As Pornhub continues to slither its way into the mainstream, survivors of rape whose attacks have been featured on the “YouTube of porn” are speaking up.
In a BBC report, a woman who was viciously raped and beaten at just 14 years old recalled when videos of her attacks uploaded to Pornhub began circulating in her high school:
A few months [after the attack], Rose was browsing MySpace when she found several people from her school sharing a link. She was tagged. Clicking on it, Rose was directed to the pornography-sharing site, Pornhub. She felt a wave of nausea as she saw several videos of the attack on her.
“The titles of the videos were ‘teen crying and getting slapped around’, ‘teen getting destroyed’, ‘passed out teen’. One had over 400,000 views,” Rose recounts.
“The worst videos were the ones where I was passed out. Seeing myself being attacked where I wasn’t even conscious was the worst.”
She made an instant decision to not tell her family about the videos – most of them had not been supportive anyway. Telling them would achieve nothing.
Within days it was evident that most of her peers at school had seen the videos.
“I was bullied,” she says, “People would say that I asked for it. That I led men on. That I was a slut.”
…
Rose says she emailed Pornhub several times over a period of six months in 2009 to ask for the videos to be taken down.
“I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’”
She received no reply and the videos remained live.
“The year that followed I withdrew into myself. I disassociated,” she recalls, “I felt nothing. Numb. I kept to myself.”
She would wonder, with every stranger who made eye contact with her, if they had seen the videos.
“Had they got off to it? Had they gratified themselves to my rape?”
It wasn’t until some time later that Rose got the idea to set up a new email address, pose as an attorney, and threaten Pornhub with legal action that her request to have the videos taken down were granted.
“Within 48 hours the videos disappeared,” she told the BBC.
It wasn’t until years later when Rose saw Pornhub’s name beginning to crop up in mainstream places, such as news stories about “woke” initiatives to donate to domestic violence shelters and efforts to save endangered animals that she told the world what Pornhub really stands for.
“It’s impossible to miss Pornhub if you use social media,” Rose told the BBC. “They’ve done a great job at positioning themselves as a ‘woke’ mission, almost transcending porn, but videos titled like mine are still on the site. There’s no way of knowing if there are rapes on there and the victims don’t know it.”
In a viral blog post, Rose retold the chilling story of her rape and called out Pornhub for turning a blind eye to her pleas until she pretended to be a lawyer. Dozens of women and some men responded to her post, saying that videos showing them being sexually abused had also appeared on the site.
For their part, Pornhub told the BBC, “These horrific allegations date back to 2009, several years prior to Pornhub being acquired by its current owners, so we do not have information on how it was handled at that time.”
“Since the change in ownership, Pornhub has continuously put in place the industry’s most stringent safeguards and policies when it comes to combating unauthorised and illegal content, as part of our commitment to combating child sex abuse material,” the platform’s statement continues. “The company employs Vobile, a state-of-the-art third party fingerprinting software, which scans any new uploads for potential matches to unauthorised material and makes sure the original video doesn’t go back up on the platform.”
When asked why videos with titles similar to those uploaded featuring Rose’s rape […] are still active on the website, Pornhub simply said: “We allow all forms of sexual expression that follow our Terms of Use, and while some people may find these fantasies inappropriate, they do appeal to many people around the world and are protected by various freedom of speech laws.”
“Women have told me that it is still happening, after they saw my blog. And these are Western women with access to social media,” Rose said, debunking Pornhub’s defense. “I don’t doubt that videos in other parts of the world, in places we know porn is consumed in large bulks like the Middle East and Asia are places where the victim might not even be aware that their abuse is being shared.”
According to The Washington Examiner, which recently published a piece calling for Pornhub to be “shut down,” the site is so massive, it can’t possibly review or responsibly moderate all of the 6 million videos uploaded each year. It can’t even begin to regulate its 42 billion visits per year, and without so much as a pop-up to confirm a viewer’s age on the landing page, it doesn’t even try.
This is how the platform wound up hosting 58 videos of a 15-year-old being raped last year. This is how over a dozen women wound up victims of “revenge porn” videos that, until recently, Pornhub refused to take down.
Folks, there is no such thing as “ethical” porn, even in cases in which the “actors” don’t happen to be sexual assault victims. The entire industry is a web of exploitation that treats women worse than animals, yet it is still somehow managing to sneak in under the “woke” tent—in the #MeToo generation, no less.
How much more will it take? How many more videos of children being tortured and abused need to surface before we put an end to this??
This article was first published on the Activist Mommy website, and is republished with permission. You may not use, copy, distribute, publish, syndicate, sub-license and transmit the whole or any part of such material in any manner and in any format and/or media without the permission of the original publishers.
