While conservatives and libertarians have been busy arguing about the war on porn, Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse has found the one thing we can all agree on: The porn industry should never be able to profit from human trafficking, as it already has.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr, Sasse called for the Justice Department to investigate Pornhub, the 34th most popular website in the United States. Why? Not because the website promotes porn, but because it has benefited from content involving trafficking victims, and it has refused to acknowledge its complicity in human rights abuses.
“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. “In October, police in Florida arrested a man trafficking a fifteen-year-old girl, missing from her family for nearly a year, who had been subjected to horrific abuse that included repeated rape and a forced abortion. In the course of his abuse, her trafficker uploaded more than sixty videos depicting her sexual exploitation to websites including Pornhub.”
This is just one of many instances where traffickers were able to profit from Pornhub and vice versa. And Sasse isn’t the only one who has a problem with the site. Laila Mickelwait, director of abolition at Exodus Cry, started a petition, now at more than 400,000 signatures, to shut Pornhub down. “Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year,” it reads. “Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts and profits from.”
Even PayPal agrees that Pornhub is shady: In November, PayPal ended transactions with Pornhub after discovering it made “certain business payments” without PayPal’s permission.
You don’t have to morally oppose pornography to recognize that Pornhub’s lack of legal oversight is being grotesquely abused. It’s time for the Justice Department to join this war on porn, and, when it comes to protecting women and girls from trafficking, this should be something we can all support.
