When people think of trafficking, they generally don’t think of pornography. But the truth is, porn and trafficking are completely intertwined. It’s impossible to discuss the origin and prevalence of sex trafficking without also addressing porn’s prominence in our culture.
There’s an argument—a cover narrative—that says porn is empowering, healthy for relationships, and even provides sexual liberation. In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Overwhelmingly, porn is used as a weapon of dehumanization, racism, the degradation and objectification of women, and the glorification of severe sexual violence and abuse.
Porn undoubtedly exploits people on BOTH sides of the screen and so we’ve laid out four of the key ways in which porn and trafficking are interconnected.
The Intersections of Porn and Sex Trafficking
1. Many trafficking victims appear in “amateur” porn.
The production and sale of pornography is just another way for traffickers to make a profit.
In February of 2020, the mother of a missing 15-year-old girl found pornographic videos of her daughter posted online on popular sites like Pornhub, Snapchat, Periscope, and Modelhub. The girl had been missing for nearly a year. She had been trafficked for sex and was featured in 58 individual pornographic videos, uploaded by the man who trafficked her.
This devastating case is the reality for an untold number of women and children, and with the explosion of user-generated porn content online through sites like Pornhub and xVideos, an entirely new avenue was created for traffickers to profit from.
Now, instead of a trafficker getting paid by one man at a time, they can seek out a vulnerable girl, exploit and sexually abuse her, film it, and get paid by thousands of men at a time through mass online distribution. Many survivors talk about the permanence of this kind of trafficking because their abuse lives online forever.
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Another tragic incidence of this is the case of Rose Kalemba, who was 14 when she was brutally raped by two men, for 12 hours, while a 3rd man filmed the incident. A few months later as she was scrolling online, she found herself tagged in a link. When she clicked on it, she was taken to a video of her rape hosted on Pornhub.
The Traffickinghub campaign highlighted Rose’s story as well as countless other videos featuring real rape, human trafficking, child sexual abuse, non-consenual “revenge” porn, and other forms of image-based abuse found on Pornhub—the “world’s biggest porn site.”
Thanks to the Traffickinghub campaign, which Exodus Cry helped to advance globally, Pornhub deleted 80% of the content on their site overnight, about 10 million videos, which featured suspect content! Other major porn sites began to follow suit and quickly delete videos that may have contained nonconsensual content.
2. Trafficking occurs in mainstream porn.
Sex trafficking is defined as a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or when the person induced to perform such an act is under 18.
By this definition, trafficking is extremely common, not just in the “amateur porn” mentioned above, but also in the mainstream, professional porn industry. And, sadly, because of the gross lack of regulation and oversight of the industry, most of it goes unreported.
One survivor who was trafficked into the mainstream porn industry at just 14 years old said,
“…the brutality of those 3 years of being trafficked in porn nearly killed me. I was not filmed in a pedophile’s darkened apartment alone. I was filmed on a set full of cameras, crew, and ‘performers.’ I call them performers so that you will understand who I mean, but you should know that all of it was real. The sex, the violence, the torture, and the fear and pain in my eyes and in my screams were 100% real.”
Jenna Jameson, known as the “Queen of Porn” and one of the most famous adult entertainers of all time, has shared her experience of entering the industry. She said she was groomed and trafficked into porn by her ex-boyfriend and his father at just 16 years old.
Jameson details her abuse and the rampant exploitative practices in the porn industry in her 2004 autobiography, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” She left the industry in 2008 and has also recently spoken out against Pornhub.
In 2016, 22 women testified to being manipulated and tricked by producers into making internet pornography for a website called GirlsDoPorn, from 2009 to 2020. The channel was one of the biggest and most popular channels on Pornhub with nearly 800,000 subscribers and over 600 MILLION views.
RELATED: Here Are the Biggest Cases of Trafficking in Porn
Michael Pratt, the founder of the site, would lure college age girls through a Craigslist ad for a modeling job, fly them to another city, and his team would aggressively coerce them into making porn by being told they now had to pay for their travel expenses by performing in porn scenes. They reportedly got the women drunk before getting them to sign a contract, and/or offered them drugs. They were also promised that the videos would never be posted online. However, the videos, which featured violent sex acts committed against the women, were published on several mainstream porn sites like GirlsDoPorn and Pornhub, along with each woman’s personal information, and the videos were also sent to the victim’s friends and family.
