How porn is connected to human trafficking

When it comes to sex trafficking, many people know that it can happen in sex work and escort agencies. But how is porn linked to human trafficking?

Sex trafficking traditionally hides in brothels and hotels, where buyers known as “johns” (people who pay for sex) can purchase time with a trafficked individual to exploit them. But there are other forms of sex trafficking outside of forced prostitution that require no physical interaction.

Human trafficking occurs in each area of the diverse commercial sex industry, and one of the most common places human trafficking occurs is within the pornography industry and explicit live streaming or “camming.”

How are porn and human trafficking connected?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime defines human trafficking as any situation in which “force, coercion, abduction, fraud, deception, abuse of power or vulnerability, or giving payments or benefits to a person in control” are used to exploit another person. If any of these qualifiers are present, it’s human trafficking.

In the pornography industry, human trafficking can take multiple forms. Unfortunately, because of the way porn is produced and distributed, trafficking can also be hard to identify.

What trafficking looks like in the porn industry

Trafficked individuals are often exploited in more than one way. Some traffickers take pornographic photos of victims as a means of control, threatening to shame them by exposing the photos to their families. Traffickers then sell the content by uploading it to porn sites. They may simultaneously exploit the victims through traditional commercial sexual exploitation.

In other cases, survivors are exploited solely for the purpose of producing sexual abuse material that appears like consensual pornography. If a minor is involved in commercial sexual activity, it is automatically classified as human trafficking — without question or exception. This means exploitation through Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), archaically referred to as child pornography, is always classified as sex trafficking.

At The Exodus Road, we take this kind of trafficking very seriously. Many of our cases have involved CSAM, forced camming, and other sexual abuse material masquerading as porn. We’ve even developed a federally funded digital safety training called Influenced to prevent this type of exploitation, translating the curriculum into multiple languages for use across cultures.

How common is human trafficking in the porn industry?

One sobering government statistic cited by Bill Woolf and Brittany Dunn in the book Eradicating Human Trafficking suggests that as much as 80% of all explicit digital content is produced with some kind of force, fraud, or coercion inherent in its production.

About 1 in 4 adults have watched pornography in any given month in the United States (and the U.S., according to Statista, is the primary source of porn-seeking traffic for massive distributors like Pornhub). About 58% of U.S. adults have watched porn in their lifetime. Although exact numbers vary, some estimates suggest that as many as 12% of all online websites are dedicated to porn. And that doesn’t even account for the widespread proliferation of pornography on poorly moderated social media platforms or thinly-veiled explicit entertainment platforms like OnlyFans.

The Exodus Road has documented how high the demand is. In one month in 2026, our website received over 250,000 views from individuals seeking out explicit content. That is just a fraction of people making these searches across the web.

In one study, data aggregated from 400 million web searches revealed that the most popular term related to sexual searches was “youth.” One of the most searched terms on Pornhub for over 10 years was “teen.” In recent years, as public outcry has led to lawsuits and crackdowns, searchers have become more creative with their terms — but they often are using euphemisms to find the same kind of content.

It’s clear that the demand for child sexual abuse content is high. As previously stated, this material always counts as sex trafficking.

The UK-based nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation works globally to identify, remove, and disrupt online child sexual abuse material. Internet Watch Foundation receives and processes data from reporting portals hosted across four continents and 50 nations. During just two months of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the IWF documented over 8 million searches for CSAM. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is the go-to place to file reports of CSAM in the U.S., received a staggering 21.3 million reports in 2025.

In the last several years, Internet Watch Foundation’s research has also revealed a trend in the creation of “self-generated child sexual abuse content.” This is being created through exploitative trends like sextortion.

In 2023, the Internet Watch Foundation said, “Of the 275,652 webpages actioned during 2023, more than nine in 10 (254,071 or 92%) were assessed as containing ‘self-generated’ imagery.”

Even if it seems to be created by the child, this is still human trafficking. When the images are distributed, companies that own porn websites profit from the sexual abuse of these children.

Adults can also be groomed, coerced, or manipulated into producing “self-generated” content. Data behind porn consumption provides a glimpse of how widespread human trafficking is within this industry. However, it is not a complete picture. The pressure for porn actresses and actors to appear consensual makes it difficult to differentiate consent versus coercion, and researchers recognize massive gaps in our knowledge.

