As billion-dollar webcam industry booms, models suffer at hands of Colombian studios
Advocacy group Human Rights Watch interviewed 50 models working in adult webcam studios for a new report that exposes widespread exploitation and abuse.
Webcam studios across Colombia have subjected models to horrific abuses and facilitated the creation of child sexual abuse material, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
Models interviewed for the report stated that they had been coerced by the studios to perform sex acts that they did not wish to perform, pressured to stream for many hours without breaks, and suffered physical and mental harm from working in dirty, cramped cubicles.
“Sex work is work, and sex workers deserve the same labor protections as all workers under international human rights law,” said Erin Kilbride, the author of the report. “Our investigation uncovered concrete steps that US and EU-based webcam platforms need to immediately take to address both labor and sexual exploitation.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 50 models working in studios across Colombia, which has a large webcamming industry, as part of its report. The models broadcast performances — which may include sexual content, but do not always do so — in exchange for payment or tips. Models can stream on these platforms from their own homes, but some choose to work for studios to have privacy or access to a computer and Internet connectivity. Both the platform and the studio take a cut of the models’ revenues, leaving the performers with as little as 10 percent of the income generated by their performance, the report found.
Adult webcamming is a billion-dollar industry that employs thousands of people. Some of the large Internet platforms that stream the content produced by these studios are making massive profits: the Cyprus-based Stripchat, one of the platforms widely used by the Colombian models interviewed by HRW, made over $100 million in gross profits in 2022, according to documents available on Cyprus’s corporate registry. Hungarian billionaire Gyorgy Gattyan also made the bulk of his fortune from LiveJasmin, a platform he founded that was highlighted in the report, according to Forbes. (The subscription-based service OnlyFans, while not mentioned in the report, also paid its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, a staggering $1 billion in dividends from 2021 to 2023.)
Models told HRW researchers that their studio managers had coerced and threatened them to perform sex acts for clients that they did not want to do. Some studio managers accepted clients’ requests for specific sex acts on the model’s behalf, before models had a chance to consent; in some cases, models reported being sexually assaulted on camera by their managers in response to client requests.
Most of the models interviewed, 49 out of 50, said that they had never seen or signed the terms of service to create their accounts on the platforms they used. The studios had seemingly accepted the terms on their behalf. This meant that the models lacked basic information that would inform their decisions about taking breaks or accepting client requests. In the absence of proper information, most models streamed for 8 hours or more at one time, sometimes without breaks to eat or use the bathroom. The studios often pressured models against pausing their streams, and in some cases fined models when they did so.
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COVID-19: Turning Colombia’s Hotels into Camming Studios
According to an article from the New York Post, the Gateway to South America is home to approximately 60,000 cam models, representing the boom in numbers during the 2020 coronavirus. Jose Dominguez, co-owner of JuanBustos Studios in Colombia, says this is around 30% of the market share!
But despite popular perception, this increase had nothing to do with lockdown boredom and everything to do with hotel owners — they transformed their buildings into camming studios for adult entertainers to keep afloat. Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin was the first to make the switch.
They would take my room away and give it to a girl who made more money, or tell me to take my dress off since I normally stay clothed and they’d said I should get naked to make more,” said one model quoted in the report. “One thing in this job is that you always have to pretend to be happy.
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The studios’ practice of creating and maintaining control of the models’ accounts also enabled the creation of child sexual abuse material, the report found. The platforms require models to submit a photo ID to verify that they are over 18 years old. But the studio can circumvent this requirement by using a “recycled account” — an already-verified account belonging to a former model, deleting the photos and text previously associated with that account and adding new photos of the underage model. Seven models told HRW that they worked in webcam studios before they were 18 years old.
The studios’ filthy conditions also…….
