Traffickinghub Campaign Video Seeks to Shut Down Pornhub for Profiting From Rape, Sex Trafficking
A new 2-minute video summarizes activists' case against the world's largest porn website
Warning: This story contains disturbing content.
The Traffickinghub campaign, author of a petition to shut down Pornhub, released a 2-minute video Tuesday. The video details how the porn site profits from videos of sex trafficking and rape.
Traffickinghub’s website says the campaign is an “effort to hold the largest porn website in the world accountable for enabling and profiting off of the mass sex-trafficking and exploitation of women and minors.”
Pornhub’s Complicity
The video lists several examples of Pornhub’s complicity in sexual crimes. It also says that Pornhub has no reliable method of verifying the age or consent of people in videos.
In the first example, a 15-year old girl was missing for a year. She was found after her mother was told about 58 videos of her daughter’s rape on Pornhub. A screenshot of a cached tweet shows Pornhub considered the girl a “verified model with a valid ID.”
In another case of Pornhub’s complicity cited in the video, 14-year-old Rose Kalemba was kidnapped at knife-point. Her kidnappers raped and abused her for 12 hours on camera before she convinced them to release her. She soon found out her rape had been posted on Pornhub and was being shared among school mates.
She sent emails to Pornhub pleading with them to take it down. They ignored her. The BBC reports: “I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’” The site didn’t reply and the videos stayed up.
“Then she had an idea. She set up a new email address posing as a lawyer, and sent Pornhub an email threatening legal action. ‘Within 48 hours the videos disappeared.'”
The video offers other evidence. An investigation by The Sunday Times into Pornhub found images of a toddler being sexually abused. Internet Watch Foundation’s investigation found 118 cases of child sexual abuse on Pornhub.
22 women won $12.7 million in a fraud lawsuit against Girls Do Porn, a partner channel with Pornhub. The women said they were deceived and coerced into signing contracts for porn videos that were posted online.
Abolishing Trafficking
Activist Laila Mickelwait is the founder of Traffickinghub. The camping is sponsored by anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry, where Mickelwait is director of abolition.
THREAD of public evidence that Pornhub profits from & enables the trafficking & rape of women and minors:
1) 15 yr old girl from Florida was trafficked, missing for a year, & found after 58 videos of her rape and abuse were discovered on #Traffickinghub—Pornhub verified her. pic.twitter.com/J0mHKfv7Yt
— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) May 12, 2020
Mickelwait announced June 9 that the campaign’s petition reached 1 million signatures. The petition has garnered international attention.
Aliya Kuykendall is a staff writer and proofreader for The Stream. You can follow Aliya on Twitter @AliyaKuykendall and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.
