Online Porn and the Global Trafficking Crisis

Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove

Guests

Laila Mickelwait

Laila Mickelwait leads the campaign to shut down Pornhub and discusses how the site enables and profits from sexual exploitation and human trafficking.

Nick Grono

Nick Grono is CEO of Freedom Fund discussing where vulnerable people are targeted around the world in trafficking networks.

Episode Summary

The biggest porn upload site Pornhub is facing a slew of lawsuits by women who accuse the site of enabling and profiting from sexual exploitation. The advent of the internet means that the abuse of victims of human rights violations including rape and violence now, arguably, is compounded - every time someone views the material. To get a sense of the scale of the issue of trafficking and where these long chains of abuse can begin, we speak with Laila Mickelwait who leads the campaign to shut down Pornhub, and Nick Grono, CEO of Freedom Fund on where vulnerable people are targeted around the world.

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Transcript

INTRODUCTION

Mcfarlane: You're listening to One Decision, the podcast that looks at how choices made today can affect our world tomorrow. I'm your host, Julia McFarlane. MindGeek, the parent company of one of the world's most popular sites, Pornhub, was recently acquired by a Canadian private equity fund called Ethical Capital Partners. Now you might be wondering what Pornhub has to do with global affairs, but bear with us. Lila Micklewaite is the founder of Trafficking Hub, a campaign to shut down Pornhub on the grounds that the world's favorite not safe for work website is allegedly a hotbed of illegal content, including videos showing the rape, abuse, and sexual exploitation of minors, kidnapped, and trafficked persons from around the world. I've been combating the injustice of sex trafficking for about the last fifteen years. Her campaign has attracted millions of supporters and has helped lead to the exodus of commercial advertisers working with the firm, including Kraft Heinz and Unilever. Recently, two top executives resigned amid allegations that Pornhub did not sufficiently remove content that involved nonconsensual and underage sex. And as the company's new owners take the helm, they'll also take on responsibility for some of the class action lawsuits against the site, but we will get into those a bit later in the conversation. Back now to Lila, who's vowed not to end her campaign until her mission is complete, that the site is shut down, disbanded, and its executives held accountable. When did this crusade of hers begin, and why?

INTERVIEW: LILA MICKLEWAITE, TRAFFICKING HUB

Micklewaite: About nine years ago, I started to notice that there were stories and papers being written about trafficking in the porn industry, as well as trafficking victims who were being filmed and that abuse was being uploaded online and distributed online, monetized online. So in a digital world, I thought, This is the trend. We need to start focusing on how sex trafficking is evolving and being distributed online. So I started to investigate what I call the big porn industry. Big porn is best represented by a company called MindGeek, and MindGeek is the parent company of Pornhub. And Pornhub is the largest and most popular well, was, as of December 2020, the largest and most popular porn site in the world. The site was getting 47,000,000,000 visits every year. That would be 130,000,000 visits per day, 5,000,000 visits per hour. And there was enough content being uploaded annually onto Pornhub that it would take 169 years to watch. So think of this as the YouTube of porn. These are people around the world. Anybody that has a camera or an iPhone could take a video of a sex act and upload it to Pornhub.

Mcfarlane: The article that sparked Micklewaite's campaign was an investigation into Pornhub by The Sunday Times that was angled on the various global businesses that had adverts on the site. It followed coverage on an alleged revenge porn case where a young woman discovered her ex had filmed explicit videos of her without her consent and uploaded it to Pornhub, which pressure groups say remained on the site days after it was flagged. When the Sunday Times came across the story and started digging, they found a staggering amount of suspicious and disturbing content, as did Micklewaite.

Micklewaite: And I was noticing that I was seeing videos of girls who appeared to be underage. They looked underdeveloped, their bodies looked young, underdeveloped bodies, they spoke like children. You know, often you'd see them in pigtails and braces and things like this. And also seeing women who appeared to be being assaulted. So they would be crying. They would be protesting. And I started to put the dots together and realize that the site is infested with videos of real sexual crime because it is set up to profit from abuse, because they do not verify the age or the consent of the millions of individuals in the videos that they globally distribute and monetize and profit from.

