Does Craigslist do enough to keep girls safe?

Craigslist is a hugely popular website where people advertise and seek goods and services. They also have a space for "adult services," which include sex and prostitutes. Prostitution is illegal, and still many women are bought and sold. Too many women and underage girls are trafficked against their will. Is Craigslist doing enough to keep women and children safe from sex trafficking?

Some facts:

• Because the internet is generally safer than walking the streets for pimps, girls, and men who pay, it has become a very popular way to traffic sex.
• Craigslist is one of the most popular site to offer "adult services." The site has 50 million American users regularly.
• In 2008, Craigslist raised fees for posting adult services to make posting less accessible. In 2009, it started donating some of its profits from adult ads to charity.
• Also in 2009, the site started going through each adult ad by hand before they were posted, promising to report the trafficking of any girls they suspected were underage to the police.
• It is impossible to tell how many girls on the site are underage, but a lot of the pictures they post are questionable.
• It is estimated that Craigslist makes a third of its money from adult ads- more than $36 million.

Anti-trafficking activists say:

• According to Washington Metropolitan Police, Craigslist "never" reports ads they deem suspicious.
• Whatever Craigslist does (or tries to do) to stop sex-trafficking, is not enough. There is still no way to know whether or not girls are underage, and there is still too little cooperation with the police.
• Craigslist doesn't have the "best" practices, they just have the least poor ones. The more power they have in the sex advertising world, the more responsibility they have to stop abuse, trafficking, and other crime.

Craigslist says:

• They do more than any other site with sex ads to prevent trafficking of underage girls.
• The site encourages users themselves to report suspicious ads to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They also feature other anti-trafficking resources.
• They cooperate with law enforcement.
• If Craigslist shut down its adult services section or made it too difficult to access, sex-traffickers would move their business to even more dangerous corners of the internet.

What can you do?

• Check out our sources here and here.
• Take action against sex trafficking, especially of children. Work with the Minga Group for teens against sexual exploitation. We especially recommend their Action of the Month.
• The Polaris Project is great, too. They have lots of national and local projects to get involved with.
• And now that you know about this, make sure everyone in your community will know and help, too.