People searching for rape porn are ending up on a women’s rights site

Women Under Siege—a project devoted to investigating violence against women as a weapon of conflict—regularly posts research, personal accounts and articles on women’s injustices around the world. Many times, those stories are about rape.

One might think, then, that the kind of people drawn to the site are  socially aware individuals, highly conscious of women’s issues.

But a quick study of the site’s Google Analytics by the project director, Lauren Wolfe, revealed a disturbing trend in how some other kinds of visitors land on their pages.

Wolfe began noticing search phrases that had led readers to Women Under Siege—searches like “girls raped shouting for mercy” and “how to open the legs of a women when raping her.”

Wolfe continued to study the keywords in use, and what she found was a series of searches that prompted sadness, outrage and a few important questions.

So, she wrote Wednesday, she decided “it was time to share what else people around the world have been searching for before they (likely unassumingly) land on a journalism project about sexualized violence instead of a porn site,” and subsequently published an organized, detailed and seriously disturbing list of search terms that brought Internet users to her site:

“I took a look through the keywords people used to get here over the past two months and sorted some of the more explicit ones into a few categories. Maybe you’ll agree with these categories. Maybe you’ll think there’s more fantasy to these ideas (on behalf of men or women) than experience. What matters, I think, is that this is what is in so many people’s minds on a daily basis—these are things they can contain only to the point of seeking more information on the Internet. Barely contained ideas or impulses, basically.

Perpetrators are looking to know more about ‘how to rape a woman.’

Fantasists want to see things I cannot even begin to imagine such as something called ‘Congo real extreme rape tube.’ When this is what is happening to women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Survivors are seeking stories to accompany them through a lonely evening thinking about how ‘I was forced to marry him, but he rapes me every night.’ Maybe they are looking for fellow survivors who like them were ‘not allowed to cry during rape.’