Pornography Use, Rape Myths, and Sexual Violence Linked in Large Brazilian Survey

A new study from Brazil has added fresh weight to one of the most contested debates in contemporary psychology: whether the consumption of pornography is connected to real-world sexual violence and to the beliefs that quietly excuse it. Researchers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul surveyed 993 Brazilian adults and found that those who reported perpetrating sexual violence were also more likely to be frequent consumers of pornography and to endorse so-called rape myths, the false and damaging beliefs that shift blame for sexual assault onto victims. The work, published in the journal Trends in Psychology, arrives at a moment when Brazil continues to register alarmingly high rates of violence against women, and it offers a data-driven portrait of how attitudes, media habits, and behavior may intertwine in the general population.

The research team, led by Maria Eduarda Cini da Cunha together with Thaís de Castro Jury Arnoud and Luísa Fernanda Habigzang, set out with a deliberately broad question. Rather than asking simply whether pornography causes aggression, they wanted to map the relationships between three variables at once: pornography consumption, the perpetration and experience of sexual violence, and acceptance of rape-related beliefs. Crucially, they also wanted to know how these relationships might differ between men and women, since decades of research have shown that gender shapes both media use and attitudes toward sexual violence in profound ways.

To capture this picture, the researchers combined four instruments. A sociodemographic questionnaire recorded basic characteristics of the sample, which included 481 women and was majority heterosexual, with 436 heterosexual respondents. A dedicated questionnaire measured patterns of pornography consumption, including frequency and type of use. The Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, a widely used psychological instrument originally developed in the United States and adapted for Brazilian Portuguese, quantified agreement with statements that minimize or justify sexual violence, such as the idea that victims provoke assaults through their behavior or clothing. Finally, a questionnaire on sexual behaviors and sexual violence asked respondents directly about experiences of perpetration and victimization.

The analytical strategy is what sets this study apart from much of the existing literature. In addition to standard descriptive statistics, which summarize how common each behavior or belief is in the sample, and comparative analyses, which test for differences between groups such as men and women, the team employed network analysis. This relatively recent technique, made accessible through tools such as the qgraph software package, treats psychological variables as nodes in a network and draws connections, or edges, between those that are statistically related. Instead of asking whether one variable predicts another on average across the whole sample, network analysis reveals the local structure of associations, showing which specific variables cluster together and which serve as bridges connecting otherwise separate clusters. In psychological science, this approach has become popular precisely because attitudes and behaviors rarely operate in isolation; they form systems of mutually reinforcing elements.

The results were striking on several fronts. Descriptively, men in the sample reported higher rates of pornography consumption than women, higher acceptance of rape myths, and higher rates of perpetrating sexual violence. This pattern echoes a large international literature. Studies from Denmark, Poland, Australia, and the United States have consistently found that men consume pornography more frequently than women, and meta-analytic reviews of gender differences in sexuality have documented robust gaps in both explicit media use and attitudes supporting aggression. The Brazilian findings suggest that these international patterns hold in a Latin American context marked by deep patriarchal traditions and persistently high levels of gender-based violence, as documented by the Brazilian Public Security Forum, whose surveys show that a large share of Brazilian women report having suffered some form of violence.

The network analysis delivered the study’s central insight. Within the estimated network, the perpetration of sexual violence emerged as positively and significantly connected to both pornography consumption and rape myth acceptance. In plain terms, the people most likely to report having committed acts of sexual violence were also the people most likely to consume pornography and to endorse beliefs that excuse rape. Importantly, a network edge represents an association, not proof of causation. The analysis cannot determine whether pornography consumption leads to violence, whether violent individuals seek out more explicit material, or whether some third factor, such as adherence to traditional gender norms or hostile sexism, drives all three variables simultaneously. The authors are careful on this point, and the broader literature reflects the same ambiguity. Meta-analyses of general population studies have found small but reliable associations between pornography consumption and actual acts of sexual aggression, while other reviews, including work by Ferguson and Hartley, argue that the causal evidence remains weak and contested.

What the network approach does offer is a way of thinking about these variables as a system. Rape myths have long been understood as a psychological scaffold for sexual violence. First formalized by researcher Martha Burt in 1980, the concept describes prejudicial and false beliefs about sexual aggression that function to deny or justify male violence against women. Subsequent research has shown that people who accept rape myths are more likely to blame victims, less likely to intervene as bystanders, and, in some studies, more likely to perpetrate assault themselves. A systematic review by Yapp and Quayle confirmed a consistent association between rape myth acceptance and male-on-female sexual violence. If pornography consumption is also connected to both of these nodes, as the Brazilian network suggests, then interventions that target rape myths may simultaneously weaken the ties that bind media habits to aggressive behavior.

The content of mainstream pornography provides one plausible mechanism for these connections, and it is a mechanism the authors discuss in light of prior research. Content analyses of popular online videos have documented that aggression, particularly toward women, is common in mainstream material, and studies by researchers such as Eran Shor and Kimberley Seida have found that both the prevalence and the intensity of aggression in popular pornography have increased over time, even as viewers appear to prefer it. Other work has shown that pornography often depicts sexual scripts in which women are objectified and in which resistance is portrayed as performance rather than refusal. According to social learning accounts of media effects, repeated exposure to such scripts can shape viewers’ expectations about what normal, desirable sex looks like, potentially reinforcing beliefs that women secretly want to be coerced. The Brazilian authors cite this body of evidence while stopping short of claiming that their cross-sectional data prove such an effect.

The practical implications of the study are framed in terms of prevention. The authors argue that their results can inform interventions designed to promote sexual and reproductive health and to prevent sexual violence, and they emphasize that such programs should acknowledge how widespread pornography consumption has become rather than treating it as a fringe behavior. In Brazil, where formal sex education remains limited and politically contested, pornography often functions as a de facto source of sexual information for young people, a phenomenon researchers have described as porn as sex education. Comprehensive sexuality education that critically addresses media literacy, consent, and gender equality could, in principle, interrupt the pathway by which distorted sexual scripts harden into rape-supportive beliefs. Bystander intervention programs, which have shown promise in university settings, similarly depend on reducing rape myth acceptance to motivate action.

Like all studies, this one carries limitations that shape how its findings should be read. The sample of 993 adults was recruited in a way that may not represent the full diversity of the Brazilian population, and self-reported data on sensitive topics such as pornography use and sexual violence perpetration are vulnerable to social desirability bias, a problem well documented in the literature, particularly among religious respondents. The cross-sectional design rules out causal inference, and the authors note that the paper’s underlying data are available only by request. Yet the study’s contribution lies less in settling the causality debate than in mapping, with modern network methods, the terrain on which that debate unfolds. In a country where sexual violence remains a daily reality for thousands of women, understanding how consumption habits, cultural myths, and violent behavior connect within the same psychological network is a step toward designing interventions that reach the right targets. The Brazilian findings suggest that those targets include not only individual behavior, but the web of beliefs that makes violence thinkable in the first place.

Subject of Research: Relationships between pornography consumption, sexual violence perpetration and victimization, and rape myth acceptance in Brazilian adults

Article Title: Consumption of Pornography, Sexual Violence, and Rape-Related Beliefs in Brazilian Adults

Article References: Consumption of Pornography, Sexual Violence, and Rape-Related Beliefs in Brazilian Adults. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00508-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00508-1

Keywords: pornography, sexual violence, rape myths, Brazil, network analysis, gender differences, rape myth acceptance, psychology, victimization, perpetration, sex education, Trends in Psychology