Guest, Author at Shared Hope International

August 17, 2010 by Guest

Craig – The Most Successful Pimp in the World

by Linda Smith, President and Founder, Shared Hope International

Recent news reports have highlighted the role of Craigslist in facilitating commercial sex involving minors – domestic minor sex trafficking. However, as we advocate for the closure of Craigslist’s adult services web page, we must acknowledge that for the lucrative business of online classifieds for “adult services” will continue to exist as long as the fuel that keeps this seemingly endless problem alive exists – DEMAND.

Shared Hope International’s research has demonstrated the connection between increased access and increased demand for paid sexual services. More men and boys are receiving unsolicited Internet advertising for pornography – this explosion in the amount of pornography is causing an unprecedented demand for commercial sex with a female who looks young and healthy – this female is too often a girl. Thriving demand has led to the migration of criminal ventures to the anonymous world of the Internet.

Perusing the local street corner turns into a virtual experience
In the 1980’s, we decimated the pornography industry by focusing on its primary distribution system, the postal service. Today we are faced with a pornography industry a thousand times more pervasive as it utilizes the anonymity and accessibility of the Internet. The dissemination of pornography and access to commercial sex through computers brings the market directly into your home.

Today, anyone can go online to a number of classified services websites and purchase sex with a minor. Where ten years ago these prostituted youth – victims of sex trafficking – might have been forced to stand on a busy street corner, fulfilling a nightly quota for their controlling pimp, today they are more likely to be standing on the virtual street corner of Craigslist, out of sight from those not looking for them but easily accessible for the shopper in the mall of human product.

Craig, the most successful pimp in the world
Craigslist is the giant in the nascent online classifieds industry. Ever the opportunists, child predators have spotted the potential of Craigslist’s “adult services” page and the website has become a bustling marketplace for the buying and selling of our kids for sex.

A new slavery block has been created on Craigslist and many other online classified web pages, and the modern-day slave is an American child under 18 years of age being recruited and ensnared through manipulation and violence by predators who sell them for sex in their own towns and cities across the U.S.

Craigslist has been under attack for facilitating the trafficking of women and children for sex by not preventing it from occurring on their web pages. Sadly, this has made Craig America’s most successful pimp, bringing in an estimated $36 million in profit from the posting of adult services ads last year.

In a 2009 lawsuit filed by the Cook County, Illinois Sheriff against Craigslist for creating a public nuisance through its provision of a forum for prostitution services, the judge said, “We cannot treat Craigslist as if it did create those ads.” While technically true that Craigslist is not creating the ads, shouldn’t they have a responsibility to their customers to refrain from posting them? Is the claim by Craigslist that they monitor the ads and remove those that suggest exploitation sufficient when we know from the mouths of survivors of domestic minor sex trafficking that they have all been marketed on Craigslist?

A minimal response
Craigslist states that the “criminal misuse of the site is quite rare,” and that the site is “one of the few bright spots” when it comes to fighting against child exploitation because the company manually screens each adult services advertisement to filter out those advertising prostitution. In addition, Craigslist claims to assist and be a tool for law enforcement in investigations because it provides phone numbers used in the ad posting and created a victim search interface. But it is clear that neither Craigslist nor any other online classified service can keep an adult service page clean and there can never be enough law enforcement or staff to enforce it. Craigslist claims to have screened hundreds of thousands of ads submitted for posting to the adult services web page, but has only reported 109 of the rejected ads to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for investigation into the potential of an exploited child in the ad. It is encouraging that Craigslist is cooperating with law enforcement and we commend the efforts and successes of law enforcement to investigate these heinous crimes, but maintaining the website for the purpose of corralling buyers and sellers of sex with children is inexcusable. Craigslist and similar online classified services are creating a marketplace and increasing sales as a result of the access.

Craigslist argues that if we close these web pages down in America, then this activity will simply move to Internet sites hosted in other countries – let it! This excuse for failing to prevent exploitation of children through online advertising of prostitution is not convincing to those Americans living with the effects of advertised sexual exploitation on their city streets, draining law enforcement capacity and most important, putting their children and families at risk.

One exploited girl is too many – legislators must respond
“Craigslist is making money misery by misery while we are left to rescue and restore the victims one life at a time,” explained Linda Smith, Founder and President of Shared Hope International.

Almost every girl who survives sex trafficking reports having been sold through Craigslist to ten or more men every day, sometimes forced to post the ad themselves – the conduit to their repeated sexual exploitation. Many girls don’t survive to tell. A conservative calculation reveals that a child victim of prostitution is raped more than one thousand times by as many different men over the course of one year enslaved.

While regulators, legislators and courts wrangle over the ability to control the content and outline the responsibilities of online classified businesses, we must put a stop to this 21^st century slave market that permits Craigslist to profit from the demand for commercial sex with our children.

End Craigslist by ending DEMAND

Although Craigslist adult services must be shut down, so too must the demand. If there were no demand for commercial sex with women and children, the market disappears. We cannot turn our backs on the rising demand for commercial sex with our women and children. Shutting down Craigslist adult services, and all those online classified businesses like it, is certainly a necessary step to stop the exploitation, but let’s be certain not to lose sight of the problem of demand.

June 11, 2010 by Guest

I am a Giant Fan, but not a fan of this Giant

Sports are part of the fabric of America. The national pastimes, whether baseball or football, allow everyday people to escape their problems for a three hour period and root, root, root for the home team. However, professional and even amateur sports have become big business through enormous television contracts, merchandising, and billion dollar sports stadiums. We are not just fans anymore; we are also consumers with choices. The salaries of athletes and coaches have gradually grown in millions with the cost being passed onto consumers. A consumer’s taste can drive the market and decide the millions doled out to our favorite sports stars. With this power, you would think we would use it more often.

