Craigslist slapped a "censored" banner over its "Adult Services" ad section in an apparent victory for anti-sex-slavery campaigners, but don't think it will do anything to stop the trafficking of girls and women: There's a good chance that the end of these ads will make their lives worse.
The first thing to note is that there are very few facts about how many ads on CL are actually for sex slaves. The state attorneys general who pressured CL into folding identified only three in their letter to the company. The Polaris Project , which campaigns against modern day slavery, says " 14,, foreign nationals are trafficked into the country each year.
Much of the impetus for the anti-CL movement comes from this CNN video, " Men paid to rape me via Craigslist ," in which a reporter located a woman who says she was forced by her pimp to be a prostitute. She said:.
But the CNN reporter -- and the anti-sex-slave campaigners -- all fail to ask the same question: Why is stopping trafficking CL's responsibility and not that of law enforcement? Put another way, if CNN can track down a sex slave in an afternoon, why are the state attorneys general sitting in front of their office word processors writing letters to CL when they could be staking out hotel rooms? The uncomfortable legal truth about why prosecutors are writing protest letters instead of bringing charges is that CL probably has the law on its side :.
Of course, they won't be going back to the street. They'll be going to Google, or Yahoo! So congratulations, anti-slavery campaigners. You've taken what you alleged was America's greatest single slave market and scattered its denizens hither and yon, without making a single arrest.
