How Pornhub Videos Hurt Abuse Survivors

Rachel del Guidice /

Visa and Mastercard are reportedly blocking payments on Pornhub due to allegations of child pornography on the website. What is going on here? 

Nicholas Kristof, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote a heartbreaking column on the children of PornHub, telling some of the stories of the children of PornHub. What are some of those stories?

How can people stand up to PornHub and its aiding and abetting of child porn?

Haley McNamara, the director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the U.K. and vice president at the U.S.-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discucss.

We also cover these stories:

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Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today on “The Daily Signal Podcast” by Haley McNamara. She’s the director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the U.K. and a vice president at the U.S.-based National Center on Sexual Exploitation. Haley, it’s great to have you back on “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

Haley McNamara: Thanks so much for having me.

Del Guidice: Well, it’s great to have you with us. I wanted to talk to you about some big news that just recently came out, that Visa and Mastercard are reportedly blocking payments on Pornhub due to allegations of child pornography on that site. So, Haley, can you bring us up to speed on what is going on here?

McNamara: Yes. So our organization, we actually met with Mastercard and Visa back in February and March of this year to let them know about what’s been a growing problem. It’s been happening for years, but survivors have been starting to come forward and share how videos of sex trafficked persons, videos of child sexual abuse, or child pornography, and even nonconsensually-shared pornography—it’s sometimes called revenge porn—was being uploaded to Pornhub.

And there’s a couple problems with the Pornhub system, such as, they allow these unverified videos to be uploaded, there’s no age or consent verification for those videos, not even a silly box that you tick and say that “I’m over 18.” And people can download those videos, and of course re-share and watch them so much.

So this has been causing real trauma to survivors who had moments or maybe years of their life of abuse, but now that’s being monetized by Pornhub and is being watched around the world. So it feels like that abuse is really ongoing.

So, as I said, we met with Mastercard and Visa earlier this year to let them know about this information. They started an internal investigation, but they really wanted to keep it quiet. And then a couple of weeks ago, The New York Times released a fantastic op-ed called “The Children of Pornhub” that just unveiled all of this information about these abusive videos on the website.

After that, Mastercard and Visa, and most recently, Discover credit card, all said that they were going to cut ties with Pornhub, which we think is a really important step forward.

Del Guidice: Well, that is good news. … We’ll be talking more about Nicholas Kristof’s column about the children of Pornhub, but I wanted to ask you, just to backtrack a little bit, for people who are unaware, how rampant is the problem of child pornography on Pornhub?

McNamara: It’s a very serious problem. Unfortunately, we can’t say metrics, we can’t say a percentage of the videos, but we know that it’s a big problem.

As in the aftermath of The New York Times article, Pornhub has now deleted over 10 million videos from their platforms, all of which were unverified. Some say that this is like 80% of their content that they’ve just deleted over the last couple of days because of the growing scrutiny of these problems.

The fact that it’s an unverified video, it means that we don’t know, which probably means that there’s a really real chance that that is nonconsensual material.

Del Guidice: You mentioned your meetings with Mastercard [and] Visa about these issues, do you think that what we’re seeing in recent days with Mastercard and Visa reportedly blocking these payments, do you think that this has anything to do as a result of your work, educating and talking to them about these concerns?

McNamara: Yes. It’s the culmination of a lot of different people’s work. First and foremost, the survivors who’ve been brave enough to be speaking out about this.

Some survivors were quoted in The New York Times article. Also, Rose Kalemba is a survivor whose sexual abuse videos were uploaded. And she had a fantastic article in the BBC earlier this year that had tremendous reach and was really impactful as well.

So survivors have been at the forefront. Our organization has been at the forefront. Certainly, we were the first ones speaking with the credit card companies. And there’s also another organization called Exodus Cry. And they have a petition, a global petition, to shut down Pornhub that has over 2 million signatures right now.

So I would say it’s kind of the culmination of survivors, our organization, Exodus Cry, and so many other advocates too, who are just speaking out about this issue. So it’s all kind of coming together at the same time, which is really exciting. It’s great to see the dominos starting to fall here.

Del Guidice: Pornhub had reportedly said that Visa and Mastercard blocking payments to their site is extremely disappointing. What is your response to their perspective here?

McNamara: I think it’s very important that mainstream corporations not partner with facilitators of sexual exploitation and abuse. And that’s what Pornhub is.

At the end of the day, Pornhub knew that these videos were on there. Many survivors have spoken about how they reached out to Pornhub and explained to them that they were minors when the video was taken, or that it was actually a video of their sexual assault, asking Pornhub to take it down. And the company wouldn’t take it down.

