Please read these words from sex trafficking survivors who were given refuge and assistance by the Fair Fund and Crittenton organizations.
Dear Craig,
Although we have not met, we are certain you would not want what happened to us or to thousands of girls like us to ever happen again.
Craig, I am AK. In 2009, I met a man twice my age who pretended to be my boyfriend, and my life as an average girl -- looking forward to college, doing my chores, and hanging out with my friends -- ended. This "boyfriend" soon revealed he was a pimp. He put my picture on Craigslist, and I was sold for sex by the hour at truck stops and cheap motels, 10 hours with 10 different men every night. This became my life.
Men answered the Craigslist advertisements and paid to rape me. The $30,000 he pocketed each month was facilitated by Craigslist 300 times. I personally know of over 20 girls who were trafficked through Craigslist. Like me, they were taken from city to city, each time sold on a different Craigslist site -- Philadelphia, Dallas, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C. My phone would ring, and soon men would line up in the parking lot. One Craigslist caller viciously brutalized me, threatening to dump my body in a river. Miraculously, I survived.
Craig, I am MC. I was first forced into prostitution when I was 11 years old by a 28-year-old man. I am not an exception. The man who trafficked me sold so many girls my age, his house was called "Daddy Day Care." All day, other girls and I sat with our laptops, posting pictures and answering ads on Craigslist. He made $1,500 a night selling my body, dragging me to Los Angeles, Houston, Little Rock -- and one trip to Las Vegas in the trunk of a car.
I am 17 now, and my childhood memories aren't of my family, going to middle school, or dancing at the prom. They are of making my own arrangements on Craigslist to be sold for sex, and answering as many ads as possible for fear of beatings and ice water baths.
Craig, we write this letter so you will know from our personal experiences how Craigslist makes horrific acts like this so easy to carry out, and the men who arrange them very rich.
Craig, we know you oppose trafficking and exploitation. But right now, Craigslist is the choice of traffickers because it's so well known and there are rarely consequences to using it for these illegal acts. We've heard that the Adult Services section of Craigslist brings in $36 million a year by charging for these ads. These profits are made at the expense of girls like us, who are lured, kidnapped, and forced to feed the increasing demand for child rape. New traffickers are putting up ads every day, because they know it's less risky and more profitable to sell girls on Craigslist than to deal drugs.
Please, Craig, close down the Adult Services section. Saving even one child is worth it. It could have been us.
Sincerely,
AK & MC
Survivors of Craigslist Sex Trafficking
So the solution isn't blanket banning the adult section, but to crack down on paedophilia and exploitation of adults.
The above article is 100% truth. Unfortunately. Please read http://abcnews.go.com/US/domestic-sex-trafficking-increasing-united-states/story?id=10557194
== In the USA ==On August 5, 2008 U.S. Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine uncovered discrepancies in a program dedicated to cracking down on human trafficking, McClatchy Newspapers report. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales spent millions of dollars on combating the international trafficking of indentured servants and sex slaves, including by creating task forces across the U.S. that identified and helped victims. Over four years, the department paid $50 million to the task forces and other groups. Conservative groups, who pressured the administration to go after sex trafficking more aggressively, applauded his efforts. Critics have questioned whether the problem was being hyped. Fine found in an audit issued that the task forces and other groups set up to help were 'significantly' overstating the number of victims they served. By examining a sampling of cases, Fine found the task forces had exaggerated by as much as 165 percent. Making matters worse, the inflated numbers were included in annual reports to Congress" (Continued)
"== In the United Kingdom ==In October, 2009 - The biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country. The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.Nick Davis of the Guardian newspaper writes:Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all."
I volunteer for an organization that uses a software program specifically designed to comb through these Craigslist "adult services" ads in order to find possible trafficking situations (underage OR "legal" age...just because they're 18 and up doesn't automatically mean they are willing participants).
I wish I could show you some of the ads we've flagged, since you can't seem to believe that this is possibly going on...but yes, they exist, even some with pictures that are very clearly young girls made up to look more mature than they really are (as in 13, 14 years old). These ads may not appear to be as common as the ads for "escorts" and "massages" and the like, but they are every bit as real, I assure you...and sometimes those massage offerings are thinly veiled trafficking situations as well.
To everyone else:
I appreciate Romulus' desire for proof right before his very eyes, but I hope anyone reading this article doesn't write this off as an exaggeration. Human trafficking in the US (via Craigslist or any other vehicle) is so unimaginable a situation that it can be very hard for people to believe, as you can see -- but this IS happening, it is tragic, and it MUST stop.
But how will it stop if people don't believe it's really happening?