(CNN)On January 9, after an examination lasting over 21 months, a Senate subcommittee released a scathing report , discovering that categorized advertisements site Backpage.com purposefully assisted in online kid sex trafficking on the “adult” area of its site.
According to the report, Backpage did so by, to name a few things, filtering the text of ads to evaluate out words like “rape,” “schoolgirl” and “lolita” prior to publishing them, to hide the intent of the advertisements. Backpage likewise did not get rid of these ads or report them to police.
These findings are not a surprise to FAIR Girls, where roughly 90% of the girls and ladies we serve– some as young as 14– were offered by their traffickers on Backpage.
Shutting down the adult area of Backpage and holding its executives liable will not end all sex trafficking.
However, maybe future sites will observe the lessons of Backpage and in fact assist sex trafficking victims instead of earnings off of them.
And ideally we will supply the assistance that those victims require, after their traffickers are called to account.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/18/opinions/backpage-sex-trafficking/index.html
