Pornography is a driving factor for trafficking and sexual exploitation.
There is a link between pornography and sex trafficking. The correlation is not hard to find, in fact, it’s pretty obvious. But in the current sex-driven culture, pornography is praised and promoted, and the majority of this world is blind to how it directly affects sex trafficking. There has been a spike in porn during the current coronavirus pandemic, and it’s important to understand the link to modern-day slavery.
Taken from https://www.pornhub.com/insights/corona-virus
Porn web-visits are spiking since the on-set of COVID-19
In 2019, PornHub averaged 115 million visits per day. This information is in PornHub’s 2019 impact report—yes, they have a yearly report bragging about the number of visits, videos, pictures on their site. If 115 million doesn’t seem like enough visits on one website in one day, since the onset of COVID-19, porn sites, including PornHub, have seen major increases in visits around the world.
For example, this month PornHub gave free access to Italian, Spanish, and French users after each country was hit by the spread of the coronavirus. “After March 12, when the subscriptions were offered, each country saw a massive jump in user engagement.”
In the United States, the search for coronavirus-related porn saw a large uptick of views in New York and Washington state, two states that were in the top 3 for cases of coronavirus.
Key reasons for why porn is spiking.
People are at home with more time on their hands. Many use sex as a coping mechanism for dealing with their fear of disease and death. Since the majority of schools are closed, more youth are at home, and research shows porn spikes when kids are out of school. With the average age of exposure to pornography being 11 years old, even children are not exempt from contributing to the increase of online porn searches. Brothels around the world are being shut down but even though people cannot buy sex in person, they will increase their consumption of the only thing available to them right now— porn on the internet.
So, the question remains, how does pornography drive sex trafficking?
Let’s start with the model of supply and demand. As the demand grows, so does the supply.
Demand: Pornography
The more someone uses a drug, the more they must consume to get the same “high”— they become more tolerant to the effects of the drug. It’s no different from sexual addictions. The more someone watches pornography, the more they must consume to get the sexual gratification they are seeking. But to support the higher demand of the world’s addiction to pornography, the supply must also increase… and this is when we realize the supply has a face, a name, and a story.
Supply: The Victim
The average porn consumer does not know the story behind the performer they are watching, why or how they got there, or if they are there by choice. If it is not by choice, those performers are victims of sex trafficking.
Sex trafficking is defined as a “modern-day form of slavery in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years.”
Non-consensual porn (also known as sex trafficking) is more common than we think.
We cannot claim that all porn is non-consensual, but we do know that some is and some is not, regardless of the performer’s age. That alone should open our eyes to what the majority of our world is participating in.
In a study by Rescue: Freedom, in 9 different countries, 49% of sexually exploited women said that pornography was made of them while they were being sex trafficked. That’s almost half.
The search for “teen” on PornHub has been one of the most searched terms for the past 6 years. Recently, a 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was found on PornHub being raped in 58 different videos. This is only one story. It’s wrong, illegal, immoral, and it needs to stop.
We need a shift in culture. Be a part of it.
There is a way to start actively preventing sex trafficking. It requires a shift in our culture. If the demand for pornography decreases, the need for women and girls will also decrease. Our sex-driven culture is complicated, it’s messy, but it can be changed one person at a time.
On the prevention side, educate yourself about sex trafficking. If you are a parent, start talking to your kids. Our Awareness & Education Initiative helps youth and parents with the discussion around the vulnerabilities of youth, and how to protect themselves from exploitation.
On the restoration side of sex trafficking, Freedom 4/24 supports partner organizations in the U.S. and in India, Thailand and Uganda. The women and girls in these countries are victims of sexual exploitation and unfortunately, they were not able to prevent what happened to them, but you can actively help their recovery.
One thing you can do right now is SHARE this article. We hope that it brings awareness and is the beginning of change for each person who reads it.
Additional Resources:
If you are a victim of trafficking or suspect a trafficking case, you can call the Human Trafficking Hotline today: 1 (888) 373-7888
If you desire to live a life of sexual integrity and would like to seek counsel, visit ProvenMen.org.