The Seattle City Council’s Tim Burgess has distinct credibility in the fight against child prostitution–he’s no Ashton-come-lately. His concern with child prostitution in Seattle appears the first year of his Council service, in 2008, and he’s consistently used his position as chair of the Council’s Public Safety and Education Committee to press for action. So when he offers the facts on child prostitution in Seattle, it’s worth listening:
Over the past three years, 18 criminal investigations, all resulting in criminal charges being filed in King County Superior Court, have produced evidence that Village Voice Media/Backpage.com has been used as a vehicle in the prostitution of children.
It’s his second recent post on child prostitution, and it’s difficult not to see it as a rebuke to the Seattle Weekly editors who have reached truly jesuitical heights in arguing that overstating the risk of child prostitution would be worse than their company’s unknowing complicity in any cases at all:
The “problem” the mayor is referring to is the trafficking of minors involved in the sex trade, and the “numbers” are how many minors are actually involved in it.
Since the Weekly is curious, Burgess replies:
Over the past 13 months, YouthCare has engaged with 185 children—some referred to YouthCare by police and other organizations, others identified by YouthCare staff involved in outreach efforts—who acknowledged being commercially sexually exploited through prostitution. Of this total, 119 enrolled in a YouthCare program and 23 of these reported being prostituted through Village Voice Media/Backpage.com.
While you may reach for that handy Upton Sinclair quote–“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”–to illuminate the Weekly‘s disturbing sang-froid, Burgess wants you to know that it’s not a question of shutting down Backpage.com at all: “Village Voice Media/Backpage.com could chose to follow the very simple steps that other publishers follow that would make it almost impossible for this exploitation of children to take place.”
The Weekly and VVM have tried to spin the story several ways so far: The concern with child prostitution is a publicity stunt by “Bono-quoting philanthropic sherpas, like Kutcher and Moore’s charity consultant Trevor Neilson,” it’s a slippery First Amendment slope (raising the prospect of right-wingers making it “illegal for adults to buy pornography and for teenagers to feel each other up (a cause we will fight to the death to defend”), and it’s possibly a conspiracy orchestrated by the puppetmasters at The Stranger to weaken a competitor.
In case all this furor has you wondering where VVM/Backpage.com actually stand, know that they take child prostitution very seriously (the Weekly‘s inability to write seriously about it notwithstanding) and are already working hard to prevent it. (“Backpage takes it so seriously that it devotes nearly 100 employees to proactively reporting suspicious ads and those who breach its terms of service to local authorities and national children’s advocacy groups.”)
Editor-in-chief Mike Seely writes: “If Backpage and, in turn, Seattle Weekly were to follow Craigslist’s lead and cave to pressure from its adversaries, the behavior […] wouldn’t simply evaporate. Instead, it would be pushed back underground–into bus stations, dark alleys, and far-flung corners of the Internet which don’t give a damn about the problem and aren’t equipped to police it themselves.”
(That’s right. Back-alley child prostitution. Just like abortion. Would someone at the Weekly please stop Mike Seely before he defends you again?)
I refuse to believe that Seely and managing editor Caleb Hannan are personally so blasé when it comes to a case of child prostitution here and there. (Nor do I believe that corporate at Backpage.com is eagerly soliciting their advice for its business model.) It seems more likely that their in-the-weeds arguments arise from being too close to the issue. But whatever the motivation, their efforts in self-defense have only resulted in people producing harder numbers on Weekly-related child prostitution. They may buy ink by the barrel, but ink doesn’t wash that stain off.
