Responding to Village Voice on Sex Trafficking

Responding to Village Voice on Sex Trafficking
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF March 21, 2012

After my Sunday column criticizing Village Voice Media for providing a forum for sex traffickers on its Backpage.com websites, Village Voice has struck back. It has just gone on line with an article “What Nick Kristof got wrong”:

The article begins:

Nicholas D. Kristof was wrong about the most devastating ‘fact’ in his Sunday, March 18th, column in The New York Times regarding Backpage.com. He wrote about an underage victim of human trafficking: “Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.” A video that accompanied his online op-ed was headlined: “Age 16, She Was Sold on Backpage.com” That is not true. According to Alissa’s court testimony, she was 16 in 2003. Backpage.com did not exist anywhere in America in 2003.

It’s interesting that Village Voice doesn’t dispute anything in my column or the accompanying video, but only the online blurb for the video. The Voice is right that Alissa was 16 in 2003 — for about two days. In fact, Alissa turned 16 at the end of 2003. So all during 2004, she was 16 years old. And so it was in 2004, not 2003, that she was traveling up and down the east coast being pimped. Backpage operated in at least 11 cities during 2004, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale, both of them cities Alissa where says she was pimped on Backpage. Then at 17, as Backpage expanded to 30 cities including Boston, she was pimped even more broadly on Backpage — and also in Village Voice print ads, she says.

Moreover, contrary to what the Voice says, Alissa continued in the sex trade until 2007, when she got out for good. Backpage was steadily expanding and becoming a major force in this period, and pimps routinely used it to sell her, she says.

I’m frankly a bit surprised that Village Voice is even trying to deny its role. Attorneys General around the country have linked Backpage to arrests for trafficking of underage girls in 22 different states. As my column noted, one recent case involved a 15-year-old girl here in New York. A previous column I wrote cited a 13-year-old girl peddled on Backpage.
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/responding-to-village-voice-on-sex-trafficking/

Where Pimps Peddle Their Goods - Backpage Village Voice Media

Where Pimps Peddle Their Goods
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
March 17, 2012

I WENT on a walk in Manhattan the other day with a young woman who once had to work these streets, hired out by eight pimps while she was just 16 and 17. She pointed out a McDonald’s where pimps sit while monitoring the girls outside, and a building where she had repeatedly been ordered online as if she were a pizza....

After Alissa testified against her pimps, six of them went to prison for up to 25 years. Yet these days, she reserves her greatest anger not at pimps but at companies that enable them. She is particularly scathing about Backpage.com, a classified advertising Web site that is used to sell auto parts, furniture, boats — and girls. Alissa says pimps routinely peddled her on Backpage.

“You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you?” she asked me. “No, but you can go to Backpage and buy me on Backpage.”

Backpage accounts for about 70 percent of prostitution advertising among five Web sites that carry such ads in the United States, earning more than $22 million annually from prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a media research and consulting company. It is now the premier Web site for human trafficking in the United States, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. And it’s not a fly-by-night operation. Backpage is owned by Village Voice Media, which also owns the estimable Village Voice newspaper....

Liz McDougall, general counsel of Village Voice Media, told me that it is “shortsighted, ill-informed and counterproductive” to focus on Backpage when many other Web sites are also involved, particularly because Backpage tries to screen out ads for minors and reports possible trafficking cases to the authorities. McDougall denied that Backpage dominates the field....

Backpage’s exit from prostitution advertising wouldn’t solve the problem, for smaller Web sites would take on some of the ads. But it would be a setback for pimps to lose a major online marketplace. When Craigslist stopped taking such ads in 2010, many did not migrate to new sites: online prostitution advertising plummeted by more than 50 percent, according to AIM Group.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/kristof-where-pimps-peddle-their-goods.html