Online prostitution and trafficking.

• Author: Farley, Melissa
• Position: I. Introduction through VI. Sex Buyers', Traffickers', and Pimps' Use of the Internet A. Social networking sites, p. 1039-1066 - Miscarriages of Justice

You are not safer because you work indoors. Craigslist is just the "internet streets," where the same predators and hustlers are meeting you with the same intentions except they look like straight people who go to medical school and have Blackberrys.

I consider myself in the same risk and danger zones as a street worker. I am an upper working class anonymous client worker. (1)

1. INTRODUCTION

   The use of Internet technologies to traffic women and children to prostitution will be described in this article. We will summarize the history of online trafficking and the remarkably effective use of the Internet for advertising prostitution locally, regionally, and internationally beginning with the development of social networking sites, discussion forums, message boards and online chats. Examples of sex buyers', pimps', and traffickers' use of the Internet and online classified advertising sites will be provided.

   We will also summarize the empirical evidence for the psychological and physical harms of trafficking for prostitution and will discuss the risks of compartmentalizing arms of the sex trafficking industry that are in fact elements of multinational, constantly expanding, businesses. False distinctions have been erected between online and offline prostitution, child and adult prostitution, indoor and outdoor prostitution, pornography and prostitution, legal and illegal prostitution, and prostitution and trafficking.

   We will discuss what is known about the involvement of organized crime in online trafficking, and summarize several successful cases brought against online traffickers. We describe public campaigns and educational boycotts against online traffickers and the development of online alternatives to the sex trafficking industry. There has been a range of legal responses to the crimes of prostitution and trafficking. Prosecutorial challenges in this newly developing field include the anonymity of the Internet, blurred jurisdictional boundaries, reluctance to prosecute prