Craigslist erotic services ads: AJC get it so, so, so very wrong
By now you might have heard that Craigslist is ending its erotic services section.
This is a little confusing to me, since they are replacing the category with a new category called “adult.” How this is not a simple renaming of an existing category still defeats me. Oh, right: because Craigslist employees are going to “review” the ads in the adult category. Well that makes me feel so much better. Because requiring sex workers to fork over their credit card information in order to post an ad wasn’t enough.
The ending of erotic services ads comes on the heels of the murder of a masseuse who advertised on Craigslist in Boston. Which is a bit like shutting down banks and opening new institutions where you store your money, but which are not called banks, because there are bank robbers out there.
Naturally, coverage from mainstream media has been what you would expect: sensationalistic, inaccurate, in many cases wildly irrelevant, and with a deafening lack of sex workers’ voices.
The AJC did a particularly stellar job with this article on the matter. Have a look at this lede, why don’t you:
Atlanta children will be a little safer now that Craigslist will no longer post prostitution and other “erotic services” ads, but additional precautions are needed, an Atlanta anti-child prostitution group said Wednesday.
WTF???????
Where to even begin?
When Rusty showed me this article in his Google Reader, I was all inspired and motivated to take Dacia’s message from this weekend about getting our voices heard in the media to heart and write a letter to the editor. I could do this! Short, to the point. On message. 150 words or less.
Then I read the full article and the WTF-ness of it was just so overwhelming that I felt paralyzed at the prospect of trying to condense a response to the necessary length for a letter to the editor.
I feel shitty about that because I do think it’s important to respond to the media in the media’s space. But all too often the media doesn’t offer space that’s meaingful, and so, I’m doing what I always do: using the space I’ve carved out for myself to spell out exactly what the hell is wrong with this, in way more than 150 words.
Looking just at the lede… I really don’t know what goes through people’s minds. Atlanta’s children will be safer? What?? Do these people truly believe that traffickers – yes, actual child traffickers, not adult sex workers posting ads for their own services – are going to go, “Oh, Craigslist shut down its erotic services section; shucks! Now there’s nothing we can do! Oh well, no more trafficking!” Because that’s what that line seems to be saying. And for anyone who believes that, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Here’s the deal. Actual traffickers? Scary, dangerous, powerful people. Tough to go after. Lots of risk involved. And you know what else? Usually not posting on fucking Craigslist!! But of course (as Ren has pointed out) it’s far easier to make a big show of “cracking down on child prostitution” by arresting a bunch of adult sex workers, a situation wherein the state essentially becomes a pimp (for another nice dose of irony there) and keeps that door revolving, than it is to go after actual traffickers. Because that doesn’t titillate readers or make enticing headlines.
Like many cities, Atlanta had been doing police stings to “crack down on child prostitution.” What ended up happening? Law enforcement dollars and resources were devoted to giving criminal records to adult women simply trying to make a living, while violent crime continues to rise. The AJC played a nice role in that, too, by posting the full names and photos of many of those workers arrested (not linking to an article because I do not want to contribute to further outing of those women).
I feel so much safer now, don’t you? Now that those dirty whores aren’t earning money (and subsequently paying taxes) somewhere off in a hotel room?
It’s for the children!
These stings have been equally successful in protecting the children elsewhere across the country. Chicago, for example:
Perhaps you’ve heard about Operation Cross Country, a three-day, nationwide FBI operation that was supposedly targeting child prostitution trafficking. I didn’t realize it had happened right here in Chicago. “Of those arrested in the Chicago area, 5 were charged with running prostitution operations, 34 were charged with prostitution, and 5 were customers, according to the release. No minors were found.” (Emphasis mine)
In that case, SWOP-Chicago put it well:
To target child prostitution and trafficking is one thing. To scapegoat sex workers and crackdown on prostitution in the name of preventing trafficking is a horse of a different color. It’s a waste of money and it’s a waste of tax-payer resources. And if you really care about “rescuing” sex workers, why the fuck are you giving them felony records?
Operation Cross Country is not about ending the exploitation of children and those who are trafficked against their will. It’s using this exploitation as a smokescreen for persecuting sex workers on the altar of sex panic.
But back to the AJC article. I have a serious problem with this line:
As recently as February, 176 girls were prostituted for sex on Craigslist, she said.
There is no sourcing for this. Where did they get that information? Police reports? If so, of what nature? Or maybe sources other than police reports? And if so, what were those? I have seen all too often how “facts” like this are crafted in order to fit an agenda. Without knowing where this information is being drawn from, I don’t trust it one damn bit. Those 176 prostituted girls might very well be escorts who are legal adults. We don’t know.
The above was attributed to Kaffie McCullough, director of the anti-child prostitution group A Future. Not A Past. This group takes an “end demand” approach to ending child prostitution, according to their web site. Yet all the red flags are there. The conflation of exploitation of minors with consensual adult sex work. The vague and brief language on their web site. The lack of support for decriminalization of prostitution (which would be a huge help in the fight against trafficking of both children and adults, because far too often when either children or adults are “rescued,” they are entered into the criminal justice system; some rescue). Oh and did you know, according to A Future. Not A Past.’s web site, this is one of the warning signs that a minor might be a victim of trafficking:
Inappropriate dress, including oversized clothing or overtly sexy clothing
?????