This is sex trafficking and this kind of coercion and fraud appear to be common in mainstream porn.
3. Porn fuels the demand for sex trafficking.
At its core, trafficking is a supply and demand issue. Without demand, there would be no supply. Sex trafficking would end today if men stopped buying women for sex. Research also shows that wherever prostitution thrives, so does trafficking.
It’s important to understand that trafficking and prostitution are often one and the same. A large portion of women in prostitution are there as a result of force, fraud, or coercion, making them trafficking victims. Therefore, if a man is buying a woman for sex, there is a fair likelihood that she falls somewhere on the trafficking spectrum.
WATCH Is Prostitution a Job?
So what’s the link between porn consumption and sex buying?
Research indicates that porn consumers are more likely to sexually objectify and dehumanize others, more likely to express an intent to rape, less likely to intervene during a sexual assault, more likely to victim-blame survivors of sexual assault, more likely to support violence against women, more likely to forward sexts without consent, and more likely to commit actual acts of sexual violence.
The desire to dehumanize and purchase another human for sex is, in large part, the natural byproduct of porn use. This deviant appetite is cultivated over time through porn addiction and the escalation that takes place, whereby the consumer requires a more extreme stimulus to attain pleasure. As one sex buyer put it, “The relationship I had with pornography was definitely progressive. It came to a point where it was like, ‘Ah, I need to experience what I’m seeing… my wife won’t do any of this stuff, no way.’ So I’m like, ‘A stranger… paying for it… duh!.’”
This is not to say that every person who watches porn becomes a sex buyer, but every single sex buyer we interviewed for our films had a porn addiction from childhood.
With every sex buyer we spoke with, there came a point where watching porn was no longer enough and they felt compelled to act out their extreme sexual fantasies with real women. Even though many of these men were married, their wives would never agree to engaging in the degrading sex acts their husbands had become drawn to through their addictions. It’s no surprise they looked to prostituted women to fulfill these deviant fantasies.
RELATED: After My Childhood Addiction to Porn, I Became A Child Sexual Abuser
And as we know, most women in prostitution are under the control of a pimp, which means they are likely not receiving the money exchanged in the deal, and fear of their pimp keeps them trapped in a life of exploitation. This is trafficking.
4. Porn is used to groom victims, especially children.
Pornography normalizes sexual abuse for both the perpetrator and the victim. It is actively used to groom victims to believe that sexual violence is normal and acceptable, or to just outright show them how they should be “performing” for the buyer. This is especially common in cases of child sex trafficking, but also among adults.
Many trafficking survivors that we have spoken to mention how a lot of sex buyers actually bring pornography as a model of what they want the women to do.
The WHISPER Oral History Project found that, of the prostituted people they interviewed, 52% named porn as an important teacher of what was expected of them, while 80% recounted that their actual customers had also shown them porn in order to illustrate exactly what the sex buyers wanted to engage in.
RELATED: 3 Reasons to End Teen Porn
Not only is porn used to groom victims of trafficking, it also makes children more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and online solicitation in the first place. It normalizes hypersexualization, sexual violence, and abuse from a young age.
In the extremely popular genres of barely legal and teen porn, performers are often dressed to look like prepubescent children. We had one individual share with us that when they first discovered porn as a child, they recognised their own clothes being worn by the woman in the porn scene.
When a child becomes desensitized to this kind of content, they are often extremely vulnerable to online predators who talk to them about porn and solicit nude images to then sell online. The sale of this child sexual abuse material constitutes a form of sex trafficking.
Sex Trafficking and Porn are Undeniably Connected
Porn and trafficking are woven together in a tightly bound noose, and it’s choking the life out of our world. If we want to end trafficking, we must start by addressing the pervasiveness of porn and the addictions that plague hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide.
The good news is that people everywhere are breaking free from porn addictions, and there are now so many resources available to help. You can find a list of amazing resources here for porn addicts, partners of addicts, and for protecting children.