There was a recent case, the GirlsDoPorn case, where about 20 women were sex trafficked into the legal pornography industry. And their sex trafficking videos were on Pornhub.

There was a legal case. I think that one of the traffickers even pled guilty to the fact that he trafficked them into those videos. And Pornhub kept those videos on their website, even after these cases were done. So they’re absolutely a bad actor. And I think mainstream companies should not be partnering with them. I’m glad if Pornhub’s disappointed.

Del Guidice: Haley, you had mentioned this really fantastic, very sad, but well-written and informative New York Times op-ed from Nicholas Kristof, who’s an opinion columnist for The New York Times. And he wrote this heartbreaking column about the children of Pornhub.

I want to talk more about some of the stories that are included in the article. But first off, can you just tell us a little bit about the article and your takeaway from it?

McNamara: Right. It’s a really impactful article. I encourage anyone to go and to read it. It’s great because it lays out what the problem is. And he even mentions in his article the questions that companies like credit card companies are still partnering with the pornography industry. But it basically just lays out the case of several survivors who’ve had their abuse videos uploaded.

And so it’s very impactful. It’s really created a seismic shift in the culture. Because people have been talking about this before. Our organization, survivors, others, have been almost screaming at the top of our lungs trying to get people to care about this issue. But it really took this piece to bring it into the public eye and to make other people feel like they can talk about it. So it’s been really helpful for our movement.

Del Guidice: [Were] there any particular stories that he raised that stuck out to you, or just any other takeaways that you saw as you were looking at this that really illustrate why you do the work that you do?

McNamara: Well, one of the survivors in the piece commented, … I’m butchering it, please go and read it in her words, but that she was trafficked for a period of a couple of years in her life, but that her abuse is now ongoing because it’s been uploaded onto this website. And that’s the same story that we hear from so many survivors.

A lot of survivors from the pornography industry or survivors who’ve had pornography made of them in different exploitation circumstances have a really hard time coming forward and speaking about it.

You don’t hear from them that often because they know that people will go and look up their videos. And so they know that if they speak out, in a way, their exploitation, their abuse will be viewed by even more people. It’s so brave for people to be speaking out about it now. And it’s so important. And it’s leading to lasting change.

The Canadian federal parliament has a committee that is calling MindGeek, which is the parent company of Pornhub, calling them in and requiring them to testify about how in the world they allowed this much abuse to continue on their website. We’re certainly calling for governments to investigate them and we expect and hope criminal charges come forward.

Del Guidice: Well, Haley, we talked about this a little bit ago, about the problem of revenge porn, but what about other similar situations like the ones Kristof raised in his column, such as videos of victims that weren’t released with the consent of these women on Pornhub or places like them, but they’re basically put up there and these individuals are living out this abuse? How big of a problem is this? And what sort of awareness can be raised to stop this practice?

McNamara: It’s a very, very big problem. As the world has gotten more connected to the internet, and especially during COVID, our lives are happening online. And so exploitation is happening online even more so as well.

We see so many ways that this intersects with different issues. Often, young girls will be pressured to send sexually explicit images or videos of themselves. Those might be uploaded to a pornography website, or they might be used as extortion to either abuse them or to even sex traffic them. That is a very common situation.

Or many people who are sex trafficked, the sex buyers, or the traffickers, are taking videos of them during that abuse and either sharing them or uploading them to the internet. There’s so many different ways that this can happen, but it’s unfortunately a very, very common trend. It’s a really huge problem. And it’s so important the people are starting to hear about it more and talk about it more.

I think we need to normalize this as a conversation, that if you’re watching pornography, you don’t know if that person is being abused in that very moment.

If a trafficker can abuse someone and coerce them into a sex trafficking situation, they can coerce them into smiling for the camera, they can coerce them into even signing a contract. That’s happened. And that’s been documented in lawsuits as well. So it’s something that people need to be really aware of, I think.

Del Guidice: Haley, that was actually my next question. And you did kind of hit the nail on the head there. But is there any way, and you basically said there isn’t, but putting aside huge significant moral concerns regarding porn, for someone to look at porn online and be absolutely sure that they’re not viewing an image of someone who’s been exploited and didn’t give their consent?

McNamara: Yeah, you can’t know. I’ve got two things to say to that. One is that this is really relevant to the conversation because Pornhub, through credit cards, stopped processing payments. And that really got Pornhub’s attention.

That’s the reason why it has deleted over 10 million unverified videos from its website. And it also is now saying that it will only have verified videos. So they’re trying to normalize themselves again and say that, “OK, we’re only going to have verified videos.”

