This weekly column covers the intersection of gender, sex, and politics. If there’s an issue you think I should be writing about, let me know.
Over the weekend, Mayor Sam Adams signed on to a resolution with the US Conference of Mayors to require classifieds site Backpage.com to change the way it takes escort ads.
The big question with this issue is: How can sex be safely sold online? And when it’s exploitive—allowing people easy access to underage kids—who bears the responsibility?
Backpage is a Craigslist-like site that’s a bulletin board for all kinds of postings, from people looking to sell boats to a “VERY open minded hot Japanese & Italian Mixed star with sexy natural curves” who is just looking to enjoy herself in the Portland area. While it’s just one website, Backpage has sparked major controversy in the Northwest, with Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn leading the charge for the website to require in-person ID checks of people listing escort ads. Like the controversy over underage sex ads on Craigslist, McGinn, Adams, and others say Backpage’s process of allowing posters to just click a box saying they’re over 18 enables easy exploitation of children.
Washington even passed a “Backpage law” this year making it a crime to publish—knowingly or unknowingly—ads for sex with minors. The law was supposed to go into effect this month, but <a href=”http://www.salon.com/2012/06/05/backpage_sues_washington_state/singleton/
“>Backpage filed suit to stop it. Their argument is that the law violates the First Amendment, since the government is mandating what kind of speech can be posted on a website. Framed that way, this law is a chilling precedent. But Backpage is no WikiLeaks. We should be able to distinguish legally between sites that are posting useful information the government doesn’t want out for political reasons and sites that post content that leads directly to the exploitation of children.
This is an issue that specifically weighs on alt-weekly newspapers. Backpage runs the classified ads for alt-weeklies nationwide, including Village Voice media papers and Willamette Week, which doesn’t list escort ads directly on their site but has a click-through to see them. The Mercury stopped hosting escort ads a couple years ago, but in our paper’s early years, we required only online verification of age. In the early 2000s (no one at this paper remembers exactly when), we switched to requiring the type of in-person age verification McGinn and Adams are pushing for.
It seems to me that the mayors are taking the right tactic by pressuring Backpage and similar sites to change their policies voluntarily. An online, illegal sex economy is always going to exist on the fringes of the internet. But making the mainstream players change their ways to require in-person age verification will—hopefully—make exploitation of young people a less attractive option for pimps and make the sites safer spaces for adults who are seeking legal, consensual sex.
But I’m convinced by Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna’s argument that a law is necessary to back up voluntary changes, especially since the law provides a defense for people who check IDs of sex ad-placers in-person (even if they’re scammed by a fake ID):
Backpage is many things, but an ally in the fight against trafficking it’s not. It’s a cash machine churning out tens of millions a year for its owners by charging $1 and up for prostitution advertisements. And it’s found frequently in police reports. As the Seattle Times reported on May 7, “Since 2010, Seattle police have recovered 24 juveniles advertised on Backpage.com, two of them in the past two months.”
Washington state’s Legislature this year passed a groundbreaking bill making it a crime to post minors for sale online, while providing an affirmative defense for those who can demonstrate they verified a person’s age before accepting the advertisement.
Wow. This is not going to work at all. We had this same conversation about Craigslist, and what happened? The problems moved. Setting this shit up doesn’t fix the fuck’n problem, ya’ fuck’n donks! Stop trying to censor shit to fix problems, it doesn’t work.
Let me quote Jacob Appelbaum on the issue of child pornography:
“As it turns out, that with the internet we learn there is an empidemic in society of child abuse. That is what we learn with this child pornography issue. I think it’s better to call it child exploitation. We see evidence of this. Covering it up, erasing it, is I think it is a travisty to do that, because in fact you can learn so much about society as a whole. For example, you can learn… I’m…-I’m obviously never going to have a career in politics after I finish this sentence, but just to be clear about this right: you learn for example who is producing it, you learn about the people who are victimized, it is impossible for people to ignore the problem. But the answer is not to destroy a medium, or to police that media. It is, when you find evidence, to prosecute that crime that the media has documented. It is not to weaken that medium, it is not to criple society as a whole over this thing. The easy thing to do is to pretend it doesn’t exist, and to stop [there], and to pretend that this stops the abuse.”
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The same applies here. Law Enforcement needs to be enforceing the fucking law and arresting the pimps – maybe they would have time to do this if they weren’t too busy trying to bust black people all of the time for drugs.
When it was banned on Craigslist it moved to Backpage, next it will probably move overseas, and then there’s nothing to be done. Get it through you’re thick fuck’n heads people.
Expecting people who already engage in borderline illegal behavior to police themselves is juuuuust a bit naive.
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