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February 10, 2017

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Japanese girls duped into porn industry

Source: AFP | February 10, 2017, Friday | Print Edition

PORN producers in Japan are preying on young modeling hopefuls, with a quarter of women who sign contracts with street touts asked to perform in sex videos, a new government survey has found.

Chilling stories of young women duped into signing modeling contracts only to find themselves on adult movie sets and instructed to perform sometimes brutal sex scenes have created alarm over Japan’s multi-billion-dollar adult film business in recent months.

Campaigners have won a rare pledge to reform from the sex industry, which is so ubiquitous that actresses can become household names, appearing on mainstream talk shows and in magazines.

But with a growing number of women speaking out about being forced into porn work, Japan’s government launched its first study into the industry’s recruitment methods in December.

The online survey found some 200 young women who signed modeling contracts after being approached on the street, most of them minors.

Of these 53 said they were asked to pose sexually or perform sex acts in front of still, movie or live streaming cameras against their will.

And 17, mostly teenagers, said they had done what was demanded of them, with most citing intimidation by physical or financial threats, as well as coercion using fraudulent contracts.

Another 60 women who had spoken to modeling scouts on the street but did not sign contracts, said they had also been forced to pose sexually or perform sex before cameras, predominantly when they were minors.

Last year a coalition of campaigners ramped up pressure on the adult movie industry to clean up its act, with research alleging dozens of cases of abuse. The mistreatment included claims women were forced to engage in intercourse without protection and even gang-raped during filming.

Contracts purporting to be for modeling jobs were used by brokers to con women, mostly minors or in their early 20s, into the porn business and to threaten them with legal action.

The survey questioned some 20,000 women, aged 15 to 39, and has been submitted to a government panel studying routes into the pornography industry.

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