The porn website Motherless was taken offline by the Dutch authorities on Thursday evening. The Dutch news site AD writes this after confirmation by the Public Prosecution Service. “Information was received yesterday and action was taken,” said a spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service. No one has been arrested at this time.
Source: AD, NRC, NOS
The investigation is still in its early stages, the spokesperson said. The website is located on servers of hosting company NForce in the town of Steenbergen (province of North Brabant).
Tips about drugging
On internet forums, users also exchanged tips about drugging partners. In a major investigation, CNN even spoke of a kind of “global rape academy.”
The images fall into a genre also called ‘drug porn’. Women, sometimes partners, are made unconscious with medication or drugs, after which sex is filmed and shared.
What is Motherless?
Motherless describes itself as a “platform without morals”. “If images fall within the limits of the law, they will be visible here forever,” is the baseline. That’s where the shoe pinches. The vast majority on the site is staged and therefore definitely porn.
However, there are also house, garden and kitchen videos where the intentions are not so clear. Has each party given prior permission to be exhibited in this way on the world wide web? And the ages of the women are also unclear. “Some of the material makes it impossible to estimate whether the victims are adults, they look very young,” writes the daily newspaper ‘NRC’.
Controversial company
This is not the first time that NForce has been associated with controversial or illegal online content. The hosting company also came into the news for hosting websites with far-right content, AD knows.
In 2020, NForce topped a list of Dutch hosting companies waar most child pornographic material was found. The list was drawn up at the time by researchers from Delft University of Technology at the request of the Dutch Minister of Justice.
Difficult to tackle
According to experts, it is legally difficult in the Netherlands to prosecute hosting companies for what their customers publish. “Where there is smoke, there is fire,” says Robert Hoving of expertise organization Offlimits to the Dutch public broadcaster NOS about reports of child pornography on Motherless. This year alone, the organization received almost 142 reports about no fewer than 12,000 videos on Motherless.
According to him, simply removing images afterwards is insufficient. “Where there is smoke, there is fire. It is precisely then that it must be investigated whether the current legal framework is sufficient to tackle these types of serious violations.”
