Fight to shut porn site
Epstein survivor’s bid to end violent videos
JEFFREY Epstein survivor Victoria Giuffre has joined the fight to shut down Pornhub for its alleged role in fuelling sex trafficking.
Shortly before the arrest of alleged Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell last week, Ms Giuffre, who now lives in Cairns, tweeted her support for a petition to close the video sharing site.
“Shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for aiding trafficking,” Ms Giufre tweeted.
The campaign to hold Pornhub to account for allegedly profiting from rape and sexual trafficking has gathered momentum during the pandemic – in one week a video by campaigners traffickinghub.com has racked up more than 15 million views on Instagram, more than 83,000 views on YouTube and more than 366,000 views on Facebook.
The correlation between pornography and domestic violence has been researched for nearly a decade. One Far
Northern woman, Rose, said her abusive partner had a long standing addiction to porn.
“He was always watching it on his phone,” Rose said.
“Every time I confronted him, he beat me up.”
She said there was a “definite” link between her husband’s porn addiction and the violence she was subjected to.
During the pandemic, Pornhub had offered its premium service for free, marketing the offer as a public service to “help flatten the curve.”
In a statement made in March this year, Pornhub owners Mindgeek stated that the site had a “steadfast commitment to eradicating and fighting non-consensual content and under age material.”
But traffickinghub.com has posted increasing numbers of stories from women who allege their rapes had been uploaded to the site and marketed as fantasy videos.
In February the BBC reported the case of a 14-year-old girl who was raped by two men and discovered the crime had been uploaded to Pornhub in 2009. After six months of emailing Mindgeek she succeeded in having the videos removed after posing as a lawyer and threatening legal action.
The effects have also been felt in the Far North, with the Youth and Sexual Violence and Abuse Steering Committee in 2017 linking sexual violence in Queensland to the consumption of pornography.
“Studies have shown that viewing violent pornography, which is now increasingly accessible, including to children due to advances in technology, can have negative effects on the thoughts, attitudes and behaviours of people who view it,” the committee found.
A US study archived in the National Library of Medicine examined popular pornographic videos for depictions of violence.
“Of 304 scenes analysed, 88.2 per cent contained physical aggression, while 48.7 per cent contained verbal aggression,” the authors found. Mindgeek has been asked for comment.