This post accompanies the Hope Education Project’s lived experience reporting on porta potty exploitation among Nigerian women trafficked to the UAE. It examines the state of the academic literature and the specific scholarly gap that survivor testimony from our ongoing research study is beginning to fill.

The question the literature has never asked

When I began researching the practice that Nigerian survivors in our study call “chopping shit” – and that circulates in mainstream media under the term “porta potty” – I went first to the academic literature. What I found, after a systematic search across clinical, feminist, criminological, and trafficking scholarship, was not a thin evidence base. It was a near-total absence.

There is no published academic research that specifically examines the act of a man defecating in a woman’s mouth as a sexually motivated behaviour. Not within clinical sexology. Not within feminist criminology. Not within trafficking or exploitation research. Not within pornography studies. The specific interpersonal dynamics of this act – what it reveals about the perpetrator’s relationship to power, to dehumanisation, to the body of another person – have never been the subject of academic inquiry.

This is not a minor gap. It is a structural failure with direct consequences for the women it affects. What follows is an account of what the literature does contain, why the specific gap exists, and what it means for research in this area.

What the clinical literature says – and what it does not

The clinical record on coprophilia – sexual arousal involving faeces – begins with Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), which documented early “coprolagnic” case studies describing fetishistic acts involving faecal defilement. The condition has been documented in clinical literature for nearly 140 years. In that time it has barely been studied.

The most comprehensive modern review is Arnone, Conti, and Preckajlo (2024), published in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association. This review searched four major academic databases – CINAHL, EBSCOhost, SAGEpub, and MEDLINE – covering research published between 1990 and 2022. It found almost nothing beyond individual case reports. The authors called for evidence-based treatment guidelines to be developed. The scale of the gap they were calling across is illustrated by the fact that the most significant single case study in the literature – Wise and Goldberg (1995), published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy – was described at the time of publication as the first reported case of coprophagia in a nonpsychotic adult of normal intelligence.

Within psychiatric classification, coprophilia sits under the DSM-5’s residual category “Other Specified Paraphilic Disorder,” and under ICD-11 code 6D3Z . The DSM-5 introduced a critical distinction between paraphilias – atypical sexual interests not inherently pathological – and paraphilic disorders, which cause distress, impairment, or involve nonconsenting persons. Kafka (2009), in a landmark review published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, concluded that insufficient empirical evidence existed to give coprophilia its own diagnostic criteria. The condition remains in the residual category not because it is rare in practice but because it has not been studied enough to characterise properly.

Prevalence data is extremely limited. Janus and Janus (1993) reported coprophilia at 1% prevalence among men and 0% among women in a general population sample. Within sadomasochistic populations the figure is substantially higher: Sandnabba, Santtila, and Nordling (1999) found 18.2% prevalence in a Finnish sample of 164 male sadomasochists. The most widely cited etiological framework remains Money’s (1986) lovemap theory, which proposed that paraphilic fixation on excrement stems from the childhood equation of excretory and reproductive organs with transgression and prohibition – creating, through an opponent-process mechanism, a link between the forbidden and the arousing.

All of this is clinically oriented. It asks what is wrong with the individual who has this fixation, how it develops, and how it might be treated. It does not ask what happens to the person on the receiving end. It does not ask what the act reveals about power, about gender, about the deliberate humiliation of another human being. The victim does not appear in this literature at all.

What feminist scholarship offers – and where it stops short

Feminist and critical scholarship has built a substantial theoretical framework around sexual degradation, objectification, and dehumanisation. That framework is directly applicable to what the women in our study experienced. But it has never been applied to coprophilic practices specifically.

Martha Nussbaum’s (1995) objectification framework, published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, identifies seven features of objectification: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Rae Langton (2009) added reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing. The concepts of violability – treating a person as lacking boundary integrity – and denial of subjectivity – disregarding a person’s experiences and feelings entirely – map directly onto the act of defecating in a person’s mouth. That act does not merely objectify in the general sense. It uses the perpetrator’s own body as an instrument of defilement against another person’s body. It is objectification taken to its logical end.

