One American woman is trying to bring down Pornhub (but her fight isn't against porn)
Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition to shut down Pornhub, and more join every day. Laila Mickelwait, who started it, says her fight is not about politics or ideology, it’s about stopping rape and child abuse.
Since the website’s inception in 2007, Pornhub is one of the most accessed pornography websites around the globe, and the number ten ranked website in the world, according to SimilarWeb.com. It’s the flagship website of MindGeek, a web empire that essentially holds the monopoly on internet porn.
Given Pornhub’s popularity and the nature of its content, controversy was inevitable. However, the most recent petition to bring the site down doesn’t invoke religious feelings, decency or porn addiction. It claims Pornhub may have aided in human trafficking.
Enter Laila Mickelwait, director of Abolition for Exodus Cry, and president and founder of New Reality International. Both are Christian organizations, with Exodus Cry focusing on battling back against sexual exploitation and trafficking. Laila has been fighting sex trafficking for over a decade.
I have had a passion to combat sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation since before it was popular to do so… because the exploitation of the most vulnerable in our society is something that needs our full attention, it needs our time and our resources.
Laila’s background includes a master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from the Annenberg School of Communications and the Dornsife School of International Relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She’s also been part of The Millenium Project think tank, and her research and writing was featured in the annual “State of the Future”report. According to her website, she’s advocated for legislative reform at the UN and several nations in regards to the fight she says she’s so passionate about. She recently took the time to talk to me about her uphill battle against Pornhub.
Why resist the porn monolith?
Calls against pornography are far from uncommon, coming mostly from various conservative personalities and ranging in the severity of proposed measures. Recent examples include Daily Wire personalities Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh advocating increased regulation and censorship respectively. But Laila doesn’t demand the abolition of porn as a whole, and her quest against Pornhub isn’t based in ideology; her petition calls out real and sinister crimes: rape and human trafficking.
Pornhub has recently had several brushes with some disturbing crimes, including when a Florida man kidnapped a woman and uploaded fifty-eight pornographic videos of her. She was also forced to have an abortion by her kidnapper. Another egregious instance was reported on by the BBC, where a woman was raped at 14 and then the video of it ended up on Pornhub.
The most notorious case, the one that brought the wrath of even the liberal media outlets down on Pornhub, was with Girls Do Porn, where over one hundred women victimized by that company was the final straw for Pornhub to end their “official partnership” with them. The owners of Girls Do Porn have been arrested and charged with counts of sex trafficking, but one is a fugitive at large.
“I knew this was happening but things came to a head when Pornhub – the largest and most popular purveyor of internet porn in the world – hosted and profited off of the rape and trafficking of a 15-year-old girl who was abused in 58 videos on their site,” Laila said of the Florida case, adding:“Pornhub even admitted to ‘verifying’ the child on its official Twitter account, however, after realizing, they admitted being complicit, they deleted the Tweets.”
Beyond allegedly scrubbing the tweets, Pornhub responded with a statement saying: “Pornhub is actively working to put in place state-of-the-art, comprehensive safeguards on its platform to combat this material.”They reference software such as Microsoft’s PhotoDNA system, as well as fingerprinting software Vobile. They further state that: “Pornhub will continue to work with law enforcement efforts and child protection non-profits in the goal of eliminating any and all illegal content across the internet.”
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