An Important Impact Update:
Shortly before our report launch, major webcam platform Stripchat emailed Human Rights Watch to say they amended an important policy as a result of our research and advocacy.
Under Stripchat’s Terms of Use, all content broadcast on the website must comply with Stripchat’s Studio Rules. The Studio Rules policy now includes a new section: Working Place Conditions. As of December 6, 2024, studios broadcasting content on Stripchat are responsible for ensuring “adequate ventilation,” and “clean and sanitary facilities … complying with applicable hygiene standards.” Human Rights Watch recommended these exact policy changes in our advocacy.
If properly implemented and enforced, this new policy will improve model’s working conditions and may also improve models’ ability to leave exploitative studios. This is because, under Stripchat’s existing protocols, Stripchat will “detach” a model from a studio – allowing the model to leave and take their account, client following, and content with them – if studio is found to be abusive or be in violation of platform policies. Now, these policies include sanitation and hygiene.
The original interview begins here:
What did your research uncover? What surprised you?
This report looks at the working conditions of people who stream adult content from webcam studios in Colombia, one of the countries with the most webcam studios in the world. If you’re not familiar, webcam studios are like a rented office space. People go there to work if they don’t have a computer, WiFi, or the privacy to perform from home. The studios then broadcast models’ performances worldwide. Models often work in webcam studios with the goal of earning enough to do webcam work from their homes or their own studio.
I have spent years documenting abuses against street- and brothel-based sex workers and honestly didn’t expect abuses in webcam studios to rise to the level they do. People leave the street to try working in a studio because they logically assume it will be safer. You don’t have to stand on the street or deal with police harassment. You don’t have to pay bribes to the armed group or gang that runs the block you work on. You’re literally indoors and protected from the elements. You don’t have to come into physical contact with clients.
But again and again in interviews, sex workers said that they tried working in studios and the conditions were so bad they quit and went back to the street. This is why we did this research, because our partner organizations in Colombia, like Calle 7 and La Liga, told us it was a critical, overlooked issue.
What type of working conditions did you find in Colombia’s studios?
People reported extreme surveillance. In addition to the cameras you’re streaming on, there are studio surveillance cameras. Why? Often because there is a “monitor” or manager in the office watching you. The monitor can even pretend to be you and message back and forth with clients. They can agree to things on your behalf that you don’t want to do. Being constantly watched makes you feel like you can’t say no.
Models I spoke with felt coerced into sexual performances that they found degrading, traumatizing, or even physically painful. Several were asked by clients—and pressured by studios—to act like children, a direct violation of platform policies. One woman in Bogotá said she was pressured to vomit on herself on camera, which was especially traumatizing because she was recovering from an eating disorder.
And this is before the sanitation and hygiene issues. Lots of people talked about cockroaches and bedbug infestations. In Medellín, a young man who had lived in his studio for several months pulled up his sleeve to show me scars on his arms from being bitten by bedbugs and his scratching. The bites got so bad he got kicked off the platform because he was reported for sadomasochism. It looked like he was harming himself.
People I spoke with were fined by studios for taking breaks to eat or use the bathroom, and some worked 18-hour shifts without a break. We also found wage theft. Forty-nine of 50 models I interviewed said they didn’t see or sign the terms of service from any platform on which they streamed because the studio created their accounts for them. This left models without essential information to ensure they were paid fairly or to make informed decisions about their work hours, breaks, and which client requests to accept. In some cases, this contributed to models experiencing wage theft, sexual coercion, and labor exploitation by studios.
Then there’s the bodily fluids. People would enter the room or cubicle to work and find all sorts of bodily fluid on the chairs, sheets, and elsewhere, left by previous performers.
The truth is, lots of jobs would be unsanitary if you never cleaned up after them. Fish markets, day cares, and hospitals would be disgusting. There need to be standards around sanitation and hygiene. Whose responsibility is it to clean the space and how often? Who pays for the anti-bacterial wipes? These huge gaps in specific labor standards for webcam studios need to be addressed.
In the report, you name specific companies and webcam platforms broadcast content created by these studios. What do you want these companies to do?
No platform policies analyzed by Human Rights Watch establish minimum standards for studios related to sanitation, cubicle size, privacy, lighting, or regularly fumigating for bugs. None require studios to allow workers to go to the bathroom or to take breaks in accordance with International Labour Organization guidelines.
The webcam industry is held to a bafflingly low standard when it comes to supply chain due diligence, I think because people globally don’t agree on the reality that sex work is work. But these abuses in studios are linked to a billion-dollar industry, and webcam workers deserve the same labor rights protections as all workers under international human rights law.
