Shut down Pornhub!

Kingsley Cortes reports in The National Pulse,

A petition to shut down Pornhub, one of the most visited pornographic websites in the world, for enabling and profiting from video content depicting trafficking, rape, and under-age sex reached one million signatures this week with signers from 192 countries.

In the summer of 2009, two men kidnapped 14-year-old Rose Kalemba at knifepoint and raped her for 12 hours. After the incident, Kalemba’s attackers uploaded the videos of her torture to Pornhub with titles like “teen crying and getting slapped around,” teen getting destroyed,” and “passed out teen,” according to BBC reports.

Late last year, another teenage girl – age 15 – went missing for a year until authorities found 58 rape and abuse videos of the girl featured on Pornhub.

Mickelwait says ‘teen’ is one of the most searched categories on PornHub’s site, calling into question the legality of the site’s films. “A quick search for the word “teen” turns up titles such as “Young Girl Tricked,” “Innocent Brace Faced Tiny Teen F—ed,” “Teen Little Girl First Time,” on and on ad infinitum,” she writes.

Pornhub also frequently uses racial labels like ‘Tiny Petite Thai Teen’ to categorize their videos. Despite joining other companies and websites standing in solidarity against racism as a slew of protests and riots erupt across major US cities in response to the killing of George Floyd – Pornhub often tags featured videos with racial slurs and derogatory language like “exploited black teen,” “how to treat your n*****,” and “black slave girl pleasures white master.”

Mickelwait told Fox News PornHub is “set up for exploitation,” and communicated her plans to notify the Trump administration of the petition.

Mickelwait’s efforts caught the attention of Senator Bill Sasse (R-NE) who called on Attorney General William Barr to probe Pornhub in a March letter to the Department of Justice.

“Pornhub’s incredible reach has a much darker side than the image of harmless fun that it tries to project. In several notable incidents over the past year, Pornhub made content available worldwide showing women and girls that were victims of trafficking being raped and exploited,” Sasse wrote.

“All it takes to upload content to Pornhub is an email address—no government-issued ID is required. Pornhub doesn’t bother to reliably verify the age or the consent of the millions featured in the videos it hosts and profits from, yet it monetizes those videos with no questions asked. The site is set up for exploitation and is infested with videos of the real rape, trafficking, abuse, and exploitation of women and children. We have evidence and it is just the tip of the iceberg,” Mickelwait says. “Shut it down.”

The full story, along with a way to sign the petition, is available at traffickinghub.com For up-to-the-minute updates on the progress of the campaign, follow Laila Mickelwait on Twitter.

629 Pakistani girls sold as brides to China

From Associated Press:

LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Page after page, the names stack up: 629 girls and women from across Pakistan who were sold as brides to Chinese men and taken to China. The list, obtained by The Associated Press, was compiled by Pakistani investigators determined to break up trafficking networks exploiting the country’s poor and vulnerable.

Read more here.

There are a few good Hollywood Celebrities

From Understanding Compassion.com:

Ashton Kutcher may be well known for being silly and funny on television, but he’s recently revealed that his organization, Thorn, which helps find sex trafficking and child pornography victims and their abusers, has helped rescue around 6000 victims.

Read more here.

"If you want to find a child sex trafficker, find a drug dealer. It's one in the same."

Sharyl Attkisson learns about drug trafficking and sex trafficking.

San Diego's number two in the country because San Diego's drug corridor is number two in the country. Texas corridor is number one in the country for narcotics and it's also number one in the country for child sex trafficking.

...Sharyl: What happens to the ones who are not rescued?

Travers: they end up with a with a hell on earth life, of being sold multiple times for money, being beaten, moved around, have no privacy, have no freedom, is all taken away and it takes years and years and years and years of rehabilitation to fix one mind that is caught up in that system.

Sharyl: You say you have to have heart to do this. Why do these guys do this with no pay?

Travers: One day I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize, and it was one of the girls in rehab that I had rescued. And she just said, “I just wanna say thank you to you and your team for getting me and rescuing me from where I was.” And that in and of itself makes everything worth it.

Read more here.

"Property"

Mia De Graaf reports in Daily Mail,

Modern-day sex traffickers are bringing back vile practice as girls tell how they are forced to get a tattoo of their pimp's name or insignia to mark them out as his 'property'

Almost all sex traffickers in America now brand their slaves with tattoos.
Crowns, bags of money and pimps' initials are common, police say.
Some of the women are even branded with a unique bar code to show who 'owns' them.


Branded: Adriana calls this tattoo her 'war wound'. It bears the name of a pimp who made her a sex slave at 14.

Read more here.

What do you know about sex trafficking?

Do you want to save underage "sex workers?" Simple, right? Go after the pimps? Yeah, go after the pimps, but when researchers

interviewed a total of 372 sex workers (262 of whom were minors and 70 who had previously worked as minors), only 14 percent of female underage sex workers in New York City (and 6 percent of the males) had a pimp. Some testified that they had recruited their friends and boyfriends to help them with their business. And “all sex workers in both Atlantic City and New York City described experiencing increasing, rather than decreasing, agency and control over their work over time.”

Pimps, too, failed to fit the stereotypical mold. “We were told pimps were not approachable because they were too dangerous and didn’t want to talk,” Marcus told me. “But all they wanted to do was talk, talk, talk—that’s what they do for a living.” Many pimps referred the researchers to their sex workers if they approached them in the right way, no cuts on the face required. (In addition to interviewing pimps in Atlantic City, the researchers spoke with 85 male pimps working in New York.) One pimp told them that going after underage girls constituted “pimp suicide,” not because it makes pimps vulnerable to harsh anti-trafficking laws, but because “teenage prostitutes don’t earn enough money,” Marcus says. In Atlantic City, they found, “those who first entered when over 18 years of age reported being approached by a pimp at nearly twice the rate of those whose entry occurred when they were minors.” And while some pimps boasted about exerting control over “their” sex workers, the women working with them told a different story. One sex worker named Diamond says that she had led her pimp to believe that he had initiated her into sex work, though she had been working for some time. She did it in order to hold up her pimp’s “narrative of hypermasculine enticement and feminine vulnerability,” as the researchers put it.

The pimp-focused approach will fail to reach the vast majority of underage sex workers who want to leave but have no adult forcing them to stay. “We haven’t really nailed down what works to get these kids back in the mainstream,” she says. “Many of them are quite disaffected. They’ve been thrown away by their families. The street has become a life they can negotiate relatively well. They’re not banging on our doors.”

Please read more here.