The anti-pornography feminist tradition provides the closest theoretical engagement with degradation as gendered power. Andrea Dworkin (Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981) argued that male power is the purpose of pornography and that the degradation of women is the mechanism through which that power is expressed and reinforced. Catharine MacKinnon argued that pornography does not merely represent the subordination of women but constitutes it – that the act of sexualised degradation, documented and circulated, is itself the harm. Gail Dines (Pornland, 2010) documented the normalisation of extreme degradation in mainstream pornographic content, arguing that what was once relegated to the margins of the industry has become its dominant register.

Empirical content analysis supports this trajectory. Bridges et al. (2010), published in Violence Against Women, found that 88.2% of best-selling pornographic scenes contained physical aggression and 48.7% contained verbal aggression, with perpetrators overwhelmingly male and targets overwhelmingly female. Vera-Gray et al. (2021), in the largest study of online pornographic content to date, analysed 150,000 video titles and found that 1 in 8 described sexually violent or nonconsensual content – with violent content actively promoted to first-time users on major platforms.

Research on pornography production confirms the escalation dynamic. Donevan (2021), in an exploratory study of women’s experiences in pornography production published in Dignity, found that women with greater vulnerability found it harder to resist demands for increasingly extreme content – that the industry’s structure creates conditions in which refusal becomes progressively more costly. Donevan et al. (2025), in a study of 28 interviews and 120 survey respondents published in Violence Against Women, found that 88% of participants had experienced childhood sexual abuse, 87% verbal abuse during production, 65% rape, and 56% physical assault. The word used by one participant to describe their experience – that in this industry “you’re no longer human” – echoes with precision what Nigerian survivors in our study said about what was done to them.

Yet none of this scholarship names coprophilic exploitation as a distinct category. Degradation has been theorised broadly. The specific act of a man defecating in a woman’s mouth – what it means, who demands it, what it does to the person it is done to – remains outside the frame.

What the trafficking literature misses

The trafficking and exploitation literature compounds the gap in a specific way. It consistently aggregates sexual violence without disaggregating by act.

Kiss et al. (2021), drawing on the IOM’s Victim of Trafficking Database covering 10,369 cases, found that 54% of victims experienced physical or sexual violence. The study does not specify what forms that sexual violence took. Hughes (2004), in analysis produced for the U.S. Department of State, addressed demand reduction without specifying the nature of acts demanded. The UNODC’s trafficking literature follows the same pattern.

This aggregation is partly an ethical choice – researchers focus on trafficking processes, control mechanisms, and health outcomes rather than cataloguing specific sexual acts, partly to protect victim dignity. That is a defensible position. Its consequence, however, is that the most extreme and systematically damaging forms of sexual exploitation remain invisible in the academic record.

MacKinnon (2005), in “Pornography as Trafficking” published in the Michigan Journal of International Law, argued that pornography production constitutes trafficking under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act – that the filming of sexual exploitation is not a separate activity from the exploitation itself but an extension of it. This argument is directly relevant to what our senior anti-trafficking official described: the filming of coprophilic acts for commercial pornographic content, without the women’s knowledge or consent, as a monetisation strategy within the trafficking operation. That specific configuration – trafficking, extreme sexual violence, and commercial pornography production in the same transaction – does not appear in any academic literature.

Extreme pornography law sits close but does not reach this topic

The UK’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, Section 63 criminalised possession of extreme pornographic images depicting life-threatening acts, serious injury to specific body parts, bestiality, and necrophilia. Scatological content is not specifically listed. It could theoretically be captured under the “grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character” threshold, but McGlynn and Bows (2019), in the most thorough analysis of Section 63 prosecutions, found that approximately 85% of extreme pornography cases involved bestiality images. No prosecutions or scholarly discussion specifically addressing coprophilic pornographic content were identified.

