By Emily Sullivan
Opinion Assignment Editor
When I want to buy a present for a friend that I can’t find at Walmart, I shop online.
For some, shopping online is a completely different experience.
Some people go online to buy people.
Seventeen-year-old Megan was coerced by an older man she had hoped to become romantically involved with to sell herself online for sex. Instead of getting the older man of her dreams, he would make her spend hours on end in a hotel room each night “servicing” up to 20 men, according to an April 24 ABC News article.
At the end of the day, the only payment Megan received is a pair of disgustingly high silver heels. All the money she ‘earned’ goes to her pimp.
Unlike the stereotypical view of prostitutes who work street corners late at night, Megan was simply made to put up an advertisement on the adult services section of Backpage.com, a website similar to Craigslist. Backpage is a website that allows people to sell things, like on Ebay, and put up advertisements for whatever services they may have to offer. It, too, had an adult services section, but after a flood of controversies, the website closed that section down.
Backpage is fighting for the right to keep the adult services portion of its website open, claiming even though it is making the illegal sex trafficking of minors possible, it can also be very influential in finding the solution, according to the same article.
Liz McDougall, the lawyer for Backpage, said, “I think it’s very important to understand that to stop human trafficking online, you have to fight human trafficking online. And we provide an extraordinary tool to do that, because we are online,” according to the same article.
I might also add McDougall is the same lawyer who tried to defend the Craigslist adult section, and just look at what happened then.
Craigslist discontinued that for a reason and, as soon as it did, a crowd of traffickers went over to Backpage.
If Backpage and law enforcement want to use the website to catch traffickers, standing by idly waiting for them to make a move isn’t going to help anything.
According to the same article, Backpage hosts an estimated 70 percent of the Internet’s online prostitution ads. If Backpage wants to help solve the problem, it needs to act. More than 250,000 youth are at risk, and the Internet is only making matters worse.
And yet McDougall thinks Backpage is helping by letting the website continue on with its ads.
These are young kids we are talking about. No one should be forced into prostitution at any age, but these kids haven’t even had a chance to experience life outside junior high. Instead of dealing with pimples and hormones, they are being forced to let adults use them for their bodies and are completely helpless to stop it.
The worst thing is these ads are right under our nose. If we would only take a minute to stop and look, maybe we could do something about it.
This problem is only getting worse because we are ignoring it, and that is exactly what Backpage will be doing if it allows the adult services section continue being used.
Trafficking needs to be stopped. If we don’t do something about it, it’s only going to get worse.
sullivec10@bonaventure.edu
