No doubt taking advantage of today’s House Judiciary hearings to capture a little of the spotlight for herself. From the CNN “Justice” page:
Sometimes it’s a story of a grown woman who has chosen prostitution as a path to a better life. More often, it’s a story of a woman being forced to sell her body by a pimp.
Gee, Amber. I didn’t notice a source for that statement. Or are you just making stuff up as you go? Or perhaps just uncritically repeating sensationalistic claims made by advocacy groups pushing a political agenda.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website contains thousands of posters of missing children. Many are girls, classified as “endangered runaways,” and the center says more than fifty of them have been pushed into the sex trade. But that’s just a snapshot, a tiny indicator of the true scale of the problem.
“Nobody knows what the real numbers are,” said Ernie Allen, the NCMEC’s chief executive. “I’m also confident that the internet has changed the dynamic of this whole problem. We’re finding an astounding number of kids being sold for sex on the internet.”
Wait a sec. Did he just say “nobody knows what the real numbers are”? Hasn’t he been getting the memos from the Rebecca Project about the hundreds of thousands of children sold for sex in the United States? Certainly those are real numbers, not just fabricated guesses pulled out of their ass.
Wait, it gets better:
But Allen said his organization, which is the nation’s primary reporting agency for missing kids, received just 132 referrals from Craigslist over that same 15-month period.
“The small number of reports makes it difficult to get a sense of the true scope of the problem,” Allen said. “We’ve seen lots of ads where there is obviously a young person in the ad. Now is she 18 or 17? Is she 22 or 12?”
So, he’s complaining that the stunkin’ 132 referrals from Craigslist is a problem because it doesn’t jibe with the inflated guesses they’ve been passing off as reality? And then he goes on to illustrate how it’s impossible to know how old a girl is by the ad, while castigating Craigslist for not magically knowing precisely that. Such is the logic of these crusaders.
But, in spite of her sleazy ambush tactics of an earlier story vilifying Craigslist, this new article ironically makes this assertion:
Craigslist has done more than any other website with an adult services section to try to combat the problem of underage sex trafficking. It has cooperated with the FBI by providing evidence against pimps and required phone and credit card verification, so ads left a paper trail for the police to follow.
Of course, all that has been lost after CNN threw its weight behind the effort to get Craigslist to shut down its adult services section thereby pushing the ads onto other less cooperative venues. Nice work CNN. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back. You deserve it.
As in most slanted reporting on prostitution, there are no other viewpoints presented. There is no mention of the harm done by pushing prostitution further underground. No mention of the independence and safety that the internet brings to prostitutes. Essentially, not a single significant question is raised as to the wisdom of the crusade against online prostitution or the validity of any of the wild claims made by the advocacy groups. Ultimately this is simply journalism designed to advance a foregone conclusion.
The piece ends on this encouraging note:
“It’s an outrageous thing to say, but one of our goals is to move these operators into some other illicit enterprise — to get them out of the trafficking of human beings and into some other illegal business,” Allen said.
Of course, the fact that many (if not most) of the people hurt by their campaign are women who sell sex voluntarily is too damn bad. If they don’t realize they’re victims, fuck ‘em. They’re must be in denial. Nothing matters less to a crusader than someone who doesn’t want to be rescued. Hell, if they are denied the option to sell sex, the door is always open to selling drugs.