Internet sex panic: fake study, real impact.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Citings

LAST SEPTEMBER the Women's Funding Network, a feminist philanthropic organization, issued an alarming study about the use of websites such as Backpage.com and Craigslist in the underage sex trade. Spokesperson Deborah Richardson told a House committee that in just six months the number of underage girls advertised online for sex had increased by 20 percent in New York state, 40 percent in Michigan, and 65 percent in Minnesota. Those alarming figures were repeated by media outlets all over the country.

But in March The Village Voice--whose parent company, Village Voice Media, owns Backpage.com--took a closer look at the figures and found glaring weaknesses in the methodology used to generate them. The study, conducted by a public opinion firm, asked 100 people to look at photos of young women and guess which were minors. They correctly identified underage women 38 percent of the time. The study's authors then asked six new participants to browse sex listings and identify every photo they thought depicted a minor. The researchers then multiplied those numbers by 0.38 to arrive at an underage-advertising estimate.

Needless to say, the mere fact that a group of people had a 38 percent success rate with a controlled group of photos does not mean they or a...