It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex

It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.

Yet we live in a time that confounds this central truth. The trading and enslaving of human beings (mostly children) is becoming the second largest cash industry in our world. Denial of the scope of this evil enterprise, or putting off confronting the monsters behind this holocaust continues to assist these enslavers and their clients.

We cannot comprehend the damage this is doing to our collective soul.

The time will come when no one will be able to ignore this present reality of slavery on such an egregious scale. There is a modern abolitionist movement rising and theUnited States of Americaneeds to make its stand.

 

Clergy call on Village Voice to shut down sex trafficking site

A newly formed multifaith coalition consisting of mainline-Christians, Catholics, Jews, evangelical-Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Humanists and other moral and religious leaders has taken an aggressive campaign to the visible center of the human-trafficking issue. Groundswell, Auburn Seminary’s social action initiative, convened a group of thirty-six prominent clergy who took out a full-page New York Times advertisement demanding that Village Voice Media discontinue a Web site used for the sex trafficking of girls and boys.

The ad featured a letter calling on the Village Voice company to immediately shut down the Adult section of its Web site where this activity is taking place. The clergy also launched a nationwide petition in partnership with Change.org’s more than one million members.

“Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin and his Board of Directors need to stop Backpage.com from serving as a platform for the sex trafficking of girls and boys immediately. For over a year, advocates have demanded action, but the responses they have been given are half-measures and delays. We are tired of Village Voice’s delay tactics,” said Rev. Dr. Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Seminary. “The only way to end the sale of minors for sex on Backpage.com is by shutting down the Adult section for good.”

 

The open letter was addressed to Jim Larkin the CEO and Chair and the members of the Board of Directors of Village Voice Media.

Dear Mr. Larkin and the Board of Directors of Village Voice Media:

It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.

So we were surprised and stunned to realize your company, Village Voice Media, continues to publish an Adult section on its classifieds Web siteBackpage.com that has been used as a platform for the trafficking of minors.

Arrests of adults selling minors for sex via Backpage.com have been reported by the media in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. And these are just some of the cases that have been documented.

As moral and religious leaders of many creeds and backgrounds, we are united in calling on your publication to shut down the Adult section ofBackpage.com. We appreciate your efforts to put in place new measures attempting to screen for ads featuring minors. However, we do not believe that these measures are doing enough to adequately solve the problem, and we share the opinion of the nation’s 51 Attorneys General that the best way to eradicate your company’s connection with the sex trafficking of minors is to shut down the Adult section of your Web site, as Craigslist did.

We trust that your company shares our outrage over the sex trafficking of minors. While we empathize with your business challenges and the increasingly difficult marketplace in which Village Voice Media competes, we trust that you are committed to running your business without compromising the lives of our nation’s girls and boys.

We know there is much more to be done to end the sex trafficking of minors beyond what we ask of you. Ending this practice for good requires a groundswell of people in our business, media, and religious communities joining together in partnership. We need educational campaigns and robust law enforcement to challenge all dimensions of the problem, including the poverty and abuse at the root of the practice.

But we can do something right now to help these girls and boys. Please shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com immediately so that no minor is exploited through advertisements on your Web site.

This effort has spurred others to speak out.

 

In Friday’s New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof told the story of Baby Face, a girl who was trafficked by her pimp on Backpage.com. (Full text of the article, “How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls,” included below.)

Kristof tweeted his op-ed yesterday morning and said: “Let’s close these sites!”

“This could be a game changer for our campaign to convince Village Voice Media to shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com. That is why Groundswell, a multifaith social action network, has organized a petition demanding that Village Voice Media shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com. Ads on the site have been used by others to exploit children and teens, despite Village Voice’s attempts to implement safeguards. ,” Groundswell sources reported.

http://www.groundswell-movement.org/take-action-to-protect-our-children/

 

How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls

by Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times

January 25, 2012

“In November, a terrified 13-year-old girl pounded on an apartment door in Brooklyn. When a surprised woman answered, the girl pleaded for a phone. She called her mother, and then dialed 911.

The girl, whom I’ll call Baby Face because of her looks, frantically told police that a violent pimp was selling her for sex. He had taken her to the building and ordered her to go to an apartment where a customer was waiting, she said, and now he was waiting downstairs to make sure she did not escape. She had followed the pimp’s directions and gone upstairs, but then had pounded randomly on this door in hopes of getting help.

Baby Face said she hurt too much to endure yet another rape by a john. She told prosecutors later that she was bleeding vaginally and that her pimp had recently kicked her down a stairwell for trying to flee.

That 911 call set in motion the arrest of Kendale Judge, then 21. Judge has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape and compelling prostitution. He is in jail, and we haven’t heard his side of the events yet.

The episode also shines a spotlight on how the girl was marketed — in ads on Backpage.com, a major national Web site where people place ads to sell all kinds of things, including sex. It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.

Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.

“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”

Craigslist backed out of this sector after public protests. Pimps then moved to Backpage.com, which is owned by Village Voice Media, owners of The Village Voice weekly newspaper.

Attorneys general from 48 states wrote a joint letter to Backpage, warning that it had become “a hub” for sex trafficking and calling on it to stop running adult services ads. The attorneys general said that they had identified cases in 22 different states in which pimps peddled underage girls through Backpage.

The attorneys general cited a 15-year-old girl who was being forced to have sex with men last year in Dorchester, Mass. The pimp marketed the girl through Backpage.

