Legal Concerns About Searching ‘Girls Do Porn’ on Pornhub Expert Q&A

Choose a Girl

Donald Findlater, the director of the Stop It Now helpline, says that while the numbers are “relatively modest” compared to the overall number of warnings displayed, they are still seen as a “big success” as it’s a sign that people may want to get help. “If people have been doing something dodgy on a site, clicking through is quite a bold step to make,” Findlater says. She does not annotate the interviews, and one of her skills as an interviewer is that she does not moralize at her subjects and avoids steering their answers. But Porn has the quality of a good novel, in that while reading it you often notice small details or perspectives which make you think about the world, or your own life, differently, without having a lesson overtly spelled out to you.

Victims of GirlsDoPorn’s Sex Trafficking Operation Now Own Their Videos

This is particularly true for LGBTQ+ teens, who may not be provided as much information in sexual education classes. Some teens are sexting, and while this is usually consensual, girls are more likely to report that they were pressured into sending images of themself, and similarly, boys were more likely to respond that they would ask for sexual pictures from a partner. 73% of teens are exposed to porn by the time they are 17, with over half of teens reporting the first time they saw porn online was before they were 13. LGBTQ+ teens and cisgender boys were most likely to report viewing porn on purpose, but often report using it in ways that explore their sexuality – for LGBTQ+ teens in particular, using porn may be a way teens feel safe exploring their preferences for a partner when they are uncomfortable talking about it to peers or adults. For example, Snapchat became very popular social network for “sexting” as the most usual way of sharing sexually explicit materials (Goodwin et al., 2015; Handyside and Ringrose, 2017; Park et al., 2016). Several of Pratt’s business partners and employees have pleaded guilty to sex crime charges.

Video Messages

The only thing that knowing she’s “supposed to” seems to have done is make her disappointed in herself. Confessions like these throughout Porn reinforce the strength of Barton’s chosen format of intimate, private conversations. Sexting is not uncommon among even young teens; keep in mind that this behavior may seem commonplace and safe to your teen. Support your teen in setting a regular and consistent bedtime and provide a space away from their bedroom where they can set all devices overnight. Provide them with an alarm clock so they don’t have a need to keep their phone in their room.

Some interviews are quite similar in their scope and perspective, and the type of person interviewed is reflective of Barton’s milieu (academics and people who have lived in Japan and work in teaching or translation are very well represented). But I found that, even when certain conversations covered similar ground, the overlap was actually instructive. Meanwhile in a dorm room at Hudson University, two college freshman, Daniel and Matt, watch a pornography video called “18 with a Bang.” They discover that the girl in the video is Evie and decide to invite her to a party. Later that night when Evie arrives to the party, she is lured into the bathroom by Matt and Daniel where they begin to sexually assault her. Because of this process, it is possible that sensitized sexual arousal to Internet pornography may cause that sexual experience with a real partner may no longer trigger the sufficient dopamine release to produce and sustain sexual arousal and erection (Melis and Argiolas, 2011; Prause and Pfaus, 2015; Schultz, 1998).

The GirlsDoPorn operators knew this, and they wagered the Does’ shame over appearing in porn would likely ensure these victims would not take the site’s management to task for this fraud. In October, prosecutors indicted former GirlsDoPorn employee Douglas “James” Wiederhold on five counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and one count of conspiracy to commit the same alleged crime. Though the indictment offers few details about his alleged conduct, related civil cases have revealed that Wiederhold created a GirlsDoPorn-style “mom” porn site for women over 30 years old. Pratt is accused of working with four people − Matthew Wolfe, Ruben Garcia, Valorie Moser, and Theodore Gyi − to “recruit young adult women to engage in commercial sex acts by fraud and coercion,” according to court documents. During hearings today and on January 22, 2024, approximately 30 survivors asked a federal judge to impose a significant sentence, describing how the actions of Wolfe and his co-defendants destroyed their lives. Survivors, many of them college students at the time, described answering what they thought were legitimate modeling ads and flying to San Diego for paid modeling gigs, only to be forced to perform sexual acts on camera.

