Originally Published at The Washington Examiner
By Haley McNamara
How can mainstream credit card companies process payments for an industry that is virtually guaranteed to profit from rape and sex trafficking?
Visa, Mastercard, and Discover partner with the pornography industry. For years, these credit card companies have processed payments for massive pornography websites such as Pornhub, Club Seventeen, Kink, and more (with names too graphic to print). By doing so, they are normalizing and supporting the pornography industry despite its sexually exploitative nature, including harm to performers, sex-trafficking victims, and even large-scale public health.
The reality is that the pornography industry is a sexually exploitative industry. Recently, mainstream pornography websites such as PornHub have even been caught hosting videos of sex-trafficked women and of a child being sexually abused.
Pornhub has claimed that it removes videos shared without all parties’ consent, yet it regularly fails to remove videos of sexual assault, including sex-trafficking videos that it left up on its website for months despite a civil lawsuit having been filed on the matter.
One young woman named Rose has spoken out about how videos of her rape at the age of 14 were uploaded to Pornhub and garnered over 40,000 views. The video titles included “passed out teen” and “teen crying and getting slapped around.”
Rose has stated: “I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.’” But the videos remained live until she resorted to impersonating a lawyer. Since speaking out about this experience, Rose says dozens of women have reached out to her with similar experiences of their assault videos being uploaded to Pornhub and the difficulty of getting them taken down.
It is essentially guaranteed that there are more videos of real-life rape and sex trafficking on Pornhub, considering the fact that the website has no age or ID verification requirement to upload a pornographic video to this site. This makes it a magnet for sex traffickers and abusers to upload content in order to control and manipulate victims further.