We want these companies to review, revise, adopt, and implement comprehensive policies and protocols for all studio account holders to prevent these abuses.
Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies have a responsibility to avoid causing or contributing to human rights abuses and to identify, mitigate, and prevent human rights abuses in their supply chains.
LiveJasmin is based in Luxembourg, while BongaCams and Stripchat are in Cyprus. Chaterbate is based in the US. When we contacted the platforms, BongaCams, Chaturbate, and Stripchat wrote back and provided us with their policies and protocols, many of which related to human trafficking and child sexual abuse. These policies are of course necessary and important, but they don’t sufficiently address what the companies are doing to ensure fair labor conditions in studios. They don’t address how they're tackling cockroach infestations, wage theft, or the fact that keyboards are covered in urine, blood, and vomit. LiveJasmin declined to respond on the record.
Speaking of child sexual abuse, did you find this in your research?
All of the people I interviewed were adults, but some said they started working in studios as children aged 13 to 17 at the time. All platforms we researched have policies prohibiting the streaming of child sexual abuse material, as well as age-verification procedures.
But studios still had two main ways of hiring children and getting around these platform policies. First, by using fake IDs. Second, by “recycling” accounts. Studios create and own models’ accounts—they have the email, password, etc.—so when a model leaves a studio, the studio keeps the account. This allows studios to hire someone without proper identification, like a child, and slot them into an account with a built-in audience. This is a clear violation of the platforms’ policies.
It's also a critical discovery. It means one of the main labor rights demands of sex workers—to take their accounts with them when they leave a studio to go work independently—would also help mitigate one of the ways studios appear to be hiring children.
What should Colombia’s government do?
In Colombia, there are several constitutional court decisions that deal with the rights of sex workers, including webcam workers. The court has repeatedly told the Ministry of Labor to develop comprehensive standards and inspection protocols for studios, but Colombian sex worker rights defenders say reform isn’t happening fast enough.
Destigmatizing sex work and centering the expertise of sex worker groups that understand the industry, like Calle 7 and La Liga, our partners in this report, can help in reform efforts.
It's interesting that you’re approaching this as a workers’ rights issue as opposed to one of sexual exploitation.
It’s both. I’ve documented sexual exploitation in Colombia and dozens of other countries around the world, and it very often involves people who have consented to selling sexual services and then experience labor abuses, like wage theft or being punished for taking breaks. Research has long shown that criminalization does not address these abuses.
Now, we increasingly see evidence that labor reforms can address not only labor exploitation, but sexual exploitation as well. The International Labour Organization has standards on adequate rest and breaks. It doesn’t matter what type of labor you’re doing; you have the right to take a break. There are standards for overnight shifts, cubicle size, and even minimizing prolonged exposure to vibrating objects.
Last week, a new law in Belgium came into force that affords sex workers who sign employment contracts the right to limit how they perform services and which people they see, and it’s a labor law.
If you want to fight sexual exploitation, you need to address labor abuses. Sex workers should lead on what regulation looks like. They know what is needed.
What else do you want from this report?
What we don’t want is for this report to be used to stigmatize webcam models or criminalize sex workers. Criminal law is not a path to freedom for marginalized groups.
While research into webcam studios is relatively new, we know from years of credible research into other types of sex work that criminalization increases rates of murders, arrests, and sexual assault. Good clients go away, bad clients remain, and things get a lot more dangerous.
So I want to be extremely clear that we are not asking for raids or for studios to be shut down. Sex work is and should remain decriminalized.
What we do want is for platforms to create better policies, protocols, and forms of oversight for studios they work with, and to allow models to take their accounts with them when they leave a studio.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Webcamming sits at the intersection of so many things: feminized labor, anti-sex work stigma, the informal economy, and the platform-mediated gig economy, to name a few. This combination makes it a ready site of multiple forms of exploitation, but it also means the workers inside it have incredible expertise and ideas for reform that would benefit other industries as well.
I was consistently impressed by the concrete recommendations the people I interviewed had. I would ask them to pick a platform and then ask: “What would you say to the owner of that platform if you had the chance?” Pretty much everybody had fantastic answers, and these really shaped the recommendations in the report.
There was one woman in her 20s in Bogota, she pulled out a notebook, flipped through, and said: “Okay, Number 1…” and she read through this list of demands she’d prepared in advance while I frantically typed. It was such a demonstration of the expertise within the sex worker community.