The gap in law mirrors the gap in scholarship. Both have been configured to respond to other categories of harm. Neither has been directed at this one.

Why the gap exists

The gap is not accidental. It reflects the way different disciplines have structured their gaze.

Clinical sexology looks inward – at the psychology of the individual with the paraphilia. It has never developed the conceptual tools to examine what that paraphilia does to another person when it is enacted without consent in an exploitation context. Feminist scholarship has theorised degradation at a general level but has not disaggregated by specific act – partly because doing so risks appearing to rank or hierarchise forms of violence, and partly because the most extreme practices have been treated as too marginal to warrant specific analysis. Trafficking research protects victim dignity by avoiding detailed cataloguing of sexual acts – a reasonable ethical instinct that has the unintended consequence of rendering the most severe abuses invisible. Pornography law and scholarship have responded to the categories of harm that became publicly visible through prosecution and media attention. Coprophilic exploitation has not been prosecuted and has not attracted academic attention. It therefore does not exist in the literature.

Wartime sexual violence scholarship has noted that sexual humiliation – the use of the perpetrator’s body as an instrument of defilement – functions as a deliberate strategy of dehumanisation, described in recent research as an expression of “performative masculinity” designed to reduce the victim to something less than human. That analysis, developed in conflict and atrocity contexts, applies with direct force to what Nigerian women in our study described. The same dynamic – power expressed through the most extreme possible violation of another person’s bodily integrity – is operating in UAE apartments. It has simply not been named as such.

There is a further dimension to this finding that the existing literature is entirely unequipped to address. In the Hope Education Project’s broader research dataset – which includes testimony from Nigerian and Ghanaian women exploited within Ghana and Nigeria as well as in the UAE – other forms of sexual exploitation involve a range of perpetrator nationalities, including local Nigerian and Ghanaian men. This specific practice, however, does not appear in that domestic context. In the UAE data it clusters exclusively with Arab male clients. Every survivor who confirmed experience of this practice in the UAE identified Arab men as the perpetrators. Not some. All of them.

What that pattern means is a question the data cannot answer alone. It may reflect cultural factors specific to a subset of Arab male clients. It may reflect the particular structure of UAE trafficking networks, which have developed organised supply chains to meet specific demand. It may reflect economic dynamics – the purchasing power to demand acts that require a woman to have no practical means of refusal. It may reflect all of these things simultaneously. The data identifies who is demanding this practice in this geography. It does not explain why. That distinction – between what the evidence shows and what it cannot yet tell us – is precisely the space that academic research needs to enter. The demand-side psychology of why this specific practice clusters with this specific group in this specific geography is one of the most important unanswered questions this research has generated. It has not been asked before and it needs to be.

What this means for research

The survivor testimony collected by the Hope Education Project is not supplementing an existing evidence base. It is creating one.

The psychological motivation of men who derive gratification from defecating in a woman’s mouth – the demand side of this practice – remains entirely unexamined in published academic literature. The clinical literature has documented that coprophilia exists as a paraphilia. It has not asked what it means when that paraphilia is organised, commercially structured, and directed at trafficked women who have no power to refuse. It has not asked what the specific choice of this act – above all others available to a man with money and power over a woman – reveals about his relationship to dominance, defilement, and the dehumanisation of women’s bodies.

These are the questions that a formal research paper must address. The theoretical framework exists across five bodies of adjacent literature – clinical sexology, feminist objectification theory, pornography production research, demand-side trafficking analysis, and extreme pornography regulation. The empirical foundation is the survivor testimony documented in this research.

The women whose accounts inform this work deserve more than documentation. They deserve an answer to the question of why it was done to them. That answer requires scholarship that this field has not yet produced.

The Hope Education Project is calling for academic collaborators – in clinical psychology, feminist criminology, sexology, and trafficking studies – to join this research. If you work in any of these fields and are interested in contributing, please contact us.