WoPAI Submits Letter to UN Women on the Theme of 16 Days of Activism 2025
“Not Just Deepfakes: Why the UNiTE Campaign Must Address Pornography as Digital Violence”
WoPAI, as a global platform created to combat the growing multidimensional backlash against women and girls, welcomes the UNiTE campaign’s focus on digital violence against women and girls, particularly as AI-driven abuse escalates. However, WoPAI strongly objects to the campaign’s framing of “digital violence” that excludes pornography except in the narrow context of non-consensual deepfakes. This framing risks erasing one of the most pervasive and normalized forms of digital violence against women today.
The report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, highlights that referring to crimes of sexual digital forgery merely as “deepfakes” undermines their unlawfulness, trivializing what are in fact serious sexual crimes. Equally, she emphasises that the system of pornography presents violence and dehumanizing depictions of women, reinforcing stereotyped roles and maintaining women’s inferior status globally. Pornography is not a neutral or harmless digital medium; it is a structural driver of online and offline violence against women.
Research consistently shows that the majority of pornography depicts physical aggression, humiliation, and coercion, overwhelmingly targeted at women. A landmark content analysis found that “88% of porn scenes contain physical aggression and 49% contain verbal aggression”. Moreover, new AI tools exacerbate these harms by generating sexual and pornographic content aimed at coercion or extortion, resulting in trauma or even suicide.
To categorize pornography as harmless when it involves “consenting” women ignores structural inequalities, coercive environments, and systemic grooming, abuse and commodification of women within the pornography industry. Consent in such circumstances cannot be used as a justification for gross human rights violations perpetuated in the pornography industry, which profits from the objectification, dehumanisation and degradation of women and girls.
WoPAI argues that by excluding pornography from the definition of digital violence, the UNiTE campaign risks legitimizing one of the central drivers of misogynistic social norms. Therefore, effective action against AI-generated sexual abuse must occur within broader efforts to combat pornography and prostitution. WoPAI urges UN Women to adopt a human rights based definition of digital violence that includes pornography and not only AI-generated or “non-consensual deepfakes”.
As the UN body entrusted to monitor the global progress of the Bejing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), UN Women must not undermine the commitments of governments and international organisations under the Platform to “Take effective measures or institute such measures, including appropriate legislation against pornography and the projection of violence against women and children in the media”.
WoPAI states that the position of “neutrality” that the UN Women has been trying to maintain on prostitution and its filmed version, pornography, is untenable in the face of systemic and gross violations the different branches of this industry perpetuate. WoPAI asks that UN Women stands to its mission and have a clear position grounded in human rights on prostitution and pornography.