Despite this past Human Trafficking Awareness Month, many people don’t realize the connections between trafficking and a product that a large percentage of our population consumes regularly: pornography. Sex trafficking is defined as, “commercial sex acts induced by force, fraud, or coercion,” describing a disturbing amount of currently produced pornography.

     Some of this porn originates directly from traffickers eager to capitalize on the lucrative industry. A study by Rescue:Freedom, an anti-trafficking NGO, reported that, “49% of exploited women said that pornography was made of them while they were being sold for sex.” This black-market porn doesn’t remain separate from mainstream distribution, either.

     In 2011, a couple from Missouri was charged with “beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocution, drowning, mutilating, and choking” a mentally handicapped girl into producing pornography: One of her photos ended up proudly plastered across the cover of a popular porn magazine. Countless horror stories also exist of young women who responded to modelling advertisements, only to be drugged and raped on tape, or threatened into performing a porn shoot, the resulting films sold to stores and websites across the nation.

     While one might assume the narrative would be different for those who knowingly signed up to produce adult films, the accounts of abuse continue even on the film set. A stunned porn-star, finding herself battered and choked by her co-star during her first-ever shoot, turning to beg the producer to stop, only to discover him watching her abuse with pleasure, her on-set rape later uploaded for popular consumption.

     With an increasing demand for hardcore pornography, producers are driven to create extreme videos in order to compete, abusing numerous individuals in the process, including some of the most popular “Hall of Fame” performers. With depression, addiction, and blackmail trapping stars into the industry and the prospect of blacklisting if they spoke out, few stories will ever be heard from those currently undergoing awful violations for others’ sexual gratification. Yet once they emerge, so do the tales of shoots filmed with performers crying from pain, near-fainting, and even vomiting.

     Pornography isn’t an industry that provides innocent entertainment or empowers its performers; rather, it runs on violent and emotional manipulation. The woman onscreen may be a willing actor or a victim of coercion, with no way to differentiate. What is certain is that every view fuels the demand driving traffickers and directors to perform their daily exploitations: Will you be a contributor?