Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore’s Sex-Trafficking Feud With The Village Voice
I expect this story to continue, and statistics flinging to go on from both sides of the issue. At root it’s a salacious news item that will draw hits so I don’t expect the wild extrapolation to stop from either the defense or the offense. Regardless of outcome, you aren’t going to get rid of personal ads. If you stop them in the Village Voice papers, they will migrate elsewhere, just as they did with Craigslist.
This isn’t a case where you throw up your hands because water will find the lowest level however. The activists have to work smarter, and that means recognizing that prostitution aka “Trafficking” will not go away no matter what they do.
So you have to ask yourself what is best - an ad service or women (and in rare cases children,) on street corners in bad areas of town late at night? A paper that screens for ads that exploit minors, or no oversight?
At the same time, sites like Backpage.com have taken underage prostitution off the streets and put it behind closed doors, where it’s far harder to detect and prosecute. According to Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the State Department’s anti-trafficking office, the vast majority of prostitution arrests involve police posing as either prostitutes or johns. Arrests are thus largely “limited by who it is that pimps are putting out in the open,” he says. While police have started paying attention to the Internet, “the rule continues to be that enforcement patterns are on street prostitution,” says CdeBaca.
Finally, as Lloyd points out, the anti-trafficking movement has worked hard to get police to stop arresting trafficked girls and to start treating them as victims in need of services. According to a February story in the Seattle PostGlobe, “last year alone, the Seattle Police Department’s Vice and High Risk Victims Unit recovered 80 prostituted youth,” compared with 40 the previous year. Because they weren’t arrested, these kids don’t show up in The Village Voice’s figures. (On the paper’s website an interactive map, replete with graphics of sexy silhouettes posing beneath a street lamp, says there’s an average of only 14 underage-prostitution arrests in Seattle annually.)
Unfortunately, the Voice story perpetuates the very regressive ideas about “real” trafficking victims that activists have spent a decade fighting. At one point, the reporters get one of the researchers behind the disputed number to admit, “Kids who are kidnapped and sold into slavery—that number would be very small.” Indeed, he says, there are probably only a few hundred such victims.