Mcfarlane: So from there, I felt compelled to sound the alarm on what was going on in the site. What soon followed was a column in the New York Times by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nick Kristof called The Children of Pornhub, which highlighted the growing trend of child exploitation that had been found on the site and Micklewaite's mission to shut it down.

Micklewaite: Today, we have over two and, you know, almost two and a half million signatures from 192 countries. Hundreds of organizations have joined the effort. Hundreds of survivors. Thousands of media articles have been written. And that's kind of the genesis of what is the Trafficking Hub movement. So we started using the Trafficking Hub hashtag, which just took off, and that is how it all began. And the petition name is shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable. User generated porn tube sites exist outside of Pornhub. Granted, MindGeek does own most of the most popular porn tube sites that operate the same way. So the reason why it's so important to shut down Pornhub and to hold its executives accountable is because one of the best ways that we can actually end and prevent this kind of abuse from proliferating in the future is to end impunity, is to make the risk for engaging in this kind of conduct higher than the benefit that these corporations get by maintaining the status quo. And it has to be a severe penalty. Giving them a slap on the wrist and them saying, I'm sorry, I won't do it anymore, after they got caught is not what justice looks like. And that's not going to deter future bad actors. So they needed to go to prison. They need to have their company shut down. And, you know, also for the fact of justice for these victims. These victims, like I said, their worst moments of their lives have been immortalized by Pornhub, globally distributed. They actually placed, intentionally placed a download button on every single video on their site so that people, 130,000,000 visitors per day, could download and possess the trauma, the rape, the trafficking of these victims, and then be able to re upload these videos not only to Pornhub, but to the other sites, so that these victims say it's the immortalization of my trauma, that my worst moments will live on long after I'm dead, and it's a terrorizing thought for them. So, you know, the magnitude of harm is so great that the magnitude of response also needs to be great and needs to be strong enough to really be justice and a deterrent.

Mcfarlane: I think it's really interesting because you've mentioned verification and the need for age verification as a part of the process for trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And it's something that I think is really interesting because in a way Pornhub and a lot of these companies, they face similar issues to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And a lot of these social media companies when it comes to things like the verification process of their content. For a long time, Facebook has tried to insist that it's not a publisher, but really it is a publisher. And a lot of people are trying to get them to own that responsibility. But as you pointed out, the sheer amount of content that is uploaded to these sites, not just Pornhub, but also Instagram and Facebook sites which also host a lot of these disturbing videos that we've been talking about. They all have the same problem, which is there is too much content being uploaded around the world in real time then they have the capacity to verify. It's an impossible task really. And it is a task that may be helped or assisted in the not too distant future when we have things that like more sophisticated algorithms and AI powered verification processes that could do a lot of these things automatically. But that's a stumbling block, is it not, in the fight against this sort of thing. The companies hosting this content like Pornhub, which is at the end of the day, there is not a huge amount they can do because these sites are so big, content creators are so ubiquitous. It's an impossible ask to get them to individually verify age and consent for every single video that is uploaded.

Micklewaite: Well, they certainly won't be able to have 6,800,000 videos uploaded every year, which is built into their business model. The volume of content for MindGeek and Pornhub was important because they mostly sell advertising. So that is based on traffic. And so the more traffic you get, the more money you can generate based on advertising revenue. And in order to generate that traffic, you need massive amounts of content to be picked up in Google to drive people to the site. So certainly you if you're verifying the age and ID of those who are in those videos, you're not going to have that volume of content. However, that is a price that needs to be paid for safety.

