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Consumer Involvement In Japanese Pornography Production
... Readers of Dignity will recall a study by Yamamoto, Norma, and Weerasinghe (2018) that analyzed events from the pre-digital era in a case in which women were treated in a supremely unfair and unequal way: the bakkī jiken or Bakky Case. This name was widely used in public media after the producers of pornographic content were prosecuted for assault of women. ...
... For our purposes, Bakky Case refers not only to the prosecution of perpetrators, but also to the assaults and the online discussions which incited sexual violence. Yamamoto, Norma, and Weerasinghe (2018) make a valuable contribution with their analysis and focus on online forums owned by pornography production companies which produced and planned DVD films between 2002 to 2005. However, their study does not explore all of the relevant social conditions, and this article deepens our understanding of the motivations of protagonists in the case by exploring the context our of which it emerged. ...
... This issue may also be relevant in this context. During 2003 and 2004, the company produced various video films of the documentary pornography genre (Yamamoto et al, 2018). The prosecution of the producers in 2005 became known as the bakkī jiken or Bakky case. ...
While the #MeToo movement has led to successful campaigns against sexual harassment in many parts of the world, results have been mixed in Japan. In spite of the fact that #MeToo has inspired a number of offshoot campaigns, many victims of sexual abuse remain silent. Greater attention needs to be directed at the reasons for this reluctance to pursue justice. One factor that requires greater scrutiny is the role of public conversations; that is, widely reported comments from prominent members of society which generate some level of discussion and which exercise some influence over people’s way of thinking on particular topics. If public conversations denigrate women by labeling them as sexually promiscuous or as failures in terms of normative motherhood, the result may be increased violence against women and greater difficulty for women who seek justice in the aftermath of sexual violence. This argument is developed in this article which explores the ways in which a set of public conversations during the 1990’s and early 2000’s may have helped to incite extreme reactions of sexual abuse by stigmatizing certain young women both in terms of masculinist norms of sexuality and of female reproduction. Through engagement with relevant texts and member-checking with gender activists, the author found that the failure to learn lessons from a case of pornography-related sexual violence in the early 2000’s (referred to as the “Bakky case”) means that women remain vulnerable, especially if they are stigmatized for “failing in their duty” to bear children. Prominent figures in society must refrain from initiating public conversations that can lead to the stigmatization of women who challenge traditional gender norms. This study is made so that concerned citizens in Japan today, and readers everywhere, can more strongly justify their insistence on public conversations that reflect principles of gender equality and respect.
... This publication was the beginning of APP's research efforts against Japan's torture pornographers, and subsequent research drew on interviews with staff involved in the production of the films (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyū kai, 2008), and an interview with a female reporter who had attended a pornography filming set where police were called (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyū kai, 2007b). Around this time, in 2004, arrests were made in Tokyo of eight men working for a torture pornography production company called Bakky Visual Planning (Poruno/kaishun mondai kenkyū kai, 2004; Yamamoto, Norma & Dep Weerasinghe, 2018). A total of ten men involved with the company were eventually convicted of injurious assault, forcible rape and other crimes in Japan's courts. ...
The use of Internet technologies to traffic women and children to prostitution will be described in this article. We will summarize the history of online trafficking and the remarkably effective use of the Internet for advertising prostitution locally, regionally, and internationally beginning with the development of social networking sites, discussion forums, message boards and online chats. Examples of sex buyers’, pimps’, and traffickers’ use of the Internet and online classified advertising sites will be provided.
We will also summarize the empirical evidence for the psychological and physical harms of trafficking for prostitution and will discuss the risks of compartmentalizing arms of the sex trafficking industry that are in fact elements of multinational, constantly expanding, businesses. False distinctions have been erected between online and offline prostitution, child and adult prostitution, indoor and outdoor prostitution, pornography and prostitution, legal and illegal prostitution, and prostitution and trafficking.
We will discuss what is known about the involvement of organized crime in online trafficking, and summarize several successful cases brought against online traffickers. We describe public campaigns and educational boycotts against online traffickers and the development of online alternatives to the sex trafficking industry. There has been a range of legal responses to the crimes of prostitution and trafficking. Prosecutorial challenges in this newly developing field include the anonymity of the Internet, blurred jurisdictional boundaries, reluctance to prosecute prostitution cases where there is no evidence of physical coercion, and a very slowly increasing number of cases brought using existing legislation, in part because of the need for special training of criminal justice personnel. Nonetheless, there are tools available that provide both criminal and civil remedies.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) was passed to “combat trafficking in persons, a contemporary manifestation of slavery whose victims are predominantly women and children, to ensure just and effective punishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims.” Since the passing of the Act, federal courts have construed the statute broadly to achieve this stated purpose. One way in which the TVPA has been underutilized, however, is in prosecuting pornography cases. Pornography enjoys wide latitude under the law, protected by a vast net of First Amendment protections. While these protections may preserve freedom of speech, they do nothing to protect adult victims who are trafficked to produce online pornographic media. To provide relief for these victims and better fight all types of domestic trafficking, prosecutors should use the sex trafficking provision of the TVPA, 18 U.S.C. § 1591, to prosecute sex trafficking within the pornography industry. The pattern of victimization, other national and international human trafficking directives, plain language of the TVPA, prior cases, and broader policy goals all support the argument that the TVPA can and should be used to address the problem of trafficking adult victims for the production of porn.
The online commercial pornography consists of approximately 4.2 million websites with over 28,000 primarily male users worldwide spending an average of $3000 each second purchasing pornographic material (Ropelato 2007). The development of a robust political economic understanding of the industry is underdeveloped primarily because of methodological limitations faced when studying such a large and amorphous system. The rise of network-based modalities for the production and distribution of pornographic material opens the door for the application of social network analysis (SNA) to fill this methodological gap. Using data sampled from the 2007 and early 2008 business reports, I conduct an SNA of the online commercial pornography industry and describe how it relies on affiliate websites to ensnare the consumer in a series of mutually reinforcing websites designed to reduce consumer choice to extract maximum profit. As opposed to an industry organized to satisfy consumer-driven desire, my research illustrates that at its core, the industry is structured to acquire profit through an antagonistic relationship between (male) webmasters and (male) consumers.
Behind the screen: Online child exploitation in Australia
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