In the wake of claims that Craigslist has been complicit in the sex trafficking of under-aged girls, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, and two human rights groups have called for Craigslist to excise the “adult” section from its site.
Each month Craigslist facilitates billions of transactions and boasts over 50 million users selling and exchanging everything from old sofas, bicycles, babysitting services to, apparently, sex.
Craigslist has received a great deal of criticism and scrutiny in the past for the lax enforcement of its “adult” section. In May 2009, the site’s CEO Jim Buckmaster pledged to employ more stringent screening methods after 43 state prosecutors threatened Craigslist with legal action.
The new screening practices appear to have been ineffective as more groups, such as The Rebecca Project for Human Rights and the Fair Fund, call for either closer scrutiny or the section’s termination.
Reinforcing their claims — that Craigslist turns a blind eye to online sex sales — is a CNN investigative report into Craigslist, which ran last week. CNN’s Amber Lyon posted a fake advertisement implying that she was a child prostitute — which Craigslist allowed to be posted. After three hours Lyon had received 15 calls.
When Lyon confronted Craig Newmark, the site’s founder, at a George Washington University “Tech Conference,” she asked him, “What are you doing to protect these girls.” Newmark did not reply.
When she presented him with blatantly sexual ads featuring words like “innocent,” “young,” and “sweet,” and asked Newmark why all such postings were never reported, Newmark said not a word, leaving an exceptionally awkward silence.
Craigslist CEO Buckmaster has responded defensively, expressing outrage at the thought that Craigslist has been a tool for the victimization of children. “We are dedicated to eliminating it entirely however, and in this regard we have been working for years to ensure that craigslist is very much part of the solution to crimes such as trafficking and exploitation of minors,” he said in a blog post.
The Rebecca Project, a national advocacy and policy group for vulnerable women and girls, has been at the forefront of the fight against sex trafficking on Craigslist. Malika Saada Saar, founder and director of the foundation, told The Daily Caller that her group became focused on the methods of trafficking while working with girls victimized by the sex trade.
“We wanted to begin to address what is the main facilitator of the type of online trafficking that we see, which is Craigslist,” Saar said. “Confronting Craigslist is part of our larger goal of ending sex trafficking in the United States.”
Saar said that she and her group have been seeking aid from the federal government to pressure Craigslist to effectively police its own site. Last month, Saar and one of the victimized girls featured in a recent ad campaign targeting Craigslist met with Attorney General Eric Holder to inform him of their concerns.
“The Attorney General was outraged and indignant that this is occurring,” Saar said. “During our meeting he turned to one of the victims and committed that he would not allow another young girl have to come into the office of another attorney general and share such a story.”
Andrea Powell, director of the Fair Fund, a human trafficking prevention outfit, told TheDC that despite a willingness to hear about the plight of children victimized on Craigslist, she believes the administration will do little to force the company to reform its practices.
“When we were on Capitol Hill when my client (one of the victimized girls) spoke. She wasn’t allowed to go with the rest of the team to the White House,” Powell said. “We stayed back because when she was being victimized as a victim of sex trafficking, she was arrested on a solicitation charge, so the White House wouldn’t let her in because she had a criminal background. So we were a little upset to hear that Craig Newmark has had meetings in the White House but that the victim couldn’t go.”
According to White House records, the last time Newmark visited the White House was in late February.
Newmark also donated thousands of dollars to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and got a proverbial “shout out” in then Sen. Obama’s service platform (in which he expressed his desire to design a web based service program that would be “the Craigslist for service”).
Obama is also featured prominently on Newmark’s Facebook profile picture.
While the human rights groups look for avenues to pressure Newmark and Buckmaster, they are hopeful that they will not need to take legal action.
“Instead of going after Craig through litigation, we really want to see if he does the right thing,” Saar said. “I want Craig to shut the adult section down until he can create a comprehensive screening process and he can put to use the $36 million that his company earns in profits from the adult services section alone annually toward developing this type of screening process to ensure that no more young girls are victimized.”
One of the more vocal opponents to Craigslist sex trafficking has been Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Schakowsky told TheDC that she plans to push for hearings on the domestic sex trade when Congress comes back in the fall.
“The sex trade does not just happen in far off countries — it’s a very real domestic problem that has been boosted by Craigslist, which appears to be the go-to marketplace, particularly for the sale of young women and girls,” Schakowsky said. “I have met with some of these young women who were trapped in horrible situations as teens and were forced by a pimp to arrange for customers online. They were intimidated and abused if they didn’t continue to keep re-posting their ads on Craigslist so they’d remain at the top of the page in order to ensure they had a steady stream of clients.”
Schakowsky continued, saying, “This is absolutely unconscionable, and not only because these women are being abused in this way, but because the online marketplace found on Craigslist is making a huge profit to the great detriment of these women’s lives, dignity, and emotional and physical health.”
Repeated attempts to contact Craigslist for comment on this story were unsuccessful.