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March 31st, 2026
Written by: Amna Ahmad
Content Advisory: This piece discusses sensitive topics such as sexual violence, trafficking, and harmful online content. Reader discretion is advised.
Supporting survivors of trafficking and promoting awareness are essential to preventing trafficking, but sometimes we forget to look at the root of the issue. If we want to end trafficking, we also have to talk about the forces that make it possible in the first place.
Trafficking doesn’t happen in isolation. It grows in a culture where buying people, their bodies, their labour, and their images, is normalized and often low-risk. Demand isn’t simply “bad individuals making bad choices.” It is a set of attitudes and systems that teach people to see others as commodities.
Research shows that addressing demand is one of the most effective ways to reduce trafficking long-term. That means looking at the cultural trends and technologies that are shaping how young people learn about sex, intimacy, violence, gender, and power.
The conditions creating demand are both cultural and economic, and they’re accelerating.
Pornography has become one of the most influential places where young people are first introduced to ideas of sex and consent. Today’s mainstream porn is not simply sexual content, it is often violent, degrading, and shaped by algorithms that reward aggression.
A 2022 report from Common Sense Media found that 54% of teens said they had seen online pornography before the age of 13. 44% of those who viewed it were doing so intentionally, and 45% of them felt that pornography gave them helpful information about sex.
Moreover, 52% of teens who view pornography reported that they had seen pornography depicting what appears to be rape, choking, or someone in pain. This kind of exposure, and the frequent use of pornography, is linked to greater acceptance of rape myths and a stronger belief in rigid gender roles, according to this 2025 study.
When teens who consume pornography trust its messaging about sex, their own attitudes change. These aren’t small shifts. Media influences real-world behaviours and fuels the cultural conditions that make trafficking profitable.
Over the years, the way boys and young men understand gender, relationships, and power, have changed. The rise of the ‘manosphere’, an online space built around misogyny and dominance, with influencers like Andrew Tate at the centre, has played a major role in this reshaping.
A study from The Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health found that the number of teenage boys engaging with “manosphere content” is on the rise. Many turn to these spaces because they offer a lens to understand difficult periods of embarrassment and loneliness.
But those answers come with a cost. Influencers, like Tate, reward anger and contempt towards females, and in turn, these harmful beliefs that form online spill over into real-world behavior. In schools, this has resulted in a rise in casual misogyny, and acceptance of violence as part of masculinity.
This matters for trafficking because demand grows wherever men believe they are owed access to women’s bodies, and the manosphere teaches exactly that.
Behind the rise of the manosphere, is what some call the ‘male loneliness epidemic’. Although data shows that there is no statistically significant gender disparity in loneliness, this ideology has reached many online, and has fueled the rise of the manosphere.
Feeling alone can make young men vulnerable to dangerous ideology. When someone feels disconnected, they look for belonging wherever they can find it. The manosphere provides them with a place where they feel understood, and redirects their pain towards blame and misogyny. What begins as a search for community becomes a pipeline toward harmful beliefs.
Traffickers exploit this vulnerability too. Men who feel ignored, rejected, or insecure, are easier to manipulate into becoming buyers or collaborators. Loneliness doesn’t excuse harm, but understanding it helps us stop the pathways that lead there.
Through factors like the manosphere or pornography, violence against women in intimate settings has become more normalized.
Sexual strangulation has become so widespread and normalized among young people that many do not consider it to be a form of rough or violent sex at all. However, although becoming increasingly common, research has found that not everyone engaging in it necessarily wants it.
In a 2019 survey for BBC, it was reported that out of a group of 2,000 young women aged 18 to 39, 38% had experienced unwanted power-based harm during otherwise consensual sex.
Digital culture pushes this normalization of violence further, as the UN Secretary General's 2024 report found that online misogyny, violent content, and hyper-sexualized videos normalize aggression. And now, AI-generated abuse material has made things even worse.
In 2024, the Internet Watch Foundation found over 20,000 AI-created Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Material (CCSAEM) in one dark web forum. Harmful content is accelerating at an alarming rate and when violence becomes normalized in intimacy, the line between desire and domination blurs. The outcomes can be extremely dangerous.
If demand is cultural, then prevention must be cultural too. Addressing demand is not about shaming individuals, it’s about changing the systems, norms, and structures that make exploitation profitable and low-risk.
Legally, that looks like using the Equality (Nordic) Model, which is used in many countries, including Canada, Ireland, and Norway. This model holds buyers accountable rather than targeting people who are exploited, and helps reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking.
Additionally, platform accountability is equally important. Online spaces are now major facilitators of exploitation, from the advertising of illicit services to the circulation of child sexual abuse material. Policies that require tech companies to detect and remove exploitative content help to eliminate the digital spaces in which traffickers recruit and make profit.
Policy alone is not enough. Education and cultural changes are just as crucial. Media-literacy programs help young people recognize manipulation, unrealistic porn scripts, and harmful gender dynamics. Critical media attitudes act as a protective buffer against the harmful effects of pornography on beliefs about sexual and dating violence.
Positive masculinity programs are another way to educate young boys, offering them something healthier to belong to. These spaces are built on connection rather than domination, and teach boys about consent, boundaries, emotional regulation, and healthy intimacy, shifting expectations long before harmful behaviours take root.
Reducing demand isn’t just a policy shift– it’s a cultural shift, which must start with honesty. When we talk openly about how misogyny, porn, loneliness, and violence shape our ideas about intimacy and power, we take away the silence that exploitation depends on.
Changing that world means teaching healthy relationships, building emotional support for boys and men, challenging harmful online spaces, and supporting survivor-informed policies that prioritize safety and dignity.
The same attitudes that make it “normal” to buy someone’s time or body, also make it normal to look away from abuse, or to treat people as disposable. We can’t end trafficking if we don’t confront the world that creates buyers.
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