Need another sad and horribly depressing story about kids? Sorry to have to oblige.
Craigslist, home of the great deals on couches and awesome hand-me-down sources for kids clothes, has become the go-to source for people trying to pimp out little kids. And numbers are rising.
The problem is particularly rampant in Atlanta, where A Future. Not A Past, a non-profit that works to fight child prostitution, says as many as one hundred seventy-six ads were posted on the free site in February trying to find a john for little girls.
The group released its findings last week, just as the FBI is working to prosecute two men they say pimped out a seventeen-year-old girl, passing her off as nineteen and using Craigslist to find men to have sex with her in an Atlanta motel. Last month, a Michigan man who called himself the Motor City Mink was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for pimping kids out via the internet - with many of his ads on Craigslist. The man, Robert Daniels, was the first to be convicted in the nation under the Adam Walsh Law (named for the kidnapped and murdered child of America's Most Wanted host John Walsh), which requires federal penalties for running a child exploitation enterprise.
The fault isn't with Craigslist itself - the company has begun requiring all posters of ads that fall under the "erotic" category, and the company reached an agreement in November with the attorneys general of forty states to add a fee system for the erotic posters, including a valid credit card that could be tracked by law enforcement. Craigslist is also reportedly suing a group of software and Internet companies that allowed posters to circumvent its defenses and post illegal ads.
It's also not always adults doing the deed. Between 2005 and 2008, seventy teens were caught selling themselves on Craigslist.
Why the numbers are back up is anyone's guess, but I wonder how much of this is economic. Craiglist is free, which means people are turning to it more than ever now that the economy is bad. People are desperate, pushing a parent, a family friend, whoever, who might not have acted on an urge to sell a child's soul body for money are no longer held back by traditional mores. It's the same reason adults turn to it in hard times . . . and as a job, it's fairly recession proof.
As the economic picture gets bleaker, I can only wonder how many more horribly sad and depressing stories we're going to hear about things adults are doing to kids. If there is any good news out there it's this: courts are finally getting the picture that teen prostitutes need help not criminalization.
Image: American
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