Yeah. If she dresses like a slut or a weirdo, she must be trafficked! It’s that easy to spot!
How out of touch with reality are these people?
Furthermore, when someone who claims to care about children says something like this (again quoting from the AJC article)…
“I’m glad because with all the press Craigslist had been getting it was just way too easy for someone to buy an underage girl on the Internet,” McCullough said.
…well I have a major problem with that, too. Another red flag. You’re talking about trafficking victims having a future and yet you use incredibly dehumanizing language. Buy a girl? Are you fucking KIDDING me?
I’m exhausted. I’ve written over 1200 words and there’s still so much more that could be said about the AJC article. It really depresses me sometimes when I realize, yet again, that this is how much of the public at large views sex work. They think these tactics are okay. They think, I guess, that Craigslist truly is overflowing with ads for underage girls. I don’t know what they think, exactly. But I know it’s fucked up, seriously wrong, and perpetuates harmful conditions for sex workers and victims of trafficking.
I don’t know what else to say. I’ll leave you with words of wisdom from Jill Brenneman:
When I did need help, when I was facing violence and coercion in the sex industry, none of the current anti trafficking measures would have applied or helped, I couldn’t go the cops or the justice system because in the US being a prostitute is illegal, the clients getting arrested,,, so what??? Great so the whole thing which was underground in the first place just moves farther underground. Not to mention I went into the sex industry for a reason. To make money to survive. I didn’t need the clients arrested because they were clients, I was there to make money to eat, to live, there was a need for the clients. I needed the ones arrested that beat the shit out of me, or raped me, or forced me to do things without my consent. I needed them arrested for rape, for assault, not on some minor misdemeanor that they could wash away with a visit to “John School” in some lame ass plea bargain. I needed labor and human rights so that an abusive, sadistic pimp, didn’t have criminalization to use against me to keep under control. As long as the whole thing is illegal the cops were more his allies than they ever could have been mine as I was more afraid of being arrested, or worse, being blown off because I was a prostitute and sent back to him to face a very angry pimp. I needed human rights.
Seriously, sometimes I wonder what it’s going to take to get through to some people.
Oh, and on that note: I might as well publicly state right now that I want to bring the Speak Up! media training seminar to Atlanta, and I am going to work to make it happen.
Excellent write-up. You should send a link to this to the writer and to the AJC’s public editor, the latter of whom is on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/ajceditor
Ugh. Great post.
It’s amazing that some people will brush off their hands and say “Yep, we fixed it”, when all they really did was change the name of the Craigslist section. It (sort of) reminds me of the same logic behind the ridiculous requirement that we have to show–and enter into a database–our government-issued IDs when buying pseudoephedrine at the grocery store. BECAUSE METH MANUFACTURERS WILL TOTALLY SHOW THEIR IDS. Problem solved. No more meth, right? Ridiculous.
(Of course, there’s no comparison between showing my ID when I have the sniffles and the plight of sex workers. I’m just sayin’.)
Uhm, how did we go from adult woman gets killed from psycho on Craigslist to OMG, THINK OF THE CHILDREN? I mean really. That guy could have been killing women who were selling furniture on Craigsist and they probably would decried the use of the internets.
To be fair, home grown meth labs have decreased.
But Mexican gangs have picked up the slack and are now trafficking it in the country at a greater rate. w00t!
Inappropriate dress, including oversized clothing or overtly sexy clothing
So, when are they going to start raiding the average nightclub where women dress “overtly sexy” on the weekend (who gets to judge?) or the hip-hop/house nights where everyone dresses in oversized clothing?
What continues to piss me off about the flip conflation of child sexual exploitation and adult sex work is that NO ONE who makes those comments would dare apply that to the “sacred tradition” of heterosexual weddings and marriage and the proliferation of child brides. Using that logic, the entire Western wedding industry should be persecuted to the nth degree. Churches should be ripe for raids on Saturdays because, I mean, who’s to say the woman walking down the aisle is actually doing so of her own volition and isn’t actually a child forced into the situation? Or hell, how about just plain old forced/arranged marriage?
I mean, think of the CHILDREN!!eleventy1!!
Furthermore, exactly where was this McCullough finding all this ease in “buying a girl” online?
I swear, if I ever become Prime Minister, I’d go after the traffickers with the fucking SAS and intelligence services. If it means risking provoking a war with Russia, are they really going to go to war to protect fucking child molesters?
Of course, it’s easy for me to say that – the chances of me being elected PM are as close to zero as makes no difference (on account of being a commie, a sadist, gender-variant and all the rest…) – but seriously, I think that’s the level of response that’s needed to take on the problem effectively.
The trouble is, Western society wants to believe everybody is as nice as us and will do the decent thing if you just encourage them enough. That’s how come Stalin was able to conquer half of Europe at the end of WW2, and it’s how come we don’t seem to have the guts to go after the real bad guys when we need to. Much easier to pick on the little guy and blame him (or her, in the case of this Craigslist thing)
That article is terrible. If I can find time to write about it later I will.
Part of me still wants to try to write a letter to the editor. We’ll see if I have the intestinal fortitude.
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