Porn & Sex Trafficking

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Did you know?

Porn directly fuels the demand for exploitation and sex trafficking

Resources

Be Broken — Resources for men, women and parents

Fight the New Drug — Educational articles and resources

Covenant Eyes — Screen accountability and filtering

Fortify - Resources and support to quit porn

Bark — Parental monitoring tool for children/teens

Grow Counseling - In-person (ATL, Ga) and virtual counseling and therapy

How porn fuels demand

Pornography fuels the global sex trade by driving demand into the mainstream of society. And since porn consumers do not and cannot distinguish between trafficked individuals and porn performers, they can often reinforce and drive the demand for exploitation through clicks and downloads without realizing it.

Or it can be a more direct reinforcement, like porn-obsessed consumers actually purchasing sex from trafficked individuals.

Consider how porn is the “tease” that leaves consumers longing for more. Catherine Mackinon, a professor at Harvard Law School, says that “consuming pornography is an experience of bought sex and thus it creates a hunger to continue to purchase and objectify, and act out what is seen.” [1]

Researchers of porn addicts have noted that an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography includes frequenting massage parlors. In other words, the consumers looking at porn at home are often the same ones exploiting real people, ready with porn images in hand to show the person they’re exploiting what they want to do.

[EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE BY FIGHT THE NEW DRUG]

Rose Kalemba was 14 years old when she was taken at knifepoint, raped, and the videos of her abuse were uploaded to Pornhub.

“I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’”

She received no reply and the videos remained live.

Sign the petition to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking.

SIGN THE PETITION

How porn and sex trafficking are often the same thing

Porn is often nothing more than recorded evidence that trafficking took place.

How so? According to one report, performers “are subjected to violence and coercion during filming. They protest and try to stop the filming…their protests are ignored or they are pressured by their agent or director to continue.”

But what does coercion look like in a real scenario that would deem it a situation involving “trafficking?” It would look something like this, as told by a former performer:

“I tried backing out and wanted to go home, not do porn at all. I was threatened that if I did not do the scene I was going to get sued for lots of money.” — Former porn performer, Michelle Avanti

Sometimes, victims are caught off-guard, expecting to film a scene doing a particular set of sex acts, and then experiencing something completely different than what they agreed to in the midst of filming. This is fraud.

It’s pretty clear these performers and performers like them are victims, not just the rich, glamorized, and sex-obsessed actors the industry would like you to believe them to be.

[EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE BY FIGHT THE NEW DRUG]

The victim is not going to turn to the camera and announce they are being trafficked, and these images and videos make their way onto mainstream porn sites, where they are indistinguishable. In fact, even if the victim does register their distress, it’s still impossible to know, because rape and abuse-themed porn have now become mainstream.

One female survivor — whose captor slept on top of her at night so she wouldn’t escape, watched her through a hole when she went to the bathroom and listened to her phone calls with a gun pointed at her head — was forced to appear in a video that made the Sinclair Intimacy Institute’s list of “sex positive productions”! [21] “Every time someone watches that film,” she said, “they are watching me being raped.” (See The Porn Industry’s Dark Secrets.)

[EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE BY FIGHT THE NEW DRUG]

“Every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped.”

Children in the porn industry

Did you know that child exploitation imagery — also known as child pornography — is one of the fastest growing businesses online, and content is becoming much worse over time due to consumers’ demands growing more extreme? It has become a $3 billion dollar annual industry by some estimates.

The United States Department of Justice states that child pornography is a form of child sexual exploitation. Period. And again, these children do not have a choice, therefore, these are extreme but real examples of human trafficking.

Not only children, but teenage girls — many of them just over 18 and 19 — now make up the biggest slice of consumable online porn. Many videos fantasize sexual acts of minors even if the performers are over 18 — not that the consumer can ever know their true age. Minor or not, the idea of any teenage girl in a sexual act with another person can fall under the category of sexual exploitation.

[EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE BY FIGHT THE NEW DRUG]