But Backpage isn’t budging. Indeed, it has fought back with personal attacks on those, such as Ashton Kutcher, who have linked it to human trafficking.

Steve Suskin, legal counsel to Village Voice Media, gave me a lengthy statement in which he argued that the company is already cooperating closely with law-enforcement authorities. He cited a 16-year-old girl in Seattle who was rescued as a result of a tip the company had made.

“Censorship will not rid the world of exploitation,” Suskin asserted.

It’s true that there’s some risk that pimps will migrate to new Web sites, possibly based overseas, that are less cooperative. But, on balance, that’s a risk worth taking. The present system is failing. Pimps aren’t the shrewdest marketers, and eliminating a hub for trafficking should at least chip away at the problem.

Backpage suggests that it is battling censors and prudes. In fact, what drives it seems to be greed. In their letter, the attorneys general said that Backpage earns more than $22 million annually from prostitution advertising.

On Backpage, the pimps claim adult ages for the girls they market, but Hersh scoffs. “I see 19,” she said, “and I immediately think 13.”

“I’m not seeing a lot of cases where there’s not coercion,” she added. “The average age where a girl is forced into prostitution is 12 to 14. And most of these 16- or 17 year-olds are being run by pretty vicious pimps.”

While there are no reliable figures for human trafficking, the more we look, the more we find. The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, says that in the year before he set up a sex-trafficking unit in June 2010, his office prosecuted no trafficking cases. Since then, the office has become a national model, indicting 32 people, with 10 convictions and no acquittals so far.

Among those rescued was Baby Face, who had run away from home in September. Judge allegedly found her on the street, bought food for her and told her that she was beautiful. Within a few days, he had posted her photo on Backpage and was selling her five to nine times a day, prosecutors say. When she didn’t earn enough money, he beat her with a belt, they add.

When Baby Face ran away from her pimp and desperately knocked on that apartment door in Brooklyn, she was also in effect pounding on the door of the executive suites of Backpage and Village Voice Media. Those executives should listen to her pleas.”

 

As the father of four (three of which are girls) I am undone.

There is no positive spin to this anti-human activity on the back-pages of any publication on the face of the planet earth .. at any time. Speech be damned!

Free speech or paid-for-speech be damned if even one child is SOLD INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY.

Shame on them and damn all efforts to perpetuate this thinnest excuse for human freedom or civic discourse. And – any system of money changing into anyone’s hands who would touch this blasphemy of a practice – is cursed.

Shame on the publishers and board of directors.

Shame on the other advertisers who would be in the same publication as the enslavers.

Shame on anyone who would willingly allow their story to be told in the same publication.

Shame on anyone who would write or contribute to such a publication.

Shame on anyone who would support that publication by reading it or purchasing from any industry or service offered therein.

Shame on any of us who think supporting such a publication is not aiding those who are harming our children.

And shame and damn me if I as a father and a man of faith stand by and merely shake my head and fists and do nothing.

It is thus condemned! (If it were that easy.)

Son of Village Voice Founder Criticizes Company for Ads that Have Been Used for Sex Trafficking

Felicia Pride wrote on January 12, 2012 that,

“John Mailer, son of writer and Village Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, has joined the campaign on Change.org calling on Village Voice Media to shut down the adult section of  its Backpage.com classifieds site where individuals have advertised children and teens for sex.”

According to the petition, started by multifaith social action initiative Groundswell, “A Georgia man was arrested for pimping two 17-year-old girls around the Nashville area. Detectives responded to a suspicious ad on Backpage.com and drove to a motel. There, they found the teens and their 37-year-old pimp, as well as a laptop computer, likely used for the online advertising.

Just four days prior to that, four people in Denver were arrested for forcing a teen girl into prostitution. They also advertised her sexual services, including semi-nude pictures, on Backpage. And last year, a South Dakota couple was arrested for selling underage girls for sex on …. wait for it … Backpage.com yet again.”

Here’s what Mailer, just one of the petition’s 80,000 supporters, had to say:

“The Village Voice was born out of the desire for an independent media voice for the people, a voice that had the freedom and authority to hold those who abuse power accountable for their actions. While I understand firsthand the financial difficulties facing all print publications today, the fact of the matter is that Village Voice is making money from selling advertisements that others have used to buy and sell minors for sex.”

He went on and also criticized the paper’s editorial direction.

the backpages ..

“As my father’s son, knowing all of the hopes and dreams that went into the work of creating this particular paper, the Village Voice appears to have lost its way from the days when Dan Wolfe, Ed Fancher, and my father began it. For the sake of the Village Voice brand and for the sake of the legacy of a great publication, take down the adult section of Backpage.com, before Village Voice must answer for yet another child who is abused and exploited because you did not do enough to prevent it.”

Take Action to Protect Our Children

It is a basic fact of the moral universe that girls and boys should not be sold for sex.

Yet Village Voice Media’s classifieds website Backpage.com continues to profit by allowing others to place advertisements that may result in the sale of boys and girls for sex via the Web site’s adult section.

As parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and caretakers to children ourselves, we need to create a groundswell of responsibility to shut down Backpage.com’s Adult section in order to remove a major venue for the trafficking of girls and boys by others on its Web site.

Groundswell is mobilizing supporters across the faith and moral spectrums in this effort. Join in calling on Village Voice Media to permanently shut down Backpage.com’s Adult section immediately.

Peace to You ..