5 Reasons the War on Online Sex Trafficking is a Waste of Time

On Backpage.com, sex traffickers sell time with young girls as easily as selling a couch.

Backpage.com knows they are “helping sex traffickers sell kidnapped girls, and they don’t care.”

That’s why Ashton and Demi, Alicia Keys,  attorney generals from 46 states, a long list of NGO’s and religious leaders, MoveOn and 245,982 Change.org petitioners are calling on Village Voice Media to shut down Backpage.com.

Here’s why shutting down Backpage.com is not only a horrible idea, but a royal waste of time.

(1) 99% – possibly 99.95% – of the adult ads on Backpage.com are not for victims of sex trafficking.

They’re for escorts, male escorts, transexuals, strippers and strip clubs, dom and fetish, body rubs, and “adult jobs” who prefer advertising online to picking up clients in the street because it is safer.

(2) Finding ads for minors or victims of sex trafficking is a needle in a haystack problem.

It isn’t easy to see who’s a sex worker and who might be a victim of sex trafficking just by looking at an ad. So Village Voice manually reviews all adult ads twice before publishing them, requires a credit card that can be subpoenaed by law enforcement, and reports suspicious ads immediately to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That’s a start, but there’s a lot more we can do.

(3) Despite claims in the media, Backpage.com is far – FAR – from the biggest source of sex ads online.

Try BlackLabelAds, an adult advertising network that serves literally 10,000 times the adult ads that Backpage serves per day.

Or LiveJasmin.com, a webcam site serving 32 million visitors per month. It’s the biggest adult site on the planet, by a huge margin.

Why is shutting down Backpage is a bigger priority than making sure visitors to the biggest porn site on the planet aren’t having interactive sex with minors?

(4) We should also shut down Facebook.

With a billion users, Facebook has problems with sex ads, sexual predators and child porn.

So they are using technology to solve the problem.

Facebook combs through 250 million photos a day for child porn, using a Microsoft technology called PhotoDNA. But if it’s sex ads on Backpage, we should just throw the towel in and shut the site down?

(5) We’ve seen this before.

Craigslist came under the same public attack for Adult Services a few years ago. Here’s all the things they were doing to fight sex trafficking before they shut down the site and the traffic migrated to other sections of Craigslist, and sites like Backpage:

• They required a credit card and telephone verification for every ad.
• Hired lawyers to manually screen every ad for illegality and suggestion of underage girls.
• Had specialized victim search interfaces for law enforcement.
• Denied more than 700,000 ads in the first year of its manual screening program.

They were also the only company doing any of this stuff:

• Active participants in NCMEC’s cybertipline program
• Implemented PICS content labeling system
• Led all awareness efforts for the National Trafficking Hotline
• Met regularly with experts at nonprofits and in law enforcement
• Featured anti-trafficking/exploitation resources
• Educated and encouraged users to report trafficking/exploitation

>>  Julie Ruvolo (@jruv) is a writer and publishes Friends with Benefits, a bi-weekly sex newsletter for the Museum of Sex.