From top to bottom, the pornography industry is built on, fueled by, and perpetuates the demand for videos featuring women who never consented to their distribution — or even to being filmed. That’s according to a report titled “Not a Fantasy: How the Pornography Industry Exploits Image-Based Sexual Abuse in Real Life,” which was released Tuesday by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
“The people depicted in these images are real people who have been degraded, abused, and exploited, oftentimes without their consent,” said Hanniya Qureshi of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation on Tuesday.
The pornography industry, explained Lisa Thompson, the lead researcher on the report, socializes people into viewing this content and believing that it’s okay. A large proportion of these companies’ videos, as well as the tags suggested to users, she explained, are premised on the idea that the filming was nonconsensual.
This includes videos showing gynecological facilities and public restrooms and tags like “real amateur” and “hidden camera,” according to the report. In fact, one out of eight videos on popular pornography sites in a six-month period from 2017–2018 “described activities that constitute sexual violence.”
Women who are victims of image-based sexual abuse, the report documents, suffer greatly. “I couldn’t physically, mentally, or emotionally handle my job because this is a continuous, retraumatizing event,” said Katelynn Spencer. Other women described their experience as “‘life-ruining,’ ‘hell on earth,’ and ‘a nightmare … which destroyed everything.’” Another said “[it] transcends [everything], it impacts you emotionally, physiologically, professionally, in dating and relationships.”
According to the report, platforms like Pornhub, XVideos, XNXX, and xHamster actively “fetishize” image-based sexual abuse, even with consensual videos, by promoting content with exploitive themes. Tags such as “stolen,” “voyeur,” “upskirt,” “hidden camera,” and “leaked” are used to market such videos. This normalizes abuse and drives demand for nonconsensual material.
“[T]he image-based sexual abuse themes and materials these sites traffic socialize millions, if not billions, of their users to view these forms of sexual abuse as ‘normal,’” explains the report.
Thompson cited the experience of Jewell Baraka, who was trafficked at age 14 and shown on an adult pornographic site. Baraka recounted in the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s event on Tuesday how “no” during her abuse meant “go” to her abusers. “The whole idea here is the ‘no,’” said Thompson. “The violation that people did not consent to this is the very point of what makes this material desirable,” she explained.
The pornography industry thus fuels, on a massive scale, an economic drive for the production of nonconsensual videos and the selling of videos without women’s permission. Indeed, the pornography industry is “dependent upon the proliferation of free, user-generated material,” according to the report. And the profit drive for these videos is huge. According to the report, the value of XVideos is $4.3 billion, the value of Pornhub is $4.2 billion, the value of xHamster is $3.3 billion, and the value of XNXX is $2.8 billion.
Content moderation at pornographic websites is deliberately lax, enabling the distribution of — and profit from — nonconsensual and abusive content. Mike Farley, a employee for Pornhub’s parent company, said during an undercover investigation in 2023: “As a business we’re monetizing content that we don’t know where this comes from, we don’t know who’s on that video.” The National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s report cites that, in 2020, 706,425 MindGeek videos flagged as containing potentially abusive and exploitative content had not been reviewed, and 95 percent of videos that had received more than 15 flags from registered users had been approved by moderators.
“These abuses are not isolated incidents,” summarized Qureshi. “They are systemic, they are widespread, and they are intentionally exploited by the pornography industry for their financial gain.”