• Since then, Pornhub has enacted a detailed system of safeguards to keep illegal and abusive content off the site.
• Later that night when Evie arrives to the party, she is lured into the bathroom by Matt and Daniel where they begin to sexually assault her.
• The deepfake abuse website, DeBarber says, doesn’t take anything down when requests are made to it, and it is hosted by a company registered in the Seychelles.
• The judge in that case found in favor of the women and handed down a $12.7 million judgment against Pratt, Wolfe, adult performer Ruben Andre Garcia and various business interests connected to Pratt.
• Investigators said that victims were forced into performing nonconsensual sexual acts, and when they wanted their videos removed from the websites, Pratt and his partners threatened and intimidated them.

Beyond being simply a book about porn, Porn often feels like a frank account of some of the stranger, less-discussed elements of what it means to be a human in the internet age. It reminded me most of Nell Dunn’s brilliant Talking to Women, which consists of the transcripts of conversations conducted between Dunn, a playwright and novelist living in London, and each of nine of her female friends in 1964. In these conversations, mostly conducted over a bottle of wine, Dunn and her friends, a mixture of artists, writers, and factory workers from varying class backgrounds, discuss their lives as women living through a time of major societal change. Reading Porn is a reminder that, in the internet age, we are living through a major societal change too. During the teen years, talk with your teen about expectations for digital management and help them to create habits around putting away their phone before bed, designing schedules for exercise and other offline time, and identifying focus settings for schoolwork to avoid multitasking with media.

Ask before you post about your teen online; no matter how proud you are of them, they have a right to control how their image and information is shared online, even by their parents. Further research indicates that the repeated exposure to these artificial sexually arousing stimuli disturbs normal sensory signal processing at the medial preoptic area, which is the hub of the telodiencephalic reproductive complex (Kim et al., 2013). This atypical processing of sexually arousing stimuli also negatively affects neural networks of the mesolimbic reward center, which is usually involved in mechanisms of addiction (Roxo et al., 2011). Several neuroimaging data also suggest that repeated viewing of sexually arousing images (related to pornography exposure) has in its certain features similar arousal effects in the medial preoptic area as viewing of a real sexual partner (Hilton and Watts, 2011; Voon et al., 2014). The typical difference between “relational” sexual experiences and “unrelational” pornography stimuli is in addition repeated and frequent novelty of these pornography stimuli.

Mickelwait said that she has reported many hundreds of videos to law enforcement and anti-trafficking watchdogs. Business Insider has found lawsuits on behalf of nearly 300 plaintiffs who allege that back before the 2020 purge, videos of their abuse were uploaded to Pornhub without their consent and remained on the site for weeks or months after they were flagged. An investigation in the Sunday Times of London revealed illegal videos on the site involving children as young as three. “No platform on the internet has taken the significant steps we have to protect the safety and security of our community,” said Sarah Bain, a spokeswoman for Ethical Capital Partners, a Canadian private equity firm that owns the Pornhub network of adult-content sites. Pornhub, launched in 2007 and based in Montreal, lets users upload amateur and professional porn videos in much the same way users upload to YouTube. GirlsDoPorn video clips remain readily available from other pornographic video sites.

“Laila Mickelwait is a superstar advocate and activist who has single-handedly led the charge against Pornhub and its facilitation and monetization of child sex trafficking,” he tweeted last week. Nearly two dozen videos uploaded to Pornhub showed a 12-year-old Alabama boy being repeatedly drugged and raped. The rapist, Rocky Shay Franklin, is now serving a 40-year prison term for sexual exploitation. “Performers” remain unverified in many thousands of pre-2024 videos, including those that pop up from search terms involving teens and violence, Mickelwait told Business Insider.

According to the ICD-10, “excessive consumption of pornography” is diagnostically close to “excessive sexual urge” also denoted as hypersexuality (F52.7) representing enhanced but “a nondeviant” manifestations of sexual behavior. Papadopoulos (2010) also suggests that pornography has a profound impact, particularly on girls and young women by creating a culture of sexualization and body dissatisfaction. This finding is in agreement with increasing numbers of the plastic surgeries among young females focused on breast operations and labiaplasty (Crouch et al., 2011), and a similar trend was observed also in men regarding penis surgery (Marra et al., 2020). GirlsDoPorn and GirlsDoToys were sex trafficking operations whose leaders admitted that, from 2013 to 2019, they convinced victims to make adult videos by lying that their imagery would only be sold to private collectors abroad and not posted online.