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Porn Hub is
UK’s biggest open access porn site which generated high revenue with 42 billion
visits to the site last year. The site is currently being accused of human
trafficking, profiting from videos of rape and non-consensual sex.
An online petition program called Trafficking
Hub was started by Laila Mickelwait and supported by Exodus Cry which is based
in the US to ban these illegal and non-consensual videos of child rape and
abuse.
The
petition has been signed by more than 1 million people till now. Laila also
claimed that it took her only 10 minutes to sign up and become a verified
member to upload videos. There was no requirement of government-issued –Ids.
In an
interview to The Guardian, Exodus Cry said that the company who earn in
millions and upload over 6 million videos a year doesn't have an efficacious
system in place to verify the content they host.
The website
is owned by a company Mindgeek, legally based in Luxembourg but their head
office is located in Montreal, Canada. CEO of the company Feras Antoon denied
these serious charges by saying that these matters are more than 10 years old
and were handled badly by then-owners but now, the site just is just a medium
of expressing some legit fantasies of people.
The
statement provided by the company was contradicted when in October 2019; a 15-year-old
girl who went missing in Florida was found after her videos of rape had been
posted on the site. The video was only taken down by Porn Hub only when her
abuser was found guilty and charged for it. There were more than 58 videos of
her posted online.
In 2019,
the Internet Watch Foundation claimed that they solely confirmed 118 cases of
Child rape and sexual abuse amongst which half of them were category A level
abuse including penetration and sadism.
The same
kind of investigation was done by Sunday times and what they found can send a
chill down to the spine of anyone. They found dozens of abuse videos in minutes
of their search and some videos were of children as young as a three-year-old.
Some of the videos had more than 350,000 views and were added many years ago on
the platform.
BBC, in
February 2020 brought forward the story of Rose Kalemba, who was raped when she
was 14 years old and months later, she found her videos taken during her rape
under ‘teen crying and getting slapped around’
‘ teen getting destroyed’ ‘passed out teen’ tags and one of them had
over 400,000 views.
Rose
recalled that it was summer’s evening of 2009 in Ohio and she was strolling
alone like every day but, on that day a man appeared from the shadow and made
her sit into the car on knife point. Two men were already sitting in the car.
They took her on the outskirts of the town and raped her for 12 hours.
Two men
raped her and abused her, one was filming the whole act. Rose said that she was
of first nations ethnicity and abusers were white, who mostly attacked the women of colour. When she was going through the episodes of passing out and gaining
consciousness, she heard them talking about killing her.
Then, Rose
cut a deal with them by asking them not to kill her and she will never reveal
their faces. They agreed and dumped her halfway before her home. The real agony
was that no one believed her and told Rose that she asked for it except her
Father and Grand-mother.
Even the
cops and doctors behaved absurdly with her. The first question that cop asked
her was whether the night had gone bad. Rose said that for one second she
couldn’t believe what she heard as she was raped, beaten, and stabbed.
Days went
by, she was trying to cope with the situation as the world has failed her
miserably. Things got worse when the video came out and she closed the doors
for everyone. Whenever any stranger would pass by and looked her into the eyes,
she thought that whether the person has seen the video or not.
She emailed
Porn Hub multiple times to take down the video but neither the response came
nor the video was taken down. Hence, she made a new email-id and mailed them
posing as lawyer threatening for a lawsuit. The video was taken down in 48
hours.
After that
several women have mailed Rose telling their own stories and proving that it is
still happening.
In a recent
event also, 22 women sued GirlsDoPorn who were forced for performing sexual
acts when they were minor. They won a suit of $12.7 million. The owner Michael
Pratt along with his producers was also charged for child trafficking, child
rape, and abusive content.
The most
popular searched category on the sits is “teens” which quickly turns into the
“Young girl tricked” “Teen takes it big time” and more such derogatory titles
to attract more viewership. The site also provides permission to download the
content and hence, even if the video is taken down, multiple copies of it are
still floating.
The site
also promotes a special category known as ‘revenge porn’ or ‘secret recording’ where
the other partner have recorded themselves and uploaded them without the
consent of another partner, also violating the laws of privacy.
Kate p
started campaign #NotYourPorn to ban such acts. She started when her friend’s
ex was secretly recording them having sex and after break up, he uploaded all
the videos for glory and cash. When they contacted Porn Hub with the matter,
the company took no action early and by the time video was taken down, some new
video appeared with a different name.
Kate also
added that the company is hiding under the disguise of freedom of speech but many
companies make “ethical porn”. She has worked with 50 different “porn stars”
revealing that they were underage when they started and were forced to do all
this.
She also
pleaded people to end such cruelty by these sites by not watching the content
promoted by them. Therefore, in a world where privacy and basic security is lagging, all we can do is be careful and stand by each other.
Help by clicking here and signing the petition.
Written by - Chavi Goel
Edited by –
Adrija Saha
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