If pornography is produced and distributed at the expense of an individual of any age against their will, human trafficking has occurred.

In 2024, Human Rights Watch published a deep dive on how trafficking can occur in the webcamming industry in Colombia.

“On average, the multinational webcam platforms that host the streaming sessions retain between 50 and 65 percent of the income generated by webcam models,” the report reads. “Maria [a 33-year-old survivor] told Human Rights Watch that in addition to her streaming camera, management also installed surveillance cameras in the restrooms, locker room where models change clothes, and in the staircase. ‘They know when you are using the bathroom,’ she said. Maria willingly sought out and consented to work in a webcam studio. She did not consent, however, to some of the performances that studio management coerced her to do.”

Even in the mainstream porn entertainment industry, recruiting and employing actors and actresses can involve deception, threats, and drug use. Porn producers sometimes act as pimps on the side, selling their performers as escorts.

In 2025, GirlsDoPorn owner Michael Pratt was sentenced to 27 years in prison after trafficking hundreds of girls through his supposedly consensual pornography website. Survivors were awarded $13 million in damages due to “alleged intentional misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, misappropriation of name and likeness, and deceptive business practices, among other civil grounds.”

Many of those charges constitute trafficking.

Justice was only served in this case because of the courage of countless survivors who spoke up, survivors who are still healing from the trauma they experienced.

These women are survivors of human trafficking. This is just one known example of what is almost certainly thousands of undocumented cases of trafficking in the commercial porn industry.

A.I. deepfake pornography has opened new avenues to traffickers

The arrival of A.I. has dramatically impacted how traffickers operate. Now, traffickers do not even need to have access to a person to create and profit from explicit content of them. All they have to do is have enough photos to generate deepfake pornography, which they can then sell in infinite variations.

The U.N. estimates that of all deepfake content online, 98% is sexually explicit. Although much of this content is of adult women, it is an increasing problem in schools with children who have access to nudify apps.

This is a legislative gray area where policy has not globally caught up to protect those who are exploited in this way. Legal precedents are still being set to determine how to label and prosecute deepfake creation and sale. In the U.S., the Take It Down Act has resulted in the first several arrests for this behavior — thanks to the tireless advocacy of survivors, including high-profile celebrities like Paris Hilton.

Can porn on free websites include trafficking?

According to Internet Watch Foundation’s 2019 research, 95 percent of the nearly 133,000 URLs assessed were hosted on platforms where it is free to create an account and upload porn.

Free accounts do not mean that no one is profiting. Approximately “90 percent of free porn websites and nearly 100 percent of pay porn websites buy their material” from an outside source. Even if producers upload exploitative content of individuals for free, website owners still profit from the traffic generated, which then could be considered trafficking.

This is where the line between legal pornography and human trafficking becomes blurry. Several of the world’s most popular porn sites have been found to host illegal content alongside legal content.

You can see an example of this in Traffickinghub’s campaign against Pornhub. Pornhub is the largest porn website in the world, and the 25th most-visited website of any kind globally as of July 2026. Responding to the extensive library of illegal material on the site, thousands of voices have advocated for the website to be shut down.

Types of content Pornhub profits from include cases of human trafficking, with over 100 confirmed cases displaying child sexual abuse (according to an Internet Watch Foundation investigation). With approximately 4.14 billion visits every single month, Pornhub profits millions each year from illegal and abusive content.

Porn increases rates of human trafficking

Globally, porn is a $70-$100 billion industry. In 2017, the International Association of Internet Hotlines (INHOPE) “traced online child sexual abuse material to over 70 countries,” and more than 80 countries by 2025. With the majority of porn accessible online, pornography featuring an overseas trafficking survivor is just a search away.

Though human trafficking might look slightly different in the porn industry than in the prostitution industry, data makes it clear that it is happening.

The scale of human trafficking can seem daunting, but at The Exodus Road, we know that every investigation and every arrest matters. We keep showing up for the sake of the many survivors enduring abuse who deserve freedom.

For more than 15 years, The Exodus Road has become an expert human trafficking nonprofit helping police find and free survivors of human trafficking, educate communities to protect the vulnerable, and support survivors as they walk into freedom.

By donating today, you can partner with us to help find and free people around the world who are trapped in human trafficking — including through digital abuse.