2 million back petition to shut down Pornhub over sex trafficking, child abuse videos
A petition calling for the dismantling of PornHub, the largest pornography hosting website in the world that critics say profits off of and enables sex trafficking as well as child abuse, has surpassed 2 million signatures.
The petition launched in February by Laila Mickelwait, director of abolition for the Sacramento-based nonprofit ExodusCry, has received signatures from 192 countries, according to a statement sent to The Christian Post Tuesday.
The petition and corresponding website allege, with notable evidence, that the site has been enabling and profiting off of crimes like rape, abduction, sexual assault and sex trafficking.
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The petition even yielded a letter from U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., in March asking Attorney General Bill Barr to conduct a federal investigation into the porn website and its parent company, MindGeek.
A group of lawmakers in Canada did likewise, asking the same of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Recently, Mickelwait met with lawmakers in Washington D.C. and presented an evidence-based case against the website, which she says draws about 42 billion views per year.
"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," Mickelwait said in a statement this week.
"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 significant evidence and it is just the tip of the iceberg. Pornhub is arguably the largest public collection of sexual exploitation evidence in existence.”
In June, the petition passed the 1 million signature mark. As of Thursday afternoon, the petition has amassed 2,026,877 supporters.
Actor and “America's Got Talent” host Terry Crews added his voice to the effort in July, posting on Twitter that Pornhub should be defunded.
Mickelwait set the campaign in motion by penning an op-ed earlier this year detailing how easy it was to upload content on to the porn hosting site.
The following day, the BBC reported the case of Rose Kalemba, who was taken at knifepoint and raped for 12 hours when she was 14 years old.
Her attackers uploaded the videos of the brutality they inflicted on her onto Pornhub and Kalemba had to threaten legal action in order to get the videos removed.
"The titles of the videos were 'teen crying and getting slapped around,' 'teen getting destroyed,' 'passed out teen.' One had over 400,000 views," Kalemba told the BBC at the time.
"The worst videos were the ones where I was passed out. Seeing myself being attacked where I wasn't even conscious was the worst."
Pornhub told BBC in a statement that the Kalemba videos date back to before the current owners of the website took control and assured that the company had “put in place the industry's most stringent safeguards and policies when it comes to combating unauthorized and illegal content.”
ExodusCry has also documented the case of a 15-year-old girl from Florida, who had gone missing for a year before being located. Fifty-eight videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on the website, which had been monetized.
Last November, PayPal cut off services to the Pornhub as a result of the site's streaming of content featuring women and children who were trafficking victims.
