Author and Advocate Laila Mickelwait Shares 15 Years of Experience Advocating for Sexual Abuse Victims
Laila Mickelwait has been combatting sex trafficking and porn platforms for more than 15 years. She’s not afraid to go after big businesses in order to advocate for victims and their families.
A boy convinced a young girl, Serena (14), to send him nude photos of herself. She had never even been kissed by a boy, but she complied because she had a crush on him. The boy quickly shared the images with friends and uploaded them to PornHub. Serena was devastated, embarrassed, and depressed. Five long years later, she was able to get her content off of PornHub after contacting an activist. Serena’s story is all too common.
There was another case where a mother of a 15-year-old missing girl found dozens of videos on Pornhubof her daughter who had been missing for a year. The videos depicted the sexual assault of a minor and were monetized with ads.
The stories began to get worse and worse.
“I do have a strong faith and belief in God,” she told The Christian Post. “My spiritual side has played an important role in keeping me grounded and helping me to just keep going forward.”
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“When we’re taking on abuse and criminal organizations this big, it’s important for people to come together and set aside their differences, whether it’s their religion or lack of religion, whether it’s their political ideology,” she said. “Because this is a human rights issue. It’s not a right or left issue; it’s not an issue that’s only for Christians.” (Matthew 25:40)
In her book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking, Mickelwait lists many additional stories of the platform “distributing and monetizing child sex abuse and rape.”
“I think it really took it to another level when I thought about the fact that these children who have been exploited could be my children in a few years because the things that were happening to them could happen to anyone’s child in the digital age,” Mickelwait said.
Mickelwait shared, “The journey of discovery, to meet the victims, the whistleblowers, to understand how this company works and the devastating trauma that it causes victims,” she added. “Hopefully, by the end of the story, they can be as passionate about ending this as I am, and we can mobilize an army of activists to take this to the next level.”
