Backpage’s Sex Ads Are Gone. Child Trafficking? Hardly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/backpage-ads-sex-trafficking.html

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OAKLAND, Calif. — Since she was 14, Tiffany says, she has been sold for sex, offered via hundreds of advertisements on Backpage.com, a website that grew rich on classified ads for services like escorts, body rubs and exotic dancers. Far from being a marketplace for consensual exchanges, Backpage, the authorities said, often used teasers like “Amber Alert” and “Lolita” to signal that children were for sale.

In the midst of a Senate investigation, a federal grand jury inquiry in Arizona, two federal lawsuits and criminal charges in California accusing Backpage’s operators of pimping children, the website abruptly bowed to pressure in January and replaced its sex ads with the word “Censored” in red.

Even so, Tiffany — a street name — did not stop using the site, she said. Instead, her ads moved to Backpage’s dating section. “New in town,” read a recent one, using words that have become code for selling sex. “Looking for someone to hang out with.” Other recent dating ads listed one female as “100% young” and suggested that “oh daddy can i be your candy.”

In the fight against child sex trafficking, shutting down an epicenter like Backpage was a major victory, but one against a relentless foe that quickly unfurled new tentacles. The demise of Backpage’s adult ads undermined the trade, but it also illustrated how difficult it is to stamp out the practice of selling children for sex. The crime is rarely punished with the full force of the law — charges like rape or statutory rape — officials say; in many places it leads to just a citation, instead of an arrest.

For Tiffany, 18, the demise of Backpage’s adult listings has made things far more unpredictable — and dangerous, she said. The old ads allowed her to try to vet customers by contacting them before meetings, via phone or text message. With far fewer inquiries from the dating ads, she said, her first encounters with men now take place more often on the street as she gets into cars in red light districts around the Bay Area.

“It’s harder to catch a date now,” she said. “Now everybody’s daddy puts them on the street.”

Eric Quan, a sergeant in the human-trafficking unit with the San Jose Police Department, said there had been a conspicuous rise in street prostitution in San Jose, where Tiffany is often forced to work.

“When Backpage was running adult ads, we used to get tips, but that has dropped off,” Sergeant Quan said. “It makes it a lot more complicated for us to figure out what’s going on.”

“I do see more girls on the street, but we’re not sure why,” he said, referring to all females, not specifically minors. “There’s more guys out there, too, because there’s more girls to choose from.”

Advocates said that while the elimination of the listings was a step forward, by itself it was more an inconvenience than a crippling blow.

“It was such a huge marketplace that any way to eliminate the widespread distribution of ads is progress,” said Yasmin Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, a human-rights organization focused on gender-based violence. “But until we see a more comprehensive solution, it is going to pop up elsewhere.”

The fight against the sex trafficking of children is an old and often doomed one, in part because the crime is typically tied to poverty and dysfunctional families. Many of the girls and boys are runaways or foster children whose disappearances rarely set off a real Amber Alert.

Nationally, about 35 percent of minors charged with prostitution are, like Tiffany, African-American, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Alameda County, Calif., where pimps have sold Tiffany most often, more than 60 percent of children who are trafficked or at risk of being trafficked are African-American, according to the Alameda County district attorney. The county’s African-American population is about 12 percent.

Few jurisdictions keep data on the men arrested in such cases. But one area that keeps track, King County in Washington, found that 79 percent of the men charged with seeking to pay for sex with a minor from 2013 to 2015 were white, while 44 percent of those they were accused of propositioning were African-American. The county’s population is 7 percent African-American.

“We educate our judges that although there is no single buyer profile, buyers are predominantly white, educated, married men,” said Victoria Sweet, a lawyer for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

It is unclear how many minors are forced into prostitution each year, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said reports of online child sex trafficking had increased by more than 800 percent from 2010 to 2015. The organization said this was “directly correlated to the increased use of the internet to sell children for sex.”

Backpage, where revenue increased to $135 million in 2014 from $5.3 million in 2008, derived more than 90 percent of its earnings from its adult ads, according to the California Department of Justice.

Backpage representatives declined to comment, but in a statement released in January the company said it had notified law enforcement whenever it became aware of illegal activity. It also said it was protected by a federal statute that shields third-party internet content providers from liability.

“The shutdown of Backpage’s adult classified advertising is an assault on the First Amendment,” the company’s statement read in part.

In Oakland, International Boulevard is among the busiest strips in the nation for the trafficking of minors, part of a network whose spokes extend to similar strips in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle and Reno, Nev.

In warm weather, Tiffany said, she can often be found there, dressed in little more than a halter top and panties.

The Oakland police, enmeshed in their own sex-trafficking scandal, said they had not seen a recent increase in prostitution along International Boulevard. Other departments around the nation acknowledged that they were not the best source for such information because officers infrequently made arrests and did not track activity. In January, a law barring children from being arrested for prostitution went into effect in California.

Tiffany said she had been sent as far away as Pennsylvania and Florida, usually via Backpage ads. Once she was given a cross-country bus ticket while her pimp took a plane, she said.

Tiffany, who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used, said she was trying to quit the business. But without a high school diploma, her job prospects are slim.

During an interview, she spoke matter-of-factly about the last four years, recounting the threat of violence from both pimps and the men who buy her. But she also said she had been in love with some of her pimps, most of them men, one a woman.

Within the span of a few seconds, she burst into tears while talking about the betrayal she felt when one pimp punished her by having his brother touch her, then had a fit of laughter while reading complimentary text messages from men who had purchased her for sex.

With her long fingernails, hair extensions and a preoccupation with the fashionable, she could easily be mistaken for an unremarkable teenager. She said she would be “too bored” to work a regular job.

Tiffany’s mother, who she said might have worked as a prostitute, gave her to her grandmother the day she was born. Her father, she said, is a pimp.

At 14, she was lured by two Facebook acquaintances to a party that became a gang rape, she said. Since then, she said, she had been conditioned — through beatings, gang rapes and other violence — to please her pimps, many of whom found her by perusing Backpage.

“It’s something I’m good at,” she said. “Once you bust a first date, you’re likely to bust another. You have power, and you know you’ll never be broke again.” (As it happened, though, pimps generally kept all her money.)

For years, Tiffany said, she habitually took Ecstasy, which she said made her “happy and numb” — a state that she said enabled her to work long hours and forget the fact that she was being sold for sex.

At 16, she was placed in the custody of Awaken, a Christian nonprofit organization that works to end sexual exploitation, but she repeatedly ran away to return to pimps. Awaken put Tiffany in touch with a reporter in the hope that her sharing her experience would help others in similar situations.

In recent weeks, Tiffany said, she has become scared of being on the street after a man who had bought her showed her a loaded gun.

“I feel like something’s going to happen to me,” she said. “The average life is seven years, and I started at age 14. When I started, the other girls called me ‘Baby.’” She paused. “Now, I’m one of the older ones.”