The museum in England's northern city of Liverpool has come under fire for partnering with a US-based lobby group, Exodus Cry, which seeks to stop pornography and shut down commercial sex work and has been criticized for stigmatizing sex workers.

A tweet by the museum announcing the exhibition this week attracted dozens of critical responses, including from anti-trafficking activists and academics who said the artworks were "trauma porn" and "damaging, sensationalist and dehumanizing".

Giving a voice to the voiceless. That’s what our partnership with @ExodusCry is about in our new, powerful display which campaigns against human trafficking in porn. You can see the three shortlisted artworks from today in our gallery #ARTXFREEDOM https://t.co/dPUfviHohH pic.twitter.com/Q7mQZYPvfr

— International Slavery Museum (@SlaveryMuseum) December 16, 2020

"This is so problematic on so many levels," said Inga Thiemann, a law lecturer at Exeter University who teaches on modern slavery and human trafficking.

This is so problematic on so many levels. Exodus Cry are fundamentalist and the ’artworks’ are textbook examples of stereotypical hyper-scandalised and oversimplifying anti trafficking campaigns

— Inga Thiemann (@inga_thiemann) December 17, 2020

"Exodus Cry are fundamentalist and the 'artworks' are textbook examples of stereotypical, hyper-scandalized, and oversimplified anti-trafficking campaigns," she said in a tweet.

The group said in a statement this week that it was "honored by the partnership" with the slavery museum, which opened in 2007 and focuses on the transatlantic slave trade.

Exodus Cry's chief executive, Benjamin Nolot, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that criticism of the exhibition was "unfortunate" and "unfair", and that the word "damaging" should instead be applied to websites that profit from child porn.

Sensationalized images used to raise awareness of modern slavery can do more harm than good because they misrepresent the problem, and also risk retraumatizing survivors, a 2019 study by the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab found.

Read also: 'Slavery and the City' tour sheds light on London's dark past

Pornhub

Exodus Cry hit the headlines this month following a New York Times column which said Pornhub, one of the world's biggest porn websites, included child abuse videos, which led Mastercard and Visa to stop payments on the site.

Pornhub responded by pulling content uploaded by unverified users and in a statement said Exodus Cry was targeting it for being an adult content site, comparing the lobby group to forces that demonize sex education and LGBT+ rights.

"Exodus Cry claims to speak for 'the voiceless', and yet it refuses to listen to sex workers and trafficking victims who... connect trafficking to their experiences of immigration laws and inequality," said Julia Laite of Birkbeck, University of London.

"Instead, Exodus Cry... chooses to see sexual immorality as the chief source of trafficking, depicts victims as helpless, silent and passive, and advocates for more carceral approaches," added Laite, a historian of gender, sex work and migration.

The International Slavery Museum said the exhibition - which is part of Exodus Cry's Traffickinghub campaign to shut down Pornhub - was meant to record "what abolitionist efforts can look like today".

"Modern slavery is rife, and Traffickinghub is a campaign that includes survivor testimony as well as artworks produced by the public, which demonstrates their emotional reaction to the campaign," a spokesman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

About 4.8 million people worldwide are victims of sex trafficking, according to a 2017 estimate by the United Nations.

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