Is pornography nothing more than sex trafficking on film?

The pornography industry generates an annual revenue of $13 billion. The largest porn website in the world receives 42 billion visits annually, equating to 115 million daily visits and a daily upload rate of 15,000 new videos, totalling 6 million new videos each year.

It's worth noting that these numbers do not cover the content available on numerous other porn websites worldwide, all contributing to the porn bulge.

The question arises: Where do all the actors featured in pornography come from?

Are they all consenting persons, or could there be a possibility some of them are trafficked?

The International Labor Organization estimates that there are currently 49.6 million people trafficked globally. However, due to the hidden nature of human trafficking, the full extent is difficult to ascertain, and it is likely that the actual number is significantly higher. 

Within human trafficking, sex trafficking accounts for a significant portion of trafficked victims. 

According to Polaris, an organization with the most extensive data on human trafficking activity in America; for every 10 individuals trafficked, 8 are subjected to trafficking for sexual exploitation, and an average of 3 of them specifically for involvement in pornography. 

In nearly every country, approximately half of sex trafficking victims have reported being forced to participate in pornography during their period of enslavement within the sex trafficking industry.

One of the world's largest pornsites, ranking 10th in global web traffic (following Amazon, Netflix and the like), was recently forced to take down 80% of its entire website by removing over 10 million videos due to trafficking alerts after the TraffickingHub movement was started in 2020.  

This means what porn consumers were witnessing in these instances, are authentic and distressing videos depicting women and even children being subjected to sexual abuse, trauma, and forced performances. These were not models or actresses playing a role in a porn film, these are real videos of trafficked women and children and being sexually abused and forced to act.

Rose Kalemba was 14 when she was kidnapped at gunpoint and brutally gang raped. A few months later while scrolling online she found herself tagged in a link. When she clicked on it she was taken to a video of her rape on the most popular pornsite in the USA. For six months, she repeatedly contacted the website, informing them that the content was non-consensual and that she was underage. They declined to remove the content during this period. As a last resort, she impersonated a lawyer and threatened legal action against them. It was only after receiving this threat that they chose to take down the content.

This joins a myriad of stories including the mother of a 15-year-old girl who was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on multiple popular pornsites. The girl had been missing for nearly a year and her rapes had been featured on 58 separate videos.

Closer home, traffickers exploit women and children in sex trafficking, often facilitated by family members in informal settings, throughout Kenya, including in sex tourism in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu. Children go missing every single day. Joyce Atieno* had left her daughter 12-year-old Akunda, playing outside before she disappeared without a trace in November last year. Sadly, she has not yet been found. 

Not all pornography is nonconsensual, some pornographic content is consensual while others may involve exploitation. When consuming this content, it can be challenging to ascertain the participants' level of consent. 

If there was even a 1% chance that you were watching a victim of sex trafficking, would you still choose to participate? How about a 30% possibility? 

Alternatively, if your consumption of pornography were to contribute to their continuous enslavement and also the trafficking of one more person to meet your demand, would you still choose to participate?

Where there is demand, traffickers, exploiters, and pornographers will create the supply by any means necessary. Ending the demand for pornography is a key to ending sex trafficking and prostitution. 

If you believe every person should be free kill the demand for pornography. 

Sign this petition to spread the awareness.  

 

LIST OF RESOURCES TO HELP BREAK FREE: https://exoduscry.com/resources/ 

*Pseudonym