The French courts have just taken the final step to bring to trial (this is unprecedented in Europe) the business of amateur pornography. 17 people will sit on the defendant's bench, including the couple who own one of the most prolific and important platforms in that country in the production of videos -it is always thought that these recordings are made with the consent of their protagonists- to being hung later on pornographic platforms.
The name of that industry of pornography, bukkake, already says almost everything. This is a Japanese word to define the collective rapes of dozens of men with a single woman. It is what those films were about and everything precipitated in September 2020 when it was verified, according to the French Prosecutor's Office, that the women subjected to these brutal and group sexual relations were raped. No consent, no fiction.
It was the abolitionist association Osez le Féminisme that uncovered this practice in an industry, that of amateur pornography, which has received very little research. They began to pull the thread after learning that these women were sexually assaulted against their will and to date, forty testimonies from victims have already been collected.
They all agree in their story: they were drugged, forced to live in inhuman conditions, raped by surprise by dozens of "actors" in those recordings who they thought were going to be something else, threatened and attacked.
The French "bukkake case" demonstrates, for the Prosecutor's Office, that this porn industry (in principle consented to by its protagonists) works with the same strings moved in the prostitution business. In this case, young people as young as 20 were sought in unstructured environments in France itself, but potential victims were also recruited in Eastern countries.
Two of the defendants, whom the prosecution calls "kidnappers", captured their "prey" on social networks. They posed as young people their own age and after promising them large amounts of money for participating in porn movies, they took them to the filming rooms. Nothing happened there that they had been promised. With no option to escape or defend themselves, they were raped -the scenes couldn't be more real- by dozens of men.
Those responsible for that porn industry did not even keep the promise that these films would only be seen in Canada. The victims of these brutal sexual assaults verified weeks later how the recordings were also distributed on French porn platforms. A round business.
Le Monde, one of the most reputable newspapers in France, published a few months ago -before learning that the case was going to go to trial- an extensive report by chapters after an exhaustive investigation. The headline could not be clearer: "Violations disguised as videos", read that information.
Among the 17 people who will share the defendant's dock are those responsible for the company - Pascal OP and his partner known as Mat Hadix -, the intermediaries, the captors and, of course, some of the actors; those men who raped young girls by force.
In France, it is stated that the "bukkake case" could serve to once and for all remove the pornography business from the limbo in which it is installed, assuming that what happens in front of these cameras has always been consented to by the protagonists of the films.