But the problem is that Pornhub has, in the past, verified videos of people who have been sex trafficked. Pornhub has, in the past, even verified videos of minors. They even gave an award to a girl who first started posting videos on Pornhub when she was a minor, which is child pornography, it’s child sexual abuse materials.

So we cannot trust them. And you’re right, they should not be able to regulate themselves. So that’s one important thing.

And then the other important thing that I would say is that we do also have to remember that pornography production causes physical and mental trauma to the performers.

This is something that a lot of people don’t talk about, but there’s been research showing that individuals who are used in the process of pornography have worse mental health than the general population. They’re more likely to live in poverty. That’s probably the reason that they’re engaging in that in the first place. There’s some economic coercion there. And that they’re exposed to serious physical harm, even beyond STDs.

So much pornography portrays violence against women. Pornography is not staged. What is happening in that video is actually happening to that person.

I think it’s also just important to remember a lot of the conversation around Pornhub is around the fact that they are literally profiting off of abuse materials. But our organization, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, even argues that the production of pornography in general causes harm to the performers. So I think that’s important for people to understand as well.

Del Guidice: Well, you touched on this in your last answer, Haley, but how big is the reach of Pornhub and other porn sites, even excluding Pornhub, and how does it affect victims when their videos are being hosted on such popular sites?

McNamara: Pornhub is huge. It’s one of the very largest pornography websites in the world. I think in 2019 it had 42 billion, with a “B,” visits to its website. So that’s a pretty impactful website.

But they are owned by MindGeek, which is a corporation that’s based in Montreal, Canada, but they have headquarters all over the world. And MindGeek owns not only Pornhub, but also a number of other pornography websites.

Hopefully your listeners haven’t been researching the pornography industry to the extent that we’ve all had to. But if you look at the structure of the marketplace of pornography, to the average viewer, it would look as if there’s just thousands and thousands of unrelated pornography websites. But actually if you zoom out and look up, there’s only a couple mega corporations that are running all of these different websites. MindGeek being the largest.

And they also … host their own advertisers. They’ve created their own payment processor. So they’ve really built up this ecosystem of companies, all surrounding pornography. And this corporation is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars every year. So it is it’s global. It’s very global.

They’re powerful. They’re upset about all of these changes that have been happening. But I think it’s helpful for people to think about that and realize this isn’t an issue about free speech or self expression. This is about a mega corporation that is facilitating exploitation in order to make money. That’s really what their goal is.

Del Guidice: Earlier this year, Sen. Ben Sasse, who’s chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on oversight, asked U.S Attorney General Bill Barr, who’s now retiring, to hold an investigation into Pornhub and its owner, MindGeek, for their involvement in streaming videos of raped women and children.

What should happen here, Haley? And do you know any updates on where this effort is at?

McNamara: I don’t have any updates, but I know that we have also written in and asked for there to be investigations. We think it’s critical that there are investigations.

If we’re not going to go after some of these online companies who are intentionally facilitating this content, then what’s the point of law enforcement, right? This is such a critical thing for us to start enforcing.

If Pornhub was trading this kind of material through the mail, I think that they would have been caught years ago. But I think law enforcement is just slow. I think they’re starting to catch up, but historically, they’ve been slow to address the online side of these harms. But I think it’s urgent.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection project has said that they, over a couple of months, got 22,000 cases of child sexual abuse materials, or child pornography, on Pornhub. So this is an urgent matter, I think.

And I would just add, Pornhub says that now they’re only going to do the verified content. Of course, we can’t trust them. They’ve already been verifying abuse videos. And also, criminals don’t get let off the hook because they’re promising better behavior. Pornhub had its chance. And it’s very clearly, I think, a company that needs to be held accountable.

Del Guidice: Well, finally, Haley, just going back to Visa and Mastercard and the whole situation with Pornhub, how can people stand up to Pornhub and their aiding and abetting of child porn? How would you encourage people to get involved if they can?

McNamara: Definitely. One thing you can do is you can go to traffickinghub.com. That is the online petition to shut down Pornhub, led by Exodus Cry. So I would encourage you to sign that petition. It’s really impactful.

And then also in February, we are launching our 2021 Dirty Dozen List, which names 12 mainstream companies that are facilitating sexual exploitation and abuse.

So Visa was on the list this last year because of its work with Pornhub. So I suspect, although I cannot confirm, that we will also have some other companies, mainstream companies, that are aiding and abetting the pornography industry in similar ways on the Dirty Dozen List. So you can learn more about that at dirtydozenlist.com.

Del Guidice: Haley, thank you so much for being with us today and for really unpacking a tough issue, but one that needs to be discussed. We appreciate having you.

McNamara: Thanks so much for having me.