Mcfarlane: Micklewaite's crusade against Pornhub may eventually prove to be successful. As lawsuits continue to pile up against the website, advertisers and other firms are beginning to take notice. Instagram recently suspended Pornhub's account. NEWS CLIP [9:59]
Mastercard and Visa both cut ties with Pornhub. Speaking out for the first time on a controversial lawsuit involving MindGeek, that's the parent company of Pornhub. The CEO saying Visa is suspending card acceptance on the advertising arm of MindGeek until further notice. But it may be too late for Visa to really distance itself from Pornhub

Mcfarlane: after a federal judge recently threw out their request to be dismissed from a lawsuit which claims that they conspired to help MindGeek, Pornhub's parent company, profit from footage and images of child sex abuse. They're being sued by 194 victims in eight lawsuits,

Micklewaite: both class action and individual lawsuits across The United States and Canada. And the damages from those lawsuits can total in the billions. So, you know, I think we have yet to see if Pornhub will end up being shut down, but there's some serious consequences that have happened in the last few years.

Mcfarlane: In 2021, a lawsuit filed in the Southern District Of California alleged that the porn provider Girls Do Porn, who partnered with Pornhub, had duped dozens of women into being part of a sex trafficking operation by offering them large sums of money after applying to online ads for modeling opportunities. It said that they used fraud, coercion, and intimidation to coerce them into performing pornographic acts. The Department of Justice charged four of the group's principals with sex trafficking and other charges.

Micklewaite: The sex trafficker involved in that case was put on the FBI's most wanted list. Finally, he was found just in December 2022, just this last December. All his co conspirators were arrested for defrauding, forcing, coercing these women into these porn videos that were on a channel, one of Pornhub's most popular partner channels. You know, they had over 600,000,000 views, over 700,000 subscribers. And Pornhub was allowing those videos to be on the site and monetizing and distributing them long after they knew that these were victims of trafficking. Now, that lawsuit was settled. That was filed in California. And there was another lawsuit. They were all bringing individual actions against MindGeek and Pornhub. 14 of them were children, you know, notorious sex criminals and pedophiles had abused these girls, some of these girls. And then the rest were adults who were raped. Some of them were drugged, trafficked on the site. And that is ongoing. So that lawsuit has not been settled. It's also against Visa. What's important about that case, and I think this is really worth noting, is not only did they sue MindGeek, but they sued the individual owners by name. They sued the investment company that actually invested $362,000,000 to enable MindGeek to roll up the porn industry into one company. And they also sued Visa. They sued Visa as a co conspirator in the crime of trafficking. And what's amazing is that Visa tried to get out of the case and a federal judge in California has held them in the case as co conspirators in the crime of trafficking and that proceeds today.

Mcfarlane: I wanted to ask you about your feelings on Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter and a lot of other sites. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2021 found that Facebook hosted more than 20,000,000 reported incidents of child sexual abuse material. 95% of the total reported incidents across all platforms during this year in 2021. Google was also responsible for a half a million reported incidents. Snapchat, just under 150,000. There are so many other media companies who are involved in this. How come you are so focused on Pornhub, which in comparison has a mere sort of tens of thousands reported incidents across the study that was referenced in 2021. I mean, do you plan on expanding your campaign?

Micklewaite: I think that any corporation that is involved in knowingly distributing, monetizing this kind of contraband illegal content should be held accountable for those actions. For me, you know, I came upon this issue with Pornhub. I've had, you know, victims who reach out to me on a regular basis. And I have taken a particular interest in holding this particular company accountable for these actions with the hope that there is a domino effect as well. If you kind of spread out too far, it's almost hard to be effective in that way instead of concentrating efforts onto one issue until it's resolved. But what I do hope is that there is a domino effect in holding one mega perpetrator accountable.

Mcfarlane: I noticed that you describe the Trafficking Hub movement as a non religious, nonpartisan, decentralized global effort to hold Pornhub accountable. And I read that you have been challenged on your activism recently, largely because of your previous association with Exodus Cry, which is a large Christian organization, which critics accuse of opposing decriminalizing or legalizing sex work and wants to abolish porn altogether. And I did look up on their website, and they do appear to call for an end to commercial sex, including pornography consumption. And they invite people to take a pledge that they say recognizes that ending this demand is the key to ending sex trafficking and prostitution. What do you say to people who have criticized you and said that this mission of yours, it is based on religious beliefs and actually you want to abolish porn altogether?

