Research has shown that the classified websites targeted by the government have actually helped to reduce the homicide rate among sex workers.
The post Study Shows ‘Escort Service’ Websites Save Lives Right As Trump Signs Bill to Shut Them All Down appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
[image: Ira Gelb]
It’s a horrific issue that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in U.S. mainstream media. Child sex trafficking is a booming black market business.
Most parents can’t imagine it happening in their own backyard.
While we know it’s a global issue, child sex trafficking is finally starting to become a mainstream topic in the U.S.
A film called “I Am Jane Doe,” released in February, highlights young girls between the ages of 13 and 15 years old who were picked up off the street and sold for sex online.
The film takes aim at Backpage.com. But in reality, the issue of child sex trafficking is so much bigger than one website. And the appetite for child sex abuse goes all the way to the top.
This is Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.
Tim Swarens, a columnist and editor for The Indianapolis Star, recently began publishing a series of articles about the child sex trade, a subject he’s reportedly investigated for more than a year. He explains that the child sex trade is like any other business trade, driven by supply and demand.
According to a study by the Center for Court Innovation from 2016, between 8,900 and 10,500 children ages 13 to 17 are being sold in the U.S. each year. Swarens writes, “The researchers found that the average age of victims is 15 and that each child is purchased on average 5.4 times a day.”
To determine a conservative estimate of the demand, Swarens “multiplied the lower number of victims (8,900) identified in the Center for Court Innovation study by the rate of daily exploitation per child (5.4), and then by an average of only one ‘work’ day per week (52). The result: Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.”
Take the recent documentary “I Am Jane Doe,” a film about parents seeking justice for their young teenage girls being picked up and trafficked for sex right in their own communities.
Those parents took aim at the website Backpage.com for profiting off of its adult section, allegedly riddled with young girls being sold for sex. But even if Backpage.com is a platform for advertising and selling, a channel through which these transactions can take place, it’s just one of many online channels being used by pedophiles to buy children to abuse.
But is the problem the channels, or is it something deeper?
Swarens explains, “The critical need to reduce demand has gained far less attention and money. The result: Buyers continue to abuse children with near impunity.”
Now, in the film “I Am Jane Doe,” the people buying children to abuse are described to be white, married men with families who live in suburbia. A former pimp interviewed for the film, Homer King, says on camera that he sold girls to priests, lawyers and even politicians.
Swarens came to the same conclusion in his investigation. He writes: “This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex? The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.”
Who are some of these men buying children to abuse?
Remember Jared Fogle from the Subway sandwich commercials? He “admitted to charges of having child pornography and repeatedly having sex with minors,” according to NPR. Court documents show that one of the text messages Fogle sent to a 17-year-old he paid for sex, stated his preferences as quote: “The younger the girl, the better.”
And back in June 2008, billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was prosecuted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for paying for sex with girls as young as 14. He served only 13 of those months.
The longest serving Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was second in line to the presidency from 1999 to 2007, admitted to sexually abusing boys while he was a high school wrestling coach. After making the admission in 2016, the judge who sentenced him 15 months in prison and two years of supervised release, called Hastert a “serial child molester.” He served only 13 months.
Now, let’s be clear: there’s no evidence that Hastert actually paid for sex. But the desire to abuse children is what fuels the global child sex trade, and demand is high.
Back in 2015, a special report aired on 60 Minutes Australia revealing that elected officials and elites in the UK were accused of buying and abusing children.
Posing as a buyer, former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security Timothy Ballard has been setting up undercover sting operations through his nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad since 2013.
Working in conjunction with governments all around the world, Operation Underground Railroad has so far busted 443 child sex traffickers and saved more than 1,000 victims. Here are just some of their 2017 operations.
Yet mainstream media does not treat it that way. Networks like CNN will give at least 40 days of daily coverage to stories like the missing Flight 370 in 2014. But in those 40 days, using Swarens’s math, about 250,000 children were bought and abused.
Even if that made the news, we make a mistake when the focus of the efforts to end this trafficking is only focused on how children are sold, instead of also focusing on to whom they are sold.
That discussion is one we need to have because until mainstream media and law enforcement is willing to go down that road… we will likely not see any real changes.
The post Reality Check: How Prevalent is the Global Child Sex Trade in the U.S.? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
If you support free speech, you support sex trafficking. At least that’s what politicians hope the public will think.