A percentage of athletes, like a percentage of the populace as a whole, take the field or court with a criminal record or pending case files. With a diligent sports media, we are informed immediately when charges filed against athletes and have the opportunity to decide whether he is guilty to our eyes. Debates ensue about whether the athlete is more susceptible to criminality because of his background or the temptations that the sports star lifestyle provides. Tiger Woods’ arrogance to carry on numerous affairs is said to be linked to a feeling of immunity as the best golfer in the world. NFL Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s choice of women and place of intercourse is to be forgiven because his team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, cannot adequately replace a two-time Super Bowl champion. Lawrence Taylor, also a two-time champ and one of the greatest defensive players in NFL history is given the benefit of the doubt as he didn’t know that the woman he paid for sex with was only sixteen years old.

Fans – as a consumer of a high end product – demand success out of their home teams. They want great athletes on the field of play to enjoy their skills and to let out their frustrations upon. As children, sports fans grow up idolizing their favorite athlete. The expectation is of great performance, but also great humanity. As adults, sports fans know that athletes are fallible, but tend to ignore their flaws if they provide great performance. As sports media has grown, the enormity of sports has been overstated. Teams are now believed to carry cities out of the doldrums, i.e. the Saints in New Orleans.

What we tend to forget as sports fans is that we are also citizens and our consuming habits can change behavior. Fair trade goods are growing in popularity in the United States and are an important part of the work to end modern-day slavery. Keeping companies accountable for their labor practices changes corporate behavior in the same way that refusing to purchase Tiger Woods’ sponsored goods or Ben Roethlisberger jerseys does. Telling your favorite team that employing a sexual batterer is unacceptable will send the message to that athlete that the privilege of earning millions of dollars to play a game can be taken away. Sports may be a billion dollar industry, like sex trafficking, but we are not powerless to change its practices.

April 14, 2010 by Guest

Finding the face behind the numbers

The issue of human trafficking, and sex trafficking in particular, can be overwhelming. 27 million people enslaved worldwide. Over 300,000 young girls at risk of being trafficked into the commercial sex industry in the United States alone. These numbers set our heads spinning and make us wonder: how we can sustain our compassion for those who are suffering when we are likely overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this issue?

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” -Mother Teresa

Mother Theresa’s quote illustrates the difficulty faced by many NGO’s – donations dry up and political will disappears once an issue becomes too large to emotionally process. The charitable nature of human beings or their outrage against injustice is limited by a process called “psychic numbing” posited by Oregon professor Paul Slovic. In simple terms, psychic numbing explains the phenomenon that human beings are more likely to act to stop the suffering of one human being than tackling ever-increasing numbers of human suffering.

NGO’s that seek to end human trafficking worldwide must base their strategy on the studies of Dr. Slovic or will have their cries fall on deaf ears. Our brains can grasp the pain of our fellow man, but do not go through a process of multiplying this suffering amongst our fellow brethren. As Slovic says, “Numerical representations of human lives do not necessarily convey the importance of those lives. All too often the numbers represent dry statistics, “human beings with the tears dried off,” that lack feeling and fail to motivate action.”

The effects of psychic numbing are seen in the media coverage of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the HBO documentary “Reporter”, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was followed on his journey to the DRC to document the atrocities. Mr. Kristof has spent most of his career seeking out underreported large-scale human suffering in order to bring the stories back to mainland. The DRC has lost nearly six million people over twelve years during the Second Congo War, the largest death toll in any war since WWII.

Unfortunately, the magnitude of lives lost in the Congo has not been given justice through the media because raw numbers do not carry weight with audiences, as millions dead without personal stories mean little to our sympathetic eyes. Overall, mainstream media coverage of this conflict has been feeble at best, while natural disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti occupy a large portion of media consciousness due to the ability to ‘put a face’ to the tragedy. Audiences have been responding to courageous individual stories of survival in Haiti with their dollars and hands while six million remains just a number.

Dr. Slovic’s theory should come as no surprise to a population overwhelmed by twenty-four hour news channels that often focus on two or three individual stories per cycle, i.e. the disappearance of Laci Peterson, the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, or the recent death of Shaniya Davis. These stories garnered national attention because of our ability to relate to the one- an easily identifiable victim. News reporters everywhere have learned the value of the “human interest” story and flood the airwaves with personal details designed to capture our attention. This practice is not limited to news desks, either. A number of people have recently been exposed to the issue of sex trafficking from the Hollywood film, Taken.

Even if Taken is not the typical trafficking situation, there is something about a story and an individual victim that we ‘get to know’ that draws us in and helps us relate to them. If stories of trafficking are not personalized to our country or neighborhood, we often turn a blind eye. This is ‘psychic numbing’ in practice. How do we make human trafficking REAL?

We in the anti-trafficking community need to tell twenty-seven million individual stories to the localities in which we serve in order to make the reality of trafficking resonate within our communities. Scale is useful when lobbying politicians, but is overwhelming when engaging citizens in the fight. Unfortunately, it is not hard to find a local story of a trafficking victim that looks, sounds, and acts like someone’s teenage daughter. To make human trafficking real to the masses, it takes one story for each community in America.

“What does a child sex trafficking victim look like?” Like you used to look when you were a child…