The CEO and COO at MindGeek—Pornhub’s parent company—stepped down after more than ten years after The New Yorker released a report detailing the ways it has failed to moderate content, specifically addressing videos featuring underage, non-consensual sexual content.

The article detailed a string of disquieting reports and class action lawsuits against Pornhub and MindGeek.

This is not the first time Pornhub has been criticized for hosting videos of underage children, victims of sexual assault, and non-consenting adults, regardless of having a policy meant to protect against this.

In a statement from Donna Rice Hughes, President and CEO of Enough is Enough, a national non-profit organization that strives to make the Internet safer for children since 1994, there is a sense of urgency coming off of the heels of the reported layoffs to renew these urgings to aggressively enforce and fund all existing laws designed to prevent the online exploitation of children, including obscenity laws, which have gone unenforced for nearly two decades.

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“With eyes wide open, online pornographers, like Pornhub, have been knowingly breaking U.S. obscenity, child pornography, and sex trafficking laws for years with impunity,” said Donna Rice Hughes, President and CEO of Enough Is Enough.

“Any child with unrestricted internet access can view graphic online pornography, most of which is prosecutable under existing obscenity laws, and is NOT protected under the First Amendment. It is illegal to produce and distribute. Yesterday’s black-market pornography is now today’s mainstream porn, depicting horrific scenes like teen rape, incest, teens, group sex, torture, strangulation, bestiality, waterboarding, and eroticized racism,” said Hughes.

“While this extreme content would be nauseating to decent adults, children have been fed a steady diet of illegal porn due to the ‘anything goes’ policy of DOJ, who have turned a blind eye to these multi-billion dollar criminal enterprises like MindGeek, headquartered in Luxembourg, but has offices in the U.S. If this continues, we will rally our NGO coalitions to call on Congress for DOJ oversight hearings for their failure to uphold the rule of law.”

According to research, 58% of children that consume this pornography are under the age of fourteen years old. Studies prove that early exposure to pornography leads to an increased risk of viewers committing sexual offenses.

John Hopkins reports the average “first perpetration of sexual violence” between fifteen and sixteen years old, strongly associated with their exposure to violent pornography.

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