Most of us have probably heard cautionary tales about Craigslist and the creepy things that can go down on online marketplaces. Sadly, these warnings are based in truth. Sex traffickers are constantly employing different schemes to trap unsuspecting victims—like the recent makeup artist targeting scheme.
One sketchy strategy highlighted in recent news involves pimps marketing babysitting gigs and trafficking those who sign up into forced sexual exploitation.
Babysitting gigs gone bad
Recently, Timea Nagy gave an interview with CTV News about her experience being trafficked through a babysitting ad.
Hungarian by birth, Timea grew up very poor. When she was 20 years old, her mother’s illness and their family’s desperate housing situation led her to accept a babysitting job in Canada through a newspaper ad. She left Budapest and found herself two weeks later in Toronto, where she endured three months of unforeseen abuse and exploitation.
Two pimps controlled Timea and forced her to perform sexual work in strip clubs and massage parlors, where she was sexually assaulted repeatedly. She eventually escaped when two men in a club, Chris and Julius, helped to hide her and get her to the airport.
Needless to say, these events—only three months long—have seriously impacted her life, even years later.
“My life is divided in two: before I was trafficked, and after,” she says in her book Out of the Shadows. “No one gets over such traumatic experiences.”
This is the part where porn comes in. What was so deeply traumatizing to Timea and altered the course of her life is marketed as an erotic fantasy on a daily basis in the world of online porn.
Real cases of babysitting turned trafficking
Babysitter porn is a surprisingly popular porn category.
Usually, a clueless woman—often a girl depicted as underage—shows up to babysit. The dad welcomes her into the home and uses his position of authority to get a little too friendly with her and…you get the picture. This situation is portrayed as seductive and exciting, and the girl is either into it right away or eventually gets into it with coercion.
But as all porn fantasies often go, this is not how it happens in reality.
Timea Nagy showed up for her babysitting job and was “welcomed” with forced sex. Spoiler alert: it was not the illicit and fun encounter the porn vids make it out to be.
But this is just one case.
Recently, the account of Mark Norton came to light. A 45-year-old public service employee and former Air Force commander, he’s been accused of the long-term molestation and pimping of a girl who started as a babysitter for his children.
He met the 16-year-old girl in 2007, asked her to babysit, began grooming her, and eventually moved her into his basement. All the while, his sexual actions toward her were not thrilling—they were rape. He also forced her to marry a friend of his who needed a wife in order to get his green card. The girl apparently resisted continually but was threatened into continuing her sexual subjugation.
Larger-scale trafficking rings have also taken advantage of young people looking to make some money through babysitting.
There are Facebook threads and online warnings about the vague “help wanted” signs and online ads for well-paying babysitting work. Two college students barely missed a possible trafficking situation after answering babysitting ads. Thankfully they noted some vague info and other red flags and didn’t show up to the job site—they could have found themselves in the same exploitative horror that changed Timea Nagy’s life.
Porn’s dangerous normalization of sex abuse
Basically, porn fetishizes the real trauma and abuse actual people have experienced in real life. It’s a difficult and vulnerable situation when people—usually girls and young women—seek out babysitting gigs online or through “help wanted” postings to bring in some much-needed cash.
And when those desperate scenarios turn out to be abusive or controlling? There is nothing erotic or normal about that. But porn says otherwise—these normalizing scripts play out again and again on mainstream sites.
A vulnerable young woman seeking work? The dad who hires her to babysit is portrayed as doing her a favor with his advances by initiating her into an exciting world. Or even worse—porn implies that she may be signing up for some extra cash, but what she really wants is sex.
When porn rewrites reality to hook viewers with seductive storylines, it makes light of real trafficking situations and hugely misleads consumers. It normalizes and diminishes the real-life dangers and effects of exploitation. In fact, scientific research tells us that pornographic content depicting degrading or disturbing actions and situations actually trains the brain to find them increasingly normal.
Essentially, with these videos, this is what the porn industry says to victims of abuse and trafficking: your nightmare is a porn consumer’s sexual fantasy.
Not cool. We stand beside those who are victimized, and we raise awareness on the porn industry’s normalization of that abuse.
What consumers take in as a momentary pleasure rush exists for many real people as a life-long battle. This is one of the many reasons we stand against porn, which promotes exploitation and degradation, and fight for real love that enriches and protects us all.
