the counter-attack of the Osez le féminisme association against the most visited sites in France

On the computers of the five activists present that day, hundreds of pornographic videos are listed. We can glimpse images that depict children, rape or acts of torture. According to information from franceinfo and that of the newspaper The world, Lhe association Osez le féminisme launched on Friday January 21 a campaign of massive reports of violent videos.

These are already more than 200 reports that were made to the government platform Pharos, particularly known for reporting videos related to radicalization and terrorism. This actually concerns thousands of videos posted on the most visited X-rated sites in France since they target entire categories of videos.

“What we denounce is that pornography is now used as an alibi, in a way, for a lot of crimes and violence.”

Alyssa Ahrabare

at franceinfo

“Under the cover of representing sexuality, there is in fact a real impunity of these platforms which put online videos which are acts of torture, filmed rapes, explains Alyssa Ahrabare, one of the spokespersons for Dare to Feminism. The term pornography is a word that hides a lot of criminal offences.”

Barely hidden offenses since the videos are classified by categories with sometimes very explicit names: incest, taking force, suffocation…
With the help of a team of lawyers, the association has therefore identified the scenes most likely to be outlaws on sites such as Pornhub or Jacquie et Michel.

“If we had access to this same kind of content in any other context, these videos would be immediately considered violent, banned, condemned, valued Alyssa Ahrabare. On the other hand, as these are pornographic sites, it passes for sexuality, freedom of expression, etc… There is a kind of impunity around these videos.“

With this reporting campaign, the activists therefore hope to alert the public authorities and finally change things, says Ursula Le Menn, spokesperson for the feminist association: “We created legal systems against illegal downloading years ago with Hadopi. And that’s more serious than pornography apparently. Is it more serious than the diffusion of videos of rape of women, rape of children? It’s incredible. We expect with these reports that, finally, the government and the public authorities move in France and internationally“.

The association now intends to let a fortnight pass and then check whether the reported videos have been deleted with, they say, little hope that this will be done.