Pornhub is profiting from sex trafficking and violence against women. By Pornhub’s own statistics, 2019 boasted more than 42 billion visitors, 115 million visits per day, and 6.83 million videos uploaded. But a startling amount of those videos are real clips of abused women, stolen off the streets like fourteen-year-old Rose Kalemba, or perpetually tormented by their partners, like New York resident Nikki Addimando. Sex trafficking on Pornhub brings the website, and its parent company MindGeek, ungodly amounts of money a year.
Sex trafficking is commonly thought of as women being taken from their home and sent somewhere else, domestically or internationally, to be sex slaves by wealthy buyers. But sex trafficking is so much more than that. Sex trafficking is any coerced sexual act for profit. Pornography, prostitution, and sexual performance done in the exchange of money, drugs, shelter, food, or clothes is sex trafficking.
This year has seen a growing movement to shut down Pornhub for these injustices. Traffickinghub, led by Laila Mickelwait, is devoted to exposing and holding Pornhub accountable for their crimes. The Traffickinghub movement is led by anti-trafficking organization Exodus Cry “a non-religious, non-partisan” group, dispelling any notions this is a puritanical attack on Pornhub or a demonization of violent sexist fantasies. This is about horrifying facts. It demands attention and action. Violence against women is an epidemic. Pornhub feeds off it, gets rich off of it, and enables future violence.
Sex Trafficking on Pornhub: The Case of Rose Kalemba
Kalemba is synonymous with the injustices of Pornhub. In 2009, the British fourteen-year-old was out for a night walk when armed men abducted her from her neighborhood. After taking her to a house, they raped her for over twelve hours. She was stabbed, beaten, and tormented with videos of previous assaults they committed.
After being let go, fourteen-year-old Kalemba made her way home. Her father took her to the hospital. She dealt with police officers asking if the encounter had been consensual, reducing her torment to “a night gone wild.”
Several months later, classmates sent her links to the videos of her attack on Pornhub. That was how she learned her brutalization had been recorded and shared for all the world to see. Her classmates had watched them; they bullied and slut-shamed her, compounding her trauma.
The numerous videos, named hideous things like “teen crying and getting slapped around,” “teen getting destroyed,” “passed out teen,” were uploaded with ease. Pornhub has no system in place to verify the age of people in the video or ascertain consent. Worst, videos can be uploaded anonymously. Every single video is monetized for the site to rake in advertisement money for shareholders.
Some of the videos of Kalemba’s abuse had over 400,00 views before Pornhub ultimately removed them. But it was not an easy fight for the fourteen-year-old to wage. She wrote to Pornhub for months begging for the videos to be removed, telling them it was not a staged video, but her real rape, and she was underage. Pornhub distributes child pornography on top of all their other crimes. It was not until she posed as a lawyer and threatened legal action that she finally got a reply and the videos were removed.
See Also: How to Help Survivors of Sexual Assault — Hotlines and Resources to Help with Healing
No Justice and No Remorse from Pornhub
While Pornhub ultimately removed the videos thanks to the hard work of Kalemba, the videos should never have been accepted by the site. Worst, Pornhub should have taken swift action from the first email they received, and they should have helped the police investigation. Ultimately, Kalemba’s rapists “were charged not with rape but ‘contributions towards the delinquency of a minor’ – a misdemeanor – and received a suspended sentence,” the BBC reported.
Pornhub and the justice system does everything it can to safeguard rapists over protecting victims.
Even if Kalemba’s case happened over ten years ago, Pornhub is still bad at protecting victims. Their digital fingerprinting system puts the onus on women and girls to report the videos, forcing them to relive their trauma instead of trying to prevent the uploads in the first place. The digital fingerprint assigned to a video is supposed to prevent the video from being reuploaded, but with a quick edit to change the runtime or any host of small things, the video can successfully be reuploaded.
Finding Strength, Finding Power
Ten years later, Kalemba was ready to speak about Pornhub’s role in her abuse. She came across social media posts praising Pornhub for its donations to numerous causes such as women in tech, conservation charities, and adding accessibility features for disabled users. Pornhub is aware it needs to polish its image to keep its wrong-doings out of the public focus. Earlier this year they donated masks to aid during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. They also made one month of premium free to the praise of popular websites.
