By Naomi Miles, Founder and acting CEO of CEASE
The law around sex is largely black and white: either something is criminal or it is deemed consensual. Yet a great deal of harm sits outside those categories, which means we neither see nor measure it.
That thought resurfaced over the weekend in an unlikely setting. I’d forgotten about parkrun, and with impeccable timing arrived at a café just as hundreds of sodden runners descended on it.
Needing caffeine, I joined the long queue. While waiting, I watched a boy behind us energetically try to persuade his dad to buy him a Pepsi Max instead of the promised hot chocolate. When his dad objected that Pepsi was unhealthy, the boy pointed triumphantly to the traffic-light nutrition labels on the can- a neat row of green boxes. Even at seven or eight, he knew that meant it was “healthy”.
According to the metrics- sugar, fat and salt- Pepsi Max is “good” for you. But the dad wasn’t convinced. It didn’t pass the sniff test.
I’d just been reading Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken, which explains why those markers are so limited. Measuring sugar, fat and salt tells us little about foods that are industrially engineered to override satiety. Ultra-processed products like Pepsi Max are packed with additives the body struggles to process, and are strongly linked to metabolic disease and obesity- harms that sit entirely outside the traffic-light system.
Things are often more complicated than they appear, and our instincts that something’s off are often right.
Which brings me to work. Last week, I gave evidence to the APPG on Commercial Sexual Exploitation’s inquiry into camming sites, focusing on OnlyFans. By the harms we usually measure- physical violence, trafficking and clear indicators of child sexual abuse- OnlyFans appears relatively “safe”. The platform emphasises its ethical credentials: age-verification, creator autonomy and an 80% revenue share. A neat row of green boxes.
But, as with Pepsi Max, this doesn’t show the full picture.
Many of the most significant harms linked to OnlyFans fall outside our standard metrics altogether: the normalisation and grooming of sexual commodification; routine exposure to what would elsewhere be recognised as sexual harassment; and the risks of image-based sexual abuse, sextortion and blackmail. There is also the cumulative psychological toll of performing sexual availability on demand, and the way these platforms both shape and reflect a wider culture of sexual entitlement and dehumanisation.
Like ultra-processed food, camming platforms can appear to be pretty safe, when judged by the wrong indicators. But that doesn’t mean they are.