The Problem

Sex trafficking and pornography.

Two concepts that may not seem to have much of a correlation.

Welcome to my project 'Trafficking Tapes' where I will be nailing down the truth of sex trafficking in the porn industry. The problem is much more severe, than we could have ever imagined.

Porn sites, despite having professional industry workers, rely heavily on user-generated uploads. This includes both videos and photographs. These are awash - with illegal, non-consensual, abusive, under-age and trafficked victim material.

PornHub, MindGeek, Aylo and other 'big porn' companies have a narrow focus on money, not humanity.

The porn industry empowers sex trafficking, and it can look like many different things.

Sex trafficking can occur in the form of grooming somebody to join the porn industry, manipulating them and convincing them that this could be their 'big break' their 'only choice' or exploiting someone's financial desperation, telling them this could be their 'money making opportunity' .

Pornography videos or images can be used as revenge or a means of threat and control over an individual. 'Do this for me or I will post these vidoes everywhere'. Trafficking can happen in the comfort of your own home, family members being complicit in selling, abusing and manipulating is more common than you'd think.

Pornographic content can be sold and bought without the consent of the person invloved. Assualt, rape, violent fantasy videos, intoxicated sex, spy camera sex can all be filmed, uploaded and in a matter of minutes receive thousands, sometimes millions of views.

It can also look like, what most people imagine trafficking to be, abducting and holding somebody against their will and uploading the sexual activity they are forced to do onto the web.

All sexual material that involves children is trafficking. All of it. To be more precise, any sexual content that involves children is automatically labelled as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). According to the UK Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in 2020, a webpage showed a child being sexually abused every three minutes.

In their 2020 annual report, it was shown that content involving 11-13 year olds, made up 64% of CSAM on the internet, internatioanlly, with about half of these videos and images being 'self-generated' as youth is increasinlgy being exposed to online life. Most of the content involved young girls filming alone in their room. 7-10 year olds contibuted to 24% of all CSAM and the IWF said: "they’re frequently coerced into exposing themselves and performing sexual acts on live streaming sites.

These live streams are then recorded and captured by offenders and shared across other platforms". Finally, the third largest category of illegal under-age material, is the horrifyingly low age of 3-6 year olds. In 2020 it made up 7% of CSAM, and they saw an increase in these types of videos, it's important to consider this was 3 years ago...what do you think the number looks like now?

The IWF commented: "Sadly, we have seen a rise in the proportion of category A imagery - including rape and sexual sadism - relating to young children. In many cases, children are abused by adults or older children in images and videos produced specifically for commercial distribution. These are then distributed on the open internet or, increasingly, using hidden services on the ‘dark web’".

Sometimes, the truth isn't what we want to hear, but it's something we need to know.

So join me, in listening...