But Kalemba wasn’t as easily taken in. She spoke up about Pornhub hosting videos of her rape. Within days, numerous women had contacted her to share their stories of finding videos of their own attacks on the platform. Kalemba’s story is heartbreaking, but not unique.
Finding a Solution
Sex trafficking is a far-reaching, all-encompassing problem. Board-certified emergency physician Dr. McCalla urges protecting minors from becoming victims. But, she also emphasizes the need to intervene in would-be abusers’ lives before they cause harm.
We’ve gotta stop the problem before it starts. And you have to protect minors from even getting in the loop of sexual trafficking. And going even further, the people that are predators, I think that comes from someplace of pain as well. So trying to recognize their issues and helping to address that before they start to prey on children is important.
Board Certified Emergency Physician Dr. Tiffany McCalla
Stop the Traffik, a group committed to ending trafficking worldwide, agrees in investing in prevention. “At Stop the Traffick, our mission is to undermine the model that sustains trafficking through the empowerment of those vulnerable to it.” They advocate the dissemination of information so that trafficking is not a crime happening in secret. Their intelligence-collecting effort identified job sectors especially vulnerable to trafficking. These include the business and finance systems. “[.. ] We can help them eradicate trafficker access to supply chains and break up the traffickers’ ability to move the proceeds of their crime in the widest sense.”
See Also: Womanhood and the Importance of Knowing Domestic Violence Statistics
Sex Trafficking on Pornhub: The Case of Nikki Addimando
Addimando is serving at least nineteen years for the murder of her abusive boyfriend. Addimando was subjected to years of torment, intimate partner violence, and genital mutilation at the hands of Christopher Grover. Grover documented some of his illicit predilections on Pornhub, uploading himself raping Addimando and torturing her in others.
Addimando’s lawyers subpoenaed Pornhub to build their case. But, Pornhub never replied. This in part may have been because the documents were never received by relevant parties. Addimando’s lawyers struggled to find the correct address, beguiled by Pornhub’s offshore corporation. A company that makes its legal department hard to locate can’t publicly claim to support and cooperate with authorities, yet that is exactly what Pornhub claims.
As Pornhub never authenticated the screenshots of videos were from an account owned by Grover, they were censored in court. Grover’s account description, the account name with his surname in it, and other details were hidden from the jury. Instead, they saw countless images of Addimando in demeaning, troubling positions. The captions to the posts were removed too, such as, “4 hours of toys and torture tonight. bitch begging for mercy.”
Pornhub is a weapon for sadistic men to abuse their partners, like Grover and Addimando. Like Kalemba, it is a tool for criminals to abduct and torture women through sex trafficking. And Pornhub profits off all of it. All of their videos brought in money for Pornhub.
Pornhub does not take down the videos swiftly. They don’t do enough to stop the videos being uploaded in the first place. And they don’t help investigations or trials to protect the women who have been hurt by sexual violence and had their pain compounded by the evidence uploaded to Pornhub.
There Are More Names
These are not the only stories.
In 2019, a Florida man was arrested after a mom found videos of her missing fifteen-year-old on Pornhub. She had been missing for nearly a year. Fifty-eight images and videos of her were found on Pornhub.
The production company Girls Do Porn was sued by twenty-two women who had their videos uploaded to Pornhub without their knowledge or consent. Girls Do Porn was a major player in the Pornhub world. They were a promoted page on the site and touted by Pornhub as a reason to pay the subscription fee for a premium account. The owner of Girls Do Porn was later charged with sex trafficking. Pornhub has since removed their account, but the videos can still be found on Pornhub through re-uploads.
Famed Taiwanese socialite Justin Lee was convicted of raping multiple women and uploading videos of the acts to Pornhub. This is truly an international problem, spotlighting the epidemic violence against women and the website so many abusers use.
Join the Traffickingub Movement
Over two million people have signed Exodus Cry’s petition to shut down Pornhub and holds its executives accountable for profiting off of sex trafficking. Add your name to the petition.
Share this story with people you know to spread awareness. Do not use Pornhub, but consume safer, ethical porn that celebrates diversity instead of fetishizing it. This probably means you will have to pay for it, but that ensures adult filmmakers have the funds to pay their actors and production teams.
Word of mouth is vital to ending Pornhub’s goodwill. Instead of cutesy write-ups about their good deeds, the focus of the conversation needs to be on holding executives accountable for the haven they provide traffickers.
