When Rose Kalemba was raped, it took her months to persuade a porn website to remove the video.
Last year Rose Kalemba wrote a blog post explaining how hard it had been – when she was raped as a 14-year-old girl – to get a video of the attack removed from a popular porn website. Dozens of people then contacted her to say that they were facing the same problem today.
Source: ‘I was raped at 14, and the video ended up on a porn site’ – BBC News
A few months later, Rose was browsing MySpace when she found several people from her school sharing a link. She was tagged. Clicking on it, Rose was directed to the pornography-sharing site, Pornhub. She felt a wave of nausea as she saw several videos of the attack on her.
“The titles of the videos were ‘teen crying and getting slapped around’, ‘teen getting destroyed’, ‘passed out teen’. One had over 400,000 views,” Rose recounts.
“The worst videos were the ones where I was passed out. Seeing myself being attacked where I wasn’t even conscious was the worst.”
She made an instant decision to not tell her family about the videos – most of them had not been supportive anyway. Telling them would achieve nothing.
Within days it was evident that most of her peers at school had seen the videos.
Rose says she emailed Pornhub several times over a period of six months in 2009 to ask for the videos to be taken down.
“I sent Pornhub begging emails. I pleaded with them. I wrote, ‘Please, I’m a minor, this was assault, please take it down.'”
She received no reply and the videos remained live.
“The year that followed I withdrew into myself. I disassociated,” she recalls, “I felt nothing. Numb. I kept to myself.”
She would wonder, with every stranger who made eye contact with her, if they had seen the videos.
“Had they got off to it? Had they gratified themselves to my rape?”
She couldn’t bear to look at herself. That’s why she covered the mirrors with blankets. She would brush her teeth and wash in the dark, thinking all the time about who could be watching the videos.
Then she had an idea.
She set up a new email address posing as a lawyer, and sent Pornhub an email threatening legal action.
“Within 48 hours the videos disappeared.”
