A woman from California reportedly leads the charge to end porn and sex trafficking to stop child abuse and rape.
RT reported that Laila Mickelwait, director of abolition for Exodus Cry, has led the petition to shut down MindGeek's Pornhub to stop human trafficking. In its website, Exodus Cry describes itself as a faith-based organization that "first began as a prayer meeting" and models its work "on the character of Jesus."
Mickelwait, who is also the founder of the Christian organization New Reality International and the #TraffickingHub movement, said she made the petition not for ideology or politics but to fight sexual exploitation, which she has been fighting for more than 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," Mickelwait told RT in an interview.
"Pornhub is complicit in the sex trafficking and rape of women and children. It's time for Pornhub to be shut down and it's executives held accountable," she said in Twitter in June 2020.
Later in December 2020, the New York Times exposed PornHub as being "infested" with illegal child sex abuse, causing an investigation to be done. The porn site quickly responded by removing "almost 80 percent of its content," Mickelwait said. But the fight doesn't end there.
Mickelwait is joined by anti-trafficking groups led by the National Center On Sexual Exploitation who target PornHub's shutdown after XTube, another porn site my MindGeek, announced its closure early this month.
MindGeek is said to be under a series of investigations led by the Canadian Parliament after uploading actual footages of sexual violence in its pornographic sites. The footages were said to be uploaded by rapists and pedophiles themselves and MindGeek earns from the videos that are viewed by its online community members based on subscription.
RT highlighted that Pornhub features "disturbing crimes," such as the case of a man from Florida who uploaded 58 pornographic videos of himself having sex with a teenage girl, who reportedly admitted having a forced abortion afterwards. The man was already arrested for several charges that included "lewd battery on a victim aged between 12 and 16."
"It is so bad that it is almost unbelievable that a company this big could be so reckless and have such a disregard for the safety of women and children," Mickelwait stressed. "This is a scandal beyond comprehension that anyone can upload sex acts to the largest porn website in the world and no one has any idea if the women in the videos consented or if the young looking girls are actually children."
Mickelwait first called for Pornhub to be shut down in an article for the Washington Examiner followed by the petition she put up at Change.org and traffickinghub.com. Mickelwait disclosed that she tried creating an account in Pornhub and discovered their verification process to be so lax that anyone can easily create an account and pretend to be of any age without being required to submit a government-issued ID or "any proof of consent."
RT pointed out that Mickelwait is aware of "how tough of a fight she was in" considering Pornhub is "a mainstream name" despite being backed by "massive support for her petition" since the end game would really "require a cultural change in the modern day" where pornography has become so "readily available."
Nevertheless, it appears that there is a growing outrage against the exploitation and abuse being done to women, as indicated in the response of more than 2 million people who have signed Mickelwait's petition to shut MindGeek down.
Mickelwait recently announced in Twitter that the Canadian investigation being done on Pornhub is being faced with the controversy of a coverup in so far as "information related to the case" being barred from access "for six years."
Last summer this video exposing Pornhub got 33 million views across all social media. It is still being shared daily. #Traffickinghub pic.twitter.com/AgX3vQSZRo
— Laila Mickelwait (@LailaMickelwait) July 11, 2021