AUSTRALIA – AbbyWinters.com parent company G Media is under fire for offering content that may violate Australia’s decency laws and for allegedly taking advantage of young, possibly naïve models.According to a December 3rd report in the Herald Sun, G Media and other online adult content purveyors “lure teenage women into performing sex acts on camera… Some of the sex acts depicted on the websites are of the type prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which regulates internet content.”
The Herald Sun reported an ACMA investigation precipitated by a complaint from the newspaper determined the content on G Media’s websites is explicit enough to be prohibited under Australian law, but the sites are hosted outside of Australia and therefore Australian authorities cannot force them to close or remove offensive material. However, the ACMA has reported the sites to makers of internet filtering software in order to have them included among sites blocked from Australian viewers.
Still, according to the paper, there remains the matter of domestic production of the material, in addition to concern about the ages of the women depicted on the websites. G Media’s most popular website — presumably AbbyWinters.com — contains “a special section headlined ‘teenagers’ and carries more than 250,000 images of 1,280 models, about half of them teenagers,” according to the report, which also indicated many of the young women may be too naïve to understand the potential repercussions of their actions. In addition, although insiders told the Herald Sun the models were promised their images would remain in the members-only section of the site, they are easily copied and distributed to free porn sites on the web.
“OK, they are over 18 and have volunteered to pose nude in return for $400 or so,” one of the website models told the newspaper. “But during the shoot one of the website employees will start offering extra cash in hand, hundreds of dollars and sometimes thousands of dollars, to try to get them to take part in various sex acts. Now these are young, impressionable women, often students or backpackers, and the offer of cash in hand is just too hard for some of them to resist and they agree to things they later regret. I know of some who have posed when they were hard-up students and then regretted it when they have become teachers and lawyers… The images stay on the websites for years.”
A photographer told the paper, “[The models] might have agreed to a tasteful nude shot, and halfway through the shoot they are offered cash up front to do girl-on-girl or explicit solo stuff. So you find them saying yes, feeling pressured, or they need the money, to do things they don’t really want to do. Now that might be legal — although some of the poses they get them to do are banned — but it doesn’t make it right.
“I have heard of cases where girls have been told, after they have stripped off, that they will not be paid for what they have already agreed to do if they don’t do the extras,” the photographer continued. “It is immoral and exploitation of the young at its worst.”
The Herald Sun said G Media Director Garion Hall, who also serves as the vice president of Australian adult-industry trade group Eros Association, declined to comment about the allegations.
