How sex traffickers coax girls into porn
Tourists walk along Diani Beach in Kwale County. The Coast region stands out as the core of sex tourism in the country, aided by the vibrant travel and tourism activities.
What you need to know:
- The industry, with its numerous shady dealings, views Africa as an unexploited market.
- The firms send agents, who are armed with tourist visas and empty promises, to manipulate, repress and objectify women for profit.
Mia Khalifa was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1993 and raised in a strictly conservative Catholic family, before she relocated to the United States in 2001, during the South Lebanon conflict.
She joined her family that was already living in Montgomery, Maryland, and endured severe bullying in school at the hands of children who targeted her plump appearance.
The mistreatment worsened after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when she was slighted and racially discriminated against for her Middle-Eastern Arabic heritage.
She joined the University of Texas in El Paso to study history, as she nursed the wounds to her self-esteem, which had been heavily fractured by intense bullying.
Throughout her teen years, she wrestled with insecurities and didn't feel attractive or worthy of male attention.
During her stay in El Paso, she shed 25kg and began receiving a barrage of male attention, which came with intoxicating emotional satisfaction to which she wasn't accustomed.
She adored verbal affection and, after warm scrutiny of male validation, pledged to prolong the exhilaration.
Mia had been raised in a bone-deep conservative culture and as a child, she profoundly envisaged a liberated lifestyle that would discard her conformist Arabic background.
She decided to undertake whatever it took to sustain the bliss.
At 21, she was eminently flattered when a stranger complimented her beauty and body, informing her she would make an exceptional model.
Mia states that “when you grow up without attention, love and affection, any attention feels good.”
In January 2015, she was invited to a state-of-the-art filming studio in Miami, Florida, that was primed to coax girls to participate.
The shooting cubicles were professionally decorated; the administrative staff was dominated by courteous and convincing women; and the offices had family photos.
The atmosphere made Mia relaxed, and changed her perception, as she was taken through nude ‘modelling’ opportunities.
She then signed an adult filming contract with WGCZ Holding, a multimillion-dollar Czech Republic company headquartered in Prague.
The second time she visited, she participated in an explicit pornographic video.
Online Goddess-Inside Mia Khalifa: The Story of the World's Top Adult Actress is a cautionary tale on how sex predators, human traffickers and perverts prey on young women, exploiting their naivety and innocence.
The cover of Online Goddess – Inside Mia Khalifa: The Story of the World's Top Adult Actress.
Mia says she did not know she was being exploited, and manipulatively duped into enacting what the porn company demanded.
As she participated in more videos, her bosses took advantage of her Arabic ancestry by instructing her to film a scene while wearing a hijab, a headgear for Muslim women and girls.
The sex scene caused a huge uproar and she began receiving death threats from Islamic extremists.
Her family then disowned her when they found out about her porn engagements, and she felt alienated.
Porn is a multibillion-dollar industry built around exploitation of women. Established corporate personalities are the profiteers.
By April 2015, three months after joining the porn industry, Mia had ended her contract with WGCZ.
She states that she only earned $12,000 and took home a meagre $1,000 per shoot, while WGCZ continued raising tens of millions of dollars from her videos.
WGCZ also owns a webpage with Mia Khalifa's domain name, together with porn sites Xvideos and BangBros, but does not pay Mia and thousands of other performers, despite continuously using their names, voices and images.
The mega companies that operate porn sites often place adverts in the social network as agents scouting for models.
The selected women are informed that to be employed, they have to pose nude before the camera and if they require immediate employment, they have to sleep with the videographer while he films, a coercive act known in the porn industry as couch casting.
The victims are then lied to that the videos will be placed in a database accessible only for modelling producers who will soon hire them for modelling gigs.
The explicit videos are later posted and sold on sites belonging to porn institutions without the victims’ consent.
Several porn companies ventured into Africa to escape lawsuits following a sex trafficking class action that was instigated by victims who had been coerced into porn in 2019.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, few active regulatory bodies hold criminals accountable for the exploitation of women and girls.
Couch casting is rapidly spreading on the continent and destroying the lives of women and girls, who are exploited and their nude videos posted online.
The industry, with its numerous shady dealings, views Africa as an unexploited market.
The firms send agents, who are armed with tourist visas and empty promises, to manipulate, repress and objectify women for profit.
They exploit the economic situation in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and South Africa to swindle women, who can't afford lawyers, on retainer.
The victims are psychologically and financially disenfranchised.
The writer is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Centre (@jeffbigbrother).