Micklewaite: Yeah, I would say that that is incorrect. And it's demonstrated by who's involved in this effort and the mission statement of the effort from day one. I believe that those, and I've said this many, many times that this is not about ending the legal consensual porn industry that is in The United States constitutionally protected. It is about ending rape for profit on these sites and child exploitation and non consensual distribution of content as well, which does affect those in the porn industry. And what we have seen is people from all walks of life. So we've had atheists and Christians coming together. We've had left and right. We've had those in the porn industry. The most famous porn star of all time, they call her the queen of porn, Jenna Jameson, has been very vocal in support of holding Pornhub and MindGeek accountable. And those in the porn industry itself have also been victimized by MindGeek. I've, you know, had porn performers themselves as some of the most helpful allies as they're scouring these tube sites, MindGeek tube sites and Pornhub for hours a day, trying to take down their stolen content, and they're coming across child abuse and trafficking, and they're sending the links to be reported. And so I would say that it absolutely 100% has been and is an effort by people of all backgrounds to come together to hold a true perpetrator accountable and hopefully cause ripple effects to prevent this from happening in the future.

THE GLOBAL TRAFFICKING CRISIS

Mcfarlane: Human trafficking and the exploitation of women and girls has long been a global problem. But it's one that when we discuss it from the point of view of Western countries, tends to be framed as a human rights issue that largely takes place further afield in developing nations or vulnerable states. And, yes, many of these places are known to be what's called source countries, places where traffickers and criminal organizations go to target vulnerable people for exploitation, where law enforcement is lax or compromised, or organized crime groups have a deep foothold. But what's changing with the advent of the Internet is that crime and the abuse of people who've had unspeakable things done to them is no longer necessarily deep underground or out of view. The Pornhub issue illustrates that we can be directly involved in these hideous crimes taking place without even realizing it. Back to those source countries where these long chains of abuse can begin. We wanted to talk to someone who has on the ground experience of tackling trafficking in all corners of the world. Here's Nick Grono, the CEO of Freedom Fund.

INTERVIEW: NICK GRONO, FREEDOM FUND

Grono: The major drivers of slavery are vulnerability and often it's marginalized populations in countries and weak rule of law. It's not often that people will be enslaved directly, say in the streets of London or New York, despite people watching movies like Taken and thinking that's how it happens. What happens in fact is it's vulnerable populations such as refugees or populations that are displaced by conflict. I mean, we will have all watched with horror the war in Ukraine and in the early stages, women and children fleeing the country and being preyed upon by exploiters waiting at the border. We'll have watched with horror what happened in Afghanistan and, you know, deeply, deeply vulnerable people being exploited. So the kind of the drivers of slavery are vulnerability and weak rule of law. And by weak rule of law, I mean that slavery is generally illegal everywhere, right? No one encourages, actively supports, governments don't actively support enslavement of populations, but where the laws aren't being enforced, where perpetrators act with impunity, then you get vulnerable people being preyed upon and exploited and ending up in situations of slavery and human trafficking. And then you have the vulnerable population, which can be vulnerable in many ways. Right? Women and girls are often highly vulnerable as we've seen in Ukraine and in Afghanistan. It can be religious minorities. It can be ethnic minorities that don't get the protection of the law or are singled out in most cases. Not every case, but that's the typology of slavery that we encounter.

Mcfarlane: Of course. Slavery is one of the oldest forms of crime. It's a historical crime, but it's also a hugely profitable one. Annually, according to the ILO, the International Labor Organization, annually the business of human trafficking globally generates around $150,000,000,000 in profits. The global organized crime index, they found in their 2021 report that the exploitation of people in the form of trafficking has now become the most pervasive criminal economy in the world, more so than arms, more so than drugs. And they also found state officials and client networks who hold influence over state authorities are now the most dominant brokers of organized crime and not cartel leaders or mafia bosses as one might be forgiven for thinking. It's an extraordinary concept to sort of consider. I read that the World Bank estimates around $1,000,000,000,000 US dollars is spent each year to bribe public officials, which is a difficult number to fathom when you think about it really. The Millennium Project, another research group, they say that transnational organized crime takes in between 3% to 7% of world GDP annually. If you average those two together, that would be nearly $5,000,000,000,000 per year. I mean, I list these sort of these facts and these figures to ask about the scale of the problem and the huge amounts of money involved in this enterprise. I mean, we've never in our history as a human race, we've never managed to abolish slavery and trafficking. And is that because the immense profitability of the sale and exploitation of human beings is something that makes this a massive, almost impossible problem to solve. And with so much money to be made from these crimes, there will always be powerful individuals who are corrupted by this.

