Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna would like nothing more than to see backpage.com — the online classified advertising site owned by Village Voice Media Holdings — shut down its "escorts" section, just as Craigslist did in September.
Backpage.com officials have admitted that prostitution ads, including those advertising underage girls, regularly appear on the site. But they claim the company has strict content policies aimed at preventing child sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
McKenna and more than 40 other attorneys general across the country are demanding that backpage.com back up those claims with hard data. In a letter sent Wednesday to Samuel Fifer, backpage.com’s Chicago-based lawyer, the attorneys general call backpage.com "a hub" for prostitution and human trafficking and argue that company efforts to restrict prostitution ads, particularly those soliciting sex with children, "have proven ineffective."
"We believe Backpage.com sets a minimal bar for content review in an effort to temper public condemnation, while ensuring that the revenue spigot provided by prostitution advertising remains intact," says the letter, which notes that the site makes an estimated $22.7 million in annual revenue from ads posted in its escorts section.
For now, McKenna, president of the National Association of Attorneys General, said he and his colleagues are simply asking for information on 21 points, requesting details on the company’s criteria for determining illegal content and its policies for removing illegal ads.
The request was made without a subpoena. The letter, signed by attorneys general of 45 states and Guam, asked that backpage.com officials respond by Sept. 14.
Independent research undertaken in different states shows that "whatever they're doing is ineffective," McKenna said. "We're asking them to document their claims ... because we're skeptical that they're trying very hard.
"We're finding lots of evidence that sex trafficking continues to be rampant on their site,' he said. "Making money from the sexual exploitation of children and adults is unconscionable, and that’s what they're doing."
But with few legal remedies at their disposal, McKenna acknowledged that the request is a moral appeal for backpage.com to "stop hiding behind" the federal Communications Decency Act and "do the decent thing."
The 1996 federal legislation was aimed at protecting children from online abuse while encouraging a robust Internet. The act provides Internet content and service providers with broad immunity from liability for content posted by third parties.
Two weeks ago, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Mummert III dismissed a federal lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Missouri on behalf of a 14-year-old girl whose pimp advertised her on backpage.com. The girl’s suit claimed that backpage.com was liable for facilitating her exploitation and argued that backpage.com is aware minors are sexually trafficked on the site and profits from prostitution ads.
Though sympathetic to the girl, Mummert, in a written ruling, said "even if a service provider knows that third parties are posting illegal content, the service provider's failure to intervene is immunized" under the 1996 act. He further wrote that "neither notice or profit make Backpage liable for the content and consequences of the ads posted" by the girl’s pimp.
Mummert concluded: “Congress has declared such websites to be immune from suits arising from such injuries,” and so it is up to Congress — not the courts — “to change the policy that gave rise to such immunity.”
The immunity provision — which was successfully utilized by Craigslist in fighting a 2009 federal lawsuit in Illinois over its prostitution ads — is "a high barrier to overcome in federal law," McKenna said, though he and the other attorneys general are looking to state laws for possible remedies.
Legal wranglings aside, McKenna said it will take nothing short of a cultural shift to change attitudes about prostitution.
Backpage.com and Village Voice Media, publisher of Seattle Weekly and 12 other weekly newspapers across the country, "want to have it both ways," McKenna said. The website "wants to take credit for passing tips" to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children when it suspects minors are being advertised, but then reports "there isn't a problem," he said, referring to recent stories published in Village Voice newspapers that claim the number of children being forced into prostitution is grossly overblown.
"Village Voice talks about a prohibitionist attitude toward prostitution but they're trying to create a false association between alcohol in the 1930s and the sex trade today," McKenna said.
"People look at prostitution and think it's a choice, but there are very few, if any, volunteers," he said. "The more we learn about sex trafficking, the more we believe it is dominated by individuals exploiting both children and adults."
To those who claim prostitution is a victimless crime, McKenna said, "They're the ones buying into the mythology that most prostitutes are consenting adults. We're seeing clear evidence that most are not." As for legalizing prostitution, McKenna said that would only "provide a shield for the pimps to hide behind" and make prosecuting them even more difficult.
"We need to move in the other direction,' he said, pointing to the way attitudes about domestic violence have changed in the past 30 years. 'No man is going to brag about keeping the little woman in line.'
In the same way, McKenna said, 'We have to make it unacceptable ... to buy another human being.'
In July, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in the Seattle Weekly because some advertisements placed in the newspaper and on its website have been linked to juvenile prostitutes.
