In addition, he denounced that there are “verbal, physical and sexual abuses”, 18-hour shifts without breaks in the production studios.
The webcam model industry in Colombia, The millionaire business of erotic content broadcast live on the Internet is plagued by cases of sexual and labor exploitation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced in a report released on Monday.
The business is great for entrepreneurs, who also avoid platform controls for the protection of minors.
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Prepared from interviews with fifty webcam models, the NGO’s extensive report makes public the “horrible working conditions” in the production studios in the capital Bogotá and the cities of Medellín, Cali and Palmira.
It also reveals repetitive practices of “verbal, physical and sexual abuse”, 18-hour shifts without breaks, “coercion” to perform “degrading” acts and spaces in “unhygienic conditions” that have affected the physical and mental health of the workers, who have presented “skin rashes and infections.”
Many models join studios “because they don’t have the privacy, the technological equipment or Internet connectivity necessary to broadcast from home.
The companies keep “up to 70 percent” of the revenue and commonly manage access to the accounts that models use to broadcast across various platforms, according to HRW.
“Adult webcam platforms based in the US and Europe “They must immediately address labor abuses and sexual exploitation in Colombian webcam studios,” he emphasized.
The research, for which local organizations of sex workers collaborated, collects crude testimonies such as that of a model “terrified by the possibility of a glass bottle that he had been pressured to insert breaking.
The stories reveal a “system of coercion” and threats to models to “perform sexual acts on camera that they did not want to perform.”
Although the testimonies collected by HRW were from adults, Several people revealed that they began working as teenagers in the erotic content industry.
The studios “violated the platforms’ age restrictions by ‘recycling’ accounts that were registered in the names of former adult models,” the NGO noted.
Several interviewees claimed on their side that they had seen people who appeared to be minors in the studios and that producers frequently encouraged acts of models who “pretend to be children” at the request of clients.
Sex work, which is legal in Colombia, is under the spotlight due to several high-profile cases of sexual exploitation and violence against children that occurred in 2024.
Last year, 264 cases of sexual exploitation were reported in the country, the highest number in the last 15 years, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
