We are excited to share the next installment of our 2019 Student Blog Series! The student blog series highlights original pieces authored by first-year law students at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Read on for Kendal Hutching’s contribution to the Student Blog Series, and check back soon for additional installments of our series.
The digital era made it possible to stream pornographic materials online, from anywhere at any time. Immediate and ubiquitous access to porn exacerbates the already exploding demand for commercial sex online. The amateur porn industry has taken advantage of the ever-increasing demand and user-friendly supply streams ad target and exploits young women all around the United States. The average age of a woman entering the porn industry is just 22 years old, meaning victims enter the industry at young age with the skewed dreams of notoriety and instead leave broken, abused and ashamed.
The victims fall prey through the power struggle of an industry ran by men twice their age, who exploit the vulnerable nature of young women and the high turn around rate of the industry. Women involved in amateur porn have very little control over what sexual acts they will be preforming and are often not told until the cameras are rolling. These women feel inferior to the actors, agents, producers and directors creating a “culture of victimization.”
After all, if they won’t do what is asked, someone else will. The average lifespan of an exploited victim’s time in this industry is merely three to four months, showing a large turnover rate. During this short time frame, industry production and broadcasting platforms make hundreds of videos of these women. Often, a career in the porn industry often ends in two ways: women became too old to be deemed desirable to consumers and cannot receive bookings or the system breaks them down; physically or mentally. Around the three to four-month mark, these young women are required to do the most grotesque “genre”: forced/abuse porn.
Abuse porn features victims being subjected to severe trauma and degradation by being bound, gagged, forcibly penetrated, and physically and verbal abused on camera. For example, a subcategory of this is facial abuse where men force the victim to perform oral copulation until the victim becomes physically ill and vomits. Many are unable to be subjected to such abuse and inevitably drop out of the industry.
These young women are volunteering for some of the most traumatic and abusive experiences a person could possibly have though some wonder why they leave the system broken, traumatized, and often adopt unhealthy copping habits in the forms of drugs and alcohol. More terrifying is that abuse porn websites get more views than popular websites like CNN, Disney and CBS. With increased accessibility to the internet, the demand for commercial sex is rising, leaving a trail of abused and discarded victims behind it. Female adult film performers have significantly worse mental health than that who have never entered the field, and some even develop post-traumatic stress disorder from the abuse.
Sadly, most people are not even aware of the exploitative nature of the amateur porn industry. The United Nations defines human trafficking in Article 3, paragraph (a) of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons as the “recruitment. . . by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of fraud, of deception, the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving and receiving payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person for the purpose of exploitation.” Under this definition, pornography of this nature qualifies as human trafficking.[1]
To effectively combat this kind of abuse we must make society aware of the exploitation that is occurring in the amateur porn industry, not to mention the adult entertainment industry overall. It is also important to offer resources to women who come out of the industry abuse, broken and addicted. We must shift the stigma away from amateur porn being a “dirty, immoral” industry, but instead shed light on the fact that there are people who demand this kind of pornographic material- every single day, and at any given time.
[1] According to the Nation Center on Sexual Exploitation, pornography is a form of sexual exploitation in which further consumption only fuels the demand for sexual exploitation. Further, porn likely “. . . meets the legal definition of trafficking to the extent that the pornographer recruits, entices, or obtains the people depicted in pornography for the purpose of photographing commercial sex acts.”
Kendal Hutchings is a first year student at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Kendal is originally from Flagstaff, Arizona, but now resides in central New Jersey. Kendal attended California Baptist University as a student athlete and now holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in Criminal Justice and a Bachelor’s of Sciences in Political Science, with an emphasis on law. Upon graduation, Kendal hopes to use her skills to help make a difference in the lives of other
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or Villanova University.