A team from the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), the University of Alicante (UA) and the Biomedical Research Networking Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), led by ISCIII researcher Belén Sanz Barbero, has validated the Pornography Violence Exposure Scale (PVES), the first scale designed specifically to measure exposure to pornographic content based on its level of violence. The open-access paper has just been published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Its lead author, J. Francisco Estévez García, senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology II and researcher at the Interuniversity Institute for Social Development and Peace (IUDESP), carried out the methodological design and psychometric analysis of the scale.
The UA team also includes Vanesa Pérez Martínez and Carmen Vives Cases, from the Department of Community Nursing, Preventive Medicine and Public Health and History of Science, and Ariadna Cerdán Torregrosa, from the Department of Sociology II. Laura Otero García, from ISCIII and CIBERESP, completes the research team. The study forms part of the project "Characterisation of pornography use and its association with sex-affective health and sexual violence: evidence to build consensus on interventions with young people in Spain", funded by the ISCIII (PI22CIII/00036).
Until now, most studies on pornography analysed consumption frequency or problematic usage patterns. However, no validated instruments existed to distinguish rigorously between levels of violence across different types of consumed content. The new scale addresses this gap by analysing exposure to violent content as a continuum, classifying material into three distinct levels according to the severity of the violence.
The validation was conducted among 2,181 young people aged between 18 and 35 living in Spain who had viewed pornography in the past year. The scale showed a solid structure, high reliability and equivalent performance across men and women as well as different age groups. Higher exposure to violent pornography was linked to a higher likelihood of having suffered or perpetrated sexual violence, with a stronger association observed for perpetration. By contrast, exposure showed virtually no relationship with sexual arousal, relationship satisfaction or partner appraisal, confirming that the scale specifically measures exposure to violent content.
The team stresses that knowing how much pornography someone watches is not enough: what they watch matters, and the scale measures this with rigor. As a cross-sectional study, the results demonstrate associations rather than cause-and-effect relationships. The paper's main contribution is a tool that will enable future research to analyse this relationship accurately and compare findings across studies. The scale is designed for research purposes and to guide prevention and affective-sexual education programmes, not to diagnose or classify specific individuals.