws to include a full ban on pornographic depictions of rape, which are legal if uploaded abroad, succeeded in putting pressure on Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, who called on Google to crack down on the kind of sites that “pollute the internet”.

Google announced that it would be donating £1m ($1.96m) to the internet Watch Foundation, a body that attempts to police the internet for illegal content.

The issue of porn – what’s out there, who’s watching it, what effect it has – hasn’t been as live as this for years.

Last month, the children’s commissioner for England published a report on the effect of porn on young people, reviewing 40,000 pieces of research, and found a correlation between violent pornography and those who commit violent crimes.

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Porn Studies whips up a storm for academics

Story by Carole Cadwalladr. 22/06/13

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/pornography/news/article.cfm?c_id=283&objectid=10892165