What can Craigslist do to end human trafficking?
This weekend, Craigslist blocked access to its “adult services” section in response to requests from 17 states attorneys general to shut down the adult ads and improve screening tactics elsewhere in the site. The requests were due to concerns of illegal prostitution and unchecked human trafficking, especially trafficking of children into the sex trade. In a dramatic flair, Craigslist covered the adult services link with a black “censored” bar.
A bastion of civil liberty? Probably not.
Bad PR? Oh, yes.
Craigslist has the right to publish adult ads under a federal law called the Communications Decency Act, but they don’t have the right to knowingly facilitate nonconsensual sex encounters with trafficked victims. The small company has been pretty quiet about the issue since first modifying its policy on adult ads in 2009, and this “censorship” hoopla is likely to exacerbate a situation that could have easily been resolved with a simple press release detailing revised monitoring standards. One contentious issue is how to prevent human traffickers from exploiting victims through adult ads on Craigslist and other online platforms for sex.
In principle, I am personally in favor of consensual sex work. But I will be the first to admit that my personal beliefs about the virtues of sex work come from a place of privilege. As a working class, cis-gendered, college educated white American, I enjoy a number of privileges that allow me to think favorably of consensual sex for money, including the fact that I’ve never personally been involved in sex work (it’s probably harder than it looks, that’s what she said) and consensual sex is possible in my life such that, by and large, I am free to dictate the terms of my sexual encounters. It’s easier for me to support consensual sex work since those things are true.
But the harsh reality is that lots of other people don’t enjoy these privileges, and many of the people in the world involved in the sex trade are not in it by choice. It is very important to make the distinction between consensual sex work and sex trafficking, and to understand that the nature of the sex trade can make it extremely difficult to identify one from the other. According to the U.S. State Department, about 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Of those people trafficked, about 80% are female and 50% are kids. Studies show that countries with weak economies are more vulnerable to sex trafficking. Traffickers may kidnap or coerce a victim into the sex trade and use any number of emotional and physical abuses to keep a victim from running away, including forced drug use, withholding immigration documents like passports, and threatening a victim’s family.
The trouble with Craigslist and other platforms for selling sex is that the company may promise to manually screen its ads for victims, but never deliver on that promise. And really, why would they? Craigslist will make about $45 million dollars this year just from the fees for posting in their adult services section. Cracking down on human trafficking could be bad for business!
This means that we have no reliable way of knowing how many of the ads are submitted by consensual adults and how many are being pimped out by human traffickers. This year in Cook County alone, of the prostitution arrests made by the sheriff’s department, about a third are from Craigslist, making it the single largest source of prostituted and trafficked women in the Chicago area. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has found 54 missing children on Craigslist adult ads since 2006.
A lot of bloggers are arguing that shutting down Craigslist won’t end human trafficking, which is certainly true but ultimately pretty complacent. At Huffington Post, Danah Boyd argues that Craigslist offers a visible platform for law enforcement to find traffickers in plain sight. This is a great point, but how can we go about making the internet a hostile place for traffickers? How do we use adult ads to catch criminals and protect their victims? Is it a policeperson’s job to pore over escort ads for code words indicating a child victim or nonconsensual adult? Or is it possible for Craigslist, law enforcement and advocacy organizations to work together on ending human trafficking? What would a collaboration like that look like, and how do we get started?
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Editor’s Note: Want to read more about the Craiglist Sex Panic? Melissa Gira Grant, a member of our team, published a piece on AlterNet about the situation called “Hypocritical Legal Crusade Against Craigslist Will Not Solve Violence Against Sex Trafficking Victims.”
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