Craiglist accused of sex trafficking
The popular website Craigslist has an adult section that looks like an on line company service, where a large number of women are offering their companionship in exchange for a certain amount of money.
The question is if the women appear there with their consent or if they are sex slaves. This question raised after two women, who described themselves as “Survivors of Craigslist Sex Trafficking”, declared in last Friday’s Washington Post that their pictures were not posted there willingly. One of the two young women, who calls herself “AK”, told that she met a man twice her age that posted her photo online on the adult section of the Craigslist and compromised her life. She said that she was sold for sex at the truck stops and at the cheap motels 10 hours each night with 10 different men and when one of them was gone there was already another waiting in the parking lot. AK says that the pimps moved from city to city and that they collected all the money that those men would give her. She was not able to quit because they would punish her. She said that she was not alone, she was together with another girl, “MC”, and they were both forced to sit on their laptops, post pictures and answer the ads on Craigslist while their pimps earned more than 1,500 dollars a night. They wrote to the founder of the Craiglist, Craig Newmark, because they wanted him to know how the website destroyed their lives and how easy it is for those men to make horrific acts.
A recent example is the one of the 26 years old District of Columbia man named Brandon Petty which was accused of two sexual assaults of women he met through Craigslist. The first one proved to have taken place on the 8th of September 2009 and the second on the 21st of April 2010 and both of them implied him threatening the women with a knife to their throat. He now faces up to 30 years in prison. Malika Saada Saar, the executive director and founder of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a non-profit organization assisting the two young women assaulted by Petty says that this can be considered both trafficking and sexual exploitation and compares it to cocaine trafficking. If it is not allowed to sell cocaine through the Craigslist, why would they be allowed to sell prostitution? The adult postings on Craigslist are now monitored by general attorneys from 39 states for what is considered to be blatant prostitution.
Someone named Jim, who is believed to be the company CEO Jim Buckmaster, defends the company on the Craiglist blog and says that everything possible will be done to assist the two victims and says that criminal use of the site is extremely rare since it is used by more than 50 million Americans. The Rebecca project officials declare that they are very disappointed with the site’s response, since they consider the website to play a major role in the sex trafficking industry that affects as many as 300,000 American children each year. They expect Craig Newmark to respond to these accusations and are asking him to take responsibility for the actions of the website that bears his name. Both AK and MC say that they consider Craig Newmark as a pimp since he was collecting money for their ads.
