I’m sure most of us are familiar with Craigslist, the online Web community where people post job opportunities, items for sale, and find activity partners. Over the past years, Craigslist has grown by leaps and bounds and now has websites representing over 300 U.S. cities. However, despite its millions of users and various social benefits, there’s a dark side of Craigslist that most users don’t see. In the “Erotic” section, human traffickers have found Craigslist to be one of the most efficient, effective, and free ways to post children and women for sale.
This happens in the United States every day, as well as in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Katherine Chon, Executive Director of the Polaris Project, wrote the following on Not For Sale, the campaign to end slavery in our lifetime:
In one recent case, two Chicago women were charged for selling girls as young as 14 years old on Craigslist. The girls were forced to have sex with 10-12 men per day, and the traffickers made tens of thousands of dollars. A Boston man and his niece were charged with plotting a child trafficking operation with teenagers as young as 13 by selling them on Craigslist to predators from Massachusetts to New York. These cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, law enforcement efforts to fight trafficking nationwide are consistently reporting a spike in online Craigslist ads, and how sex trafficking has “moved online” lately.
The Craigslist for Washington, DC is one of the most active, with an average of 500 sexually oriented ads per day. As Chon points put:
A significant percentage of these ads on Craigslist do not advertise solely “legal escort services” as Craigslist may like to believe. Instead, a considerable percentage of the ads are a thinly veiled guise for one of the many faces of human trafficking that exists here in the United States. Although Craigslist may convince itself that it has created a beneficial online venue for advertising legal escorts, in effect, what it has done is create a fertile ground for traffickers to further their trade in human misery.
Article comments
1 - Joy
This is incredible and outrageous. More people should be aware, and we should all be writing to craigslist demanding that they monitor and stop this crime from happening on their site.
2 - Franco
Is not one of the fastest ways to provide protective aid to these children to report it to Child Protective Services?
3 - Propagandist
I'm sure it happens but this might be an alarmist view. Things like this can happen anywhere where people meet to buy and sell goods. Before the era of Craigslist, it probably happened with newspaper classifieds. There are other avenues such as private MIRC groups, coded messages elsewhere like personals that appear nonchalant, etc.
It is a sick world but I dont think blaming craigslist will solve the problem.
4 - Somanjana
True, there are various avenues to garner child trafficking but friends, Craigslist has shaped up to be the most sought after medium to solicit prostitution because it's free, anonymous and the Web site's operators say they depend on viewers to police content. The wide reach and popularity of Craigslist makes the situation worse.
FACTS
1. Craigslist site exhibits local classifieds and forums for 450 cities worldwide, in all 50 US states and over 50 countries.
2. Craigslist gets more than 8 billion page views per month.
3. More than 25 million people each month use craigslist.
4. Craigslist users self-publish more than 20 million new classified ads each month.
5. Every 10 days there are 25,000 new ads posted in the erotic services section.
I work with a Human-Rights organization named Love146. We have initiated a campaign called "Call to Action" to fight child sex trafficking and exploitation on Craigslist. For further information on the Craigslist campaign.
For updates on child-sex trafficking and exploitation on Craigslist, please visit Love146's News Room.
5 - Irene Wagner
It doesn't take much more time to leave a brief protest note at
Craigslist's website's email-posting facility than it does to leave a comment here. Thanks for your good work, Shelley Seale.
6 - ai
there's more than one campaign to end slavery. check out freetheslaves.net and Kevin Bales's text Ending Slavery.
7 - Hannah Varner
Please watch this video!
8 - Ms. wanderer
Doesn't the fact that this is taking place online aid law enforcement in any way? It's going to go on regardless, unfortunately. It seem that if the selling of children is taking place online it provides an open portal to get to the root of the problem -- the traffickers.
(Poor Craig, I'm sure he is as concerned about child sex trafficking as anyone.)
9 - Mike
wow! I use craigs list all the time and I wasn't aware of this. Thanks for the info.