Grono: Those are absolutely key factors. And let me give you another number. Walk Free's Global Slavery Index estimates there are about 50,000,000 people in slavery at any one time. And the figure of 150,000,000,000 is from about ten years ago, so it's almost certainly a gross underestimate these days. So massive, massive profitability. And basically, of course, what the whole model of slavery is extracting labor or sex for free or for very little cost. Right? And so people, enslaved people, so they can force them to work or force them to engage in sex for little or no money and can make a lot of money as a result of that. But that also provides the answer to ways in which we can address the problem. So, slavery's been with us for millennia. Absolutely, I suspect some form of extreme exploitation will always exist, right? I mean, criminal enterprises and all the rest of it. But we can do far, far, far better than we do. And a lot of the slavery exists in corporate supply chains, which is why I started talking about coltan being produced from The Congo, which, you know, is source material for batteries produced by Tesla and Apple and others or fast fashion companies sourcing from South Asia. And of course, they're not directly linked to this exploitation because they source from a company, which sources from a company, which sources from a company. But if the incentive is there, we can make a huge difference where the will is there. And what is happening is companies benefit from lower prices because full wages aren't being paid for labor. It increases their profit margins, and they have no particular incentive to take this on. And we need to change that. And, you know, we've got experience in The UK and The US, for example, of highly exploitive labor practices a century ago or two centuries ago. And we introduced regulation to address what we thought were entirely unacceptable and abusive practices. There is no reason why we can't make a significant difference in corporate supply chains.

Mcfarlane: Your organization Freedom Fund, it does so much work tackling modern slavery and trafficking. A lot of that is similar to what other charities do, raising awareness, educating lawmakers, education programs, advertising. But you also have teams who work on the ground on frontlines. I was reading about your hotspot projects. Tell us more about what exactly these are by giving us an example of one of these specific hotspots and what your colleagues and partners are up to on the ground in those places.

Grono: Sure. So, you know, we spent a lot of time talking about the source countries and people being exploited in country and how that drives slavery. And our approach is that one of the key ways, and it's not the only way, but one of the most effective ways to tackle slavery is to build resilient communities so they aren't being preyed upon. And that means working in these countries. So we're working in Nepal and in Myanmar and in Kenya and Brazil, among others, Ethiopia. And it's to work with the grassroots organizations that are part of the community to build resilience. And if you can stop vulnerable people being preyed upon in the first place, then you go a long, long way to tackling slavery. So an example, I've just come back from Brazil, you know, and Brazil, the issue we're working on there is the trafficking of girls into the sex trade. And you have a lot of girls that are highly vulnerable, they may flee violence in their own home or they may be preyed upon, and it's always the vulnerable, right? It's not everyone, it's the vulnerable, I keep on coming back to this point. And then they get trafficked into exploitation. And so if you can work at the community to intervene at that early stage, provide them with alternatives and options and schooling and vocational training and support, you go a long, long way to tackling the problem. I mean, in Brazil, we're also about to start working on another issue that intersects with the environment, which is there's a massive use of forced labor to illegally deforest the Amazon. So you have, you know, two ills intersecting. You have the destruction of the environment and you have slavery and forced labor. And the model there will be to work with local community groups, particularly in the communities where the men are being sourced from, often offered good jobs, you know, often being told because there's a lot of we've talked a lot about the criminal element and the kind of use of force, but there's a lot of deception that goes into slavery. Right? It's such an insidious crime because you're preying on people, often people who are seeking a better life. And so you offer people jobs. You tell them they're gonna have a good job. Turns out, well, you're not gonna have a good job. You're gonna be in a logging camp, and you're gonna be forced to work, and you're gonna be beaten up if you don't, and you're told you have a huge debt now that you have to pay off. And so all these forms of control are used to extract labor. And so it's trying to intervene and break that model.

