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.
Alissa, her street name, escaped that life and is now a
24-year-old college senior planning to become a lawyer — but she will always
have a scar on her cheek where a pimp gouged her with a potato peeler as a
warning not to escape. “Like cattle owners brand their cattle,” she said,
fingering her cheek, “he wanted to brand me in a way that I would never
forget.”
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.
Attorneys general from 48 states have written a
joint letter to Village Voice Media, pleading with it to get out of the
flesh trade. An
online petition at Change.org has gathered 94,000 signatures asking Village
Voice Media to stop taking prostitution advertising. Instead, the company has
used The Village Voice to mock its critics. Alissa thought about using her real
name for this article but decided not to for fear that Village Voice would
retaliate.
Court records and public officials back Alissa’s
account, and there is plenty of evidence that under-age girls are marketed on
Backpage. Arrests in such cases have been reported in at least 22 states.
Just this month, prosecutors in New York City filed
charges in a case involving a gang that allegedly locked a 15-year-old Long
Island girl in an empty house, drugged her, tied her up, raped her, and
advertised her on Backpage. After a week of being sold for sex, prosecutors in
Queens said, the girl escaped.
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 and said
that the Long Island girl was marketed on 13 other Web sites as well. But if
street pimps go to jail for profiteering on under-age girls, should their media
partners like Village Voice Media really get a pass?
Paradoxically, Village Voice began as an alternative
newspaper to speak truth to power. It publishes some superb journalism. So it’s
sad to see it accept business from pimps in the greediest and most depraved
kind of exploitation.
True, many prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by
adult women acting on their own without coercion; they’re not my concern. Other
ads are placed by pimps: the Brooklyn district attorney’s office says that the
great majority of the sex trafficking cases it prosecutes involve girls
marketed on Backpage.
Alissa, who grew up in a troubled household in Boston,
has a story that is fairly typical. She says that one night when she was 16 —
and this matches the account she gave federal prosecutors — a young man approached
her and told her she was attractive. She thought that he was a rapper, and she
was flattered. He told her that he wanted her to be his girlfriend, she recalls
wistfully.
Within a few weeks, he was prostituting her — even as
she continued to study as a high school sophomore. Alissa didn’t run away
partly because of a feeling that there was a romantic bond, partly because of
Stockholm syndrome, and partly because of raw fear. She says violence was
common if she tried connecting to the outside world or if she didn’t meet her
daily quota for cash.
“He would get aggressive and strangle me and physically
assault me and threaten to sell me to someone that was more violent than him,
which he eventually did,” Alissa recalled. She said she was sold from one pimp
to another several times, for roughly $10,000 each time.
She was sold to johns seven days a week, 365 days a
year. After a couple of years, she fled, but a pimp tracked her down and — with
the women he controlled — beat and stomped Alissa, breaking her jaw and several
ribs, she said. That led her to cooperate with the police.
There are no simple solutions to end sex trafficking,
but it would help to have public pressure on Village Voice Media to stop
carrying prostitution advertising. The Film Forum has already announced that it
will stop buying ads in The Village Voice. About 100 advertisers have dropped
Rush Limbaugh’s radio show because of his demeaning remarks about women. Isn’t
it infinitely more insulting to provide a forum for the sale of women and
girls?
Let’s be honest: 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.
Alissa, who now balances her college study with part-time work at a restaurant and at Fair Girls, an antitrafficking organization, deserves the last word. “For a Web site like Backpage to make $22 million off our backs,” she said, “it’s like going back to slave times.”