In the spring of 2004, during the American occupation of Iraq, the world was shocked to learn that US soldiers were abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of leaked photos showed Iraqi prisoners being made to crawl on the floor wearing leashes, wear panties on their heads, masturbate for the camera, touch other men’s naked bodies, and even more degrading behaviors that we are not comfortable mentioning here. What horrified the public was not only the human rights violations themselves, but the fact that the soldiers recorded the abuse with obvious glee. In many of the photos, soldiers grinned and flashed a “thumbs up” to the camera as they stood over their victims. After an investigation, several soldiers were dishonorably discharged from the military and others served time in prison for what they had done at Abu Ghraib. [2]

That same year, pornographers video-recorded and photographed thousands of women enduring nearly identical treatment and worse. Those images were published on the internet and viewed by millions of porn consumers. There was no public outcry.

Comparing porn to what happened in Abu Ghraib will ruffle some people’s feathers. A knee-jerk reaction is to say, “Those are totally different! In porn, women give their consent!”

But do they? Do we know for sure that anyone in any porn content gave their consent? Defenders of pornography make this argument all the time, that no matter how a woman is treated in porn, it’s okay because she gave her consent. [3] But what if she didn’t? What if she really didn’t want to be painfully dominated, humiliated, and sexually used for the world to see? The truth is, there’s often much more going on than what you see on the screen. That is, perhaps, the porn industry’s biggest, darkest secret: it’s not all consensual.

There is a tendency to believe that “human trafficking” refers to a Third World problem: forced prostitution or child pornography rings in some far-off, developing country. The truth is, sex trafficking is officially defined as a “modern-day form of slavery in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is under the age of 18 years.” [4] That means any instance in which the individual on screen was forced, tricked, or pressured. By that definition, human trafficking is everywhere. [5] (See How Porn Fuels Sex Trafficking.)

The examples are chilling. In 2011, two Miami men were found guilty of spending five years luring women into a human trafficking trap. [6] They would advertise modeling roles, then when women came to try out, they would drug them, kidnap them, rape them, videotape the violence, and sell it to porn stores and businesses across the country.

That same year a couple in Missouri was charged with forcing a mentally handicapped girl to produce porn for them by beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocution, drowning, mutilating, and choking her until she agreed. One of the photos they forced her to make ended up on the front cover of a porn publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group. [7]

So sure, you could say the handicapped girl “agreed” to participate. You could argue that the women voluntarily responded to an ad. But do you really think those victims gave their consent? We all know that’s not real consent, that’s coercion.

In porn, the question of consent can be tricky (and the growing phenomenon of amateur porn makes it even trickier). For example, if one of the participants doesn’t know there’s a camera running, then the porn is not consensual, even if the sex is. Right? What if a person consented to be filmed, but not to have the film shown to anyone else? What if someone manipulated their partner into being filmed in the first place, like making him or her worry that they’d blackmail them if they didn’t cooperate? Or what if a person agreed to have sex, but in the middle, their partner suddenly started doing something that the person who initially gave consent didn’t expect? Did he or she still give consent?

The point is, when you consume porn, there’s no way to know what kind of “consent” the actors have given. You can’t assume, just because someone appears in a porn video, that they knew beforehand exactly what would happen or that they had a real choice or the ability to stop what was being done.

“I’ve never received a beating like that before in my life,” said Alexandra Read after being whipped and caned for 35 minutes. “I have permanent scars up and down the backs of my thighs. It was all things that I had consented to, but I didn’t know quite the brutality of what was about to happen to me until I was in it.” [8]

Did you catch what Alexandra said there? “It was all things that I had consented to.” That’s the problem with treating consent like it’s “all-or-nothing.” She consented to do X. She didn’t consent to do X, Y, and Z².

We’re not claiming that all porn is non-consensual. We’re just pointing out that some of it is and some of it isn’t, and when you watch it there’s no way to know which is which.

So, would you buy from a company if you knew that some, but not all, of their products were made with child labor? Would you support a store that abused some, but not all, of their employees?

How can it be ethical to say that “porn is okay because participants give their consent,” when we know for a fact that some—probably much more than you think—do not?