Mcfarlane: That's true. And I read I don't have the stat to hand, but it was something like more than half of all slavery and trafficking cases recorded involved recruitment. And a large proportion of this recruitment was carried out by people known to the victims, whether that's friends or relatives. I mean, it's hugely, as you say, hugely insidious and there's deception involved in it. You talked about building resilience. I mean, does that mean? How can you in terms of empowering a community, like when you go to Brazil and you go to the favelas and you work on education programmes and employment programmes, what does building resilience actually mean in terms of trying to protect these people from, in some cases, being recruited by people they know for jobs that aren't what they say?

Grono: So let me give you an example of how this works, you know. So just imagine you're in Nepal and you have a family there with six kids and the youngest is a 12 year old girl and the family has been forced off its farm because of climate change and all the rest of it and basically, you know, starving. And then someone, a cousin comes to the village and says, I can offer your youngest daughter a good job in the big city in Kathmandu. And she'll have to work, but she'll also go to school, and she'll be able to save some money and send her back home. Now this farming couple may know that this is too good to be true, but they're desperate. Alright? They're trying to feed a family of with six kids. They know that if they don't take any action, then, you know, things will only get more and more desperate. So they may close their eyes to the problem and off goes their daughter. And, of course, their daughter doesn't end up working in a hotel or as promised, but works in a brothel and not works is exploited and raped in a brothel. And so there are numerous ways you can engage there. First of all, you can educate the community that, you know, these recruiters more often than not are recruiting people into situations of exploitation, but that only gets you so far. You find often that these are marginal communities that aren't accessing that might have an entitlement to government benefits, but they don't know how to access them or the government officials aren't enabling them to get access to benefits. So the local NGOs can connect them to the benefits. You can provide them with vocational training opportunities. You can work with local groups to put aside a little money. These are all small interventions and it sounds quite complicated, but you know, we've done research that shows that these interventions in India over four years reduced the amount of slavery by over 50% in a community of highly vulnerable population. This is, you know, 100,000 people or so less that ended up in slavery than otherwise would've been the case. So by engaging with the community, educating, finding multiple ways to tackle that vulnerability and counteract the pull factors, you can make a huge difference. It doesn't take a lot of money. It's about getting governments to do the right thing. It's about providing awareness and opportunities.

Mcfarlane: What is the number one sort of worry that you have? Is there a particular country? Is there a particular situation that keeps you up at night particularly? I mean, is it the huge movement of people flooding out of Ukraine? Is it the climate refugee crisis that you alluded to earlier that's disproportionately affecting people in very troubled countries in the African Continent, for example, in Central Asia? What is the most concerning issue on this topic that you have?

Grono: I find it all concerning and distressing and of course, they're individual. I do find the kind of forced displacement through conflict utterly utterly distressing because you don't see where the solution lies there, do you? You know, if millions are forced to flee from Afghanistan is happening right now or from Syria as we've seen, Ukraine hopefully maybe a slightly different scenario if the situation improves there. And when you meet those that have been forced out of their countries that have nothing, you know, often highly successful people in their own countries, you know, when you meet Afghans, highly qualified Afghans who were judges and teachers and professors forced to flee and in utterly desperate circumstances, it just rams home to you the unfairness of the world and just how brutal it can be and how vulnerable people are and how that enables them to be exploited. And it's quite distressing. But let me try and end on a more positive note. We can make a difference. Right? I mean, we are seeing real progress around business regulation, about an awareness that we have to do much better on supply chains, that sustainability means really getting to the grips of the products that we use, the clothes that we wear. And I am optimistic that we can make a big difference over the next decade or so, but it's a really hard fight. That's it for this week's episode of One Decision. We drop new episodes every Thursday.

Mcfarlane: Like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Drop us a line. Tell us your thoughts. What decisions have impacted you and where you live? You can write to us. Our email is 1decision@1decisionpodcast.com. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.