Clever politicians seem to be learning. If they want to censor the web and destroy free speech, they need to pick the right targets for their legislation. Of course, in reality, the legislation will end up affecting all of us.
Their efforts really amount to holding websites accountable for what their users post. They are shining a light on Backpage, a website much like Craigslist where users post ads. The website lets users post based on location for things like buying and selling items, job listings, and community events.
The legal issues come from Backpage failing to stop the use of its website for sex trafficking. Ads appear in adult and dating sections which facilitate prostitution.
But why should a website be held accountable for what users post? Is Facebook held accountable for drug deals arranged through its messenger? Should Twitter be held responsible when a riot is organized with the platform?
But politicians aren’t talking about the potential for their legislation to affect sectors other than sex trafficking. They use emotional pleas. And this could mean more Americans are willing to stomach legislation that would seriously threaten any website that allows users to post. Hosts would be liable for user content.
That means anyone who has a website would be at serious risk of legal trouble if any piece of their business lets users post. Websites like Facebook who can hire countless employees to police the content might not care. But what about small websites? What about message boards, and comments sections?
Trade groups representing Google, Facebook and other Internet giants warn of a “devastating impact” on the tech industry if the 1996 Communications Decency Act is tinkered with in the way lawmakers envision to hold Backpage and others liable for criminal material on their pages.
They project “mass removals of legitimate content” by social media and other firms scrambling to shield themselves from a deluge of lawsuits from trial lawyers and prosecutors. The ACLU joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups in warning lawmakers that if they pass the law, every one of the millions of social media postings placed online daily becomes a potential liability for the company hosting it.
But in true politician fashion, the response highlights only the “good” the legislation will do, ignoring the potential to curb free speech online.
“The Communications Decency Act is a well-intentioned law, but it was never intended to protect sex traffickers,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio)…
California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra said the site would have been shut down long ago if not for the immunity. “We would have been able to stop the abuse and in some cases the death of some of these young people who got caught up in these sex trafficking rings,” Becerra said.
Prostitution might be the world’s oldest profession. But politicians think they can finally stamp it out if only they had the power to censor shut down websites!
A quarter of the members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. Maybe they have the best intentions.
Or maybe they simply want more power to censor websites and the free speech of their users.
User created content will suffer if this bill passes. That puts things like communication, organization, and protest at risk.
Free speech is becoming a problem for the government, and they are taking the incremental approach to limiting it. That is why they talk so much about curbing hate speech and fake news. They want Americans to be onboard to limit neo-Nazis and ads for prostitution. But like most laws, it will only limit freedom.
President-elect Donald Trump has complained about paid activists both before and after the 2016 presidential campaign, and as The Washington Times reports, he may have a point.
Job ads running in more than 20 cities offer $2,500 per month for agitators to demonstrate at this week’s presidential inauguration events.
Demand Protest, a San Francisco company that bills itself as the “largest private grassroots support organization in the United States,” posted identical ads Jan. 12 in multiple cities on Backpage.com seeking “operatives.”
“Get paid fighting against Trump!” says the ad.
“We pay people already politically motivated to fight for the things they believe. You were going to take action anyways, why not do so with us!” the ad continues. “We are currently seeking operatives to help send a strong message at upcoming inauguration protests.”
The job offers a monthly retainer of $2,500 plus “our standard per-event pay of $50/hr, as long as you participate in at least 6 events a year,” as well as health, vision and dental insurance for full-time operatives.
An example of one of the ads...
While there have been "fake" ads in the past, as The Washington Times notes, if the Demand Protest ads are ruses, however, someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to sell the scam.
The classifieds are running in at least two dozen cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas and Houston, and the company operates a slick website that includes contact information.
A San Francisco phone number listed on the website was answered with a voice-mail message identifying the company by name. A request for comment left Monday evening was not immediately returned.
The website, which says that the company has provided 1,817 operatives for 48 campaigns, promises “deniability,” assuring clients that “we can ensure that all actions will appear genuine to media and public observers.”
“We are strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences and desirable messages,” says the website. “With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact.”
A search by the Washington Times showed the Backpage.com ads also ran in Austin, Charlotte, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Oakland, Oklahoma City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C.
