Pornography: How A “Private” Issue Fuels Human Trafficking
**Please note** This post, as well as the following two posts, discuss a sensitive topic that may be difficult for some readers.
It’s no secret that hypersexuality is a defining characteristic of our society. With things like the “Me Too Movement” and videos of women secretly filming themselves getting cat-called on the street, this is something impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, something that comes along with this hypersexuality is pornography and a lot of it. James Emery White conducted a survey regarding the porn habits of America today and found that 70% of the 18-34-year-olds who responded to his survey regularly use pornography. It has also been found that the average age that people start using pornography in America is 11 years old. Cybersecurity company “Webroot” found that 37 pornographic videos are created every day in our nation alone and that queries related to porn make up 25% of all of our internet searches.
The numbers in these statistics alone are startling but what makes it all truly distressing is knowing that while some argue that porn is normal, or even empowering, scientific research has proven quite the opposite. Pornography harms every single person involved, from the consumers to the actors themselves. One of the major arguments in favor of pornography is that everything, from the filming to the sex acts themselves, happens between consenting adults. Sadly, this simply isn’t true. When it comes to the porn industry, consent is such a slippery thing, and actors so frequently find themselves coerced into things they never intended to do. In more serious cases, people are forced into filming pornographic videos against their will, but nobody ever really knows because pornography displaying violence and abuse is in such high demand! This makes the creation of these videos themselves, by definition, human trafficking.
Recently, there has been a public outcry against PornHub, a popular porn website, because of its shocking amount of videos that include actual footage of rape, abuse, underage actors, and “revenge porn.” Revenge porn consists of videos or pictures that might have been consensual as far as the filming goes, but were posted without the person’s consent as a way of getting back at them. You can read more about this at Exodus Cry.com. All of these videos slipped through the cracks in PornHub security, but nobody had any idea because looks can be deceiving. Human trafficking was literally being put on display for all to see, and for the creators to profit from, and nobody even knew. This is just one of the many ways that pornography fuels human trafficking and damages our society. Throughout the next few posts, we’ll be discussing other facets of this issue, but if you’d like more information about the specifics of how porn is harmful to consumers, the actors, and our culture as a whole, please visit the websites below.