A petition on Change.org to shut down the pornography website Pornhub.com has garnered over 1 million signatures in a little over 4 months. The petition was started to shut down the mega site over the facilitation of child trafficking and rape.
It was started by Laila Mickelwait, the director of abolition for Exodus Cry, an anti-trafficking organization.
Mickelwait wrote an op-ed in The Washington Examiner in February in which she described several of Pornhub’s offenses.
“In the last few months, there have been several shocking cases of sex trafficking and child rape films that were hosted on Pornhub. A 15-year-old girl who had been missing for a year was finally found after her mother was tipped off that her daughter was being featured in videos on the site — 58 such videos of her rape and sexual abuse were discovered on Pornhub,” Mickelwait wrote.
“Also in recent news was the case of 22 women who were deceived and coerced by Michael Pratt, owner of GirlsDoPorn, into performing sex acts on film that were subsequently uploaded to Pornhub. These women sued GirlsDoPorn and won a $12.7 million lawsuit against the company,” she added.
Mickelwait cites the fact that Pornhub takes no steps to verify girls in the videos uploaded by users to the site are not children being trafficked and victims. This is done, she said, in the interest of profits.
“Pornhub is generating millions in advertising and membership revenue with 42 billion visits and 6 million videos uploaded per year. Yet it has no system in place to verify reliably the age or consent of those featured in the pornographic content it hosts,” she wrote.