Porn and sex trafficking are two mutually exclusive industries. Porn creates the
appetite and trafficking feeds it, and this wicked, unending cycle hurts everyone
involved.
Porn viewers often believe they are not harming anyone and are engaging in a
very individual act with no other implications. That simply is not true. Porn websites like
PornHub has been caught a number of times with videos of recorded rapes, and sex
acts with minors on their website. Porn viewers are given no history or insight into the
people in the film. This is done largely to dehumanize the individuals in the film and thus
relieve any guilt or conviction of wrongdoing by the buyers and viewers, but on top of
that, the porn industry is largely not invested in the proper vetting of the origins or members
of the sex videos they make available for profit.
One example of the lack of proper vetting is of Rose Kalemba who was 14 years
old when she went for a walk that ended in her being kidnapped, stabbed, badly beaten,
and raped by two men over a 12 hour period. A third man was present to record her
being violently raped several times. When the men finished, they left her abandoned on
a street. A few months later Rose saw people from her school sharing a link, it led her
to Pornhub. Several videos of her attack were uploaded on the site with titles such as,
“Teen Crying and Getting Slapped Around”, “Teen Getting Destroyed”, and “Passed Out
Teen.” One of the videos had over 400,000 views. Rose emailed Pornhub several times
over a six month period informing them that she was a minor and that the videos were
assault, she begged them to remove the videos. After no reply and the videos
remaining live, she posed as a lawyer from an alternate email address and sent
Pornhub an email threatening legal action. Within 48 hours the videos were gone.
Melissa Farley did an in-depth study on 900 prostitutes over 9 countries to
discover the links between commercial sex: prostitution, porn, and sex trafficking. The
vast majority of prostitutes were tricked, coerced, or trafficked into prostitution and are
being kept in the industry against their will. Of the 900 prostitutes, nearly half of the
group were [aware of being] used to make pornographic films, a little over half were
forced to re-enact scenes and specific acts from porn by their traffickers, and the
majority of the group were taught how to “perform” via pornographic material.
Porn conditions its viewers to see people as sex objects, sex becomes less intimate and
more disconnected, and this mindset lends itself to eventually purchasing sex via sex
trafficking and prostitution (which are largely one and the same in the sense that the
victims are not free to leave and also began under false pretenses).
While most can agree that sex trafficking is evil, porn is widely accepted in
society. However, the reality is that they are two sides of the same coin that must both
be shunned and rejected in order to heal the affected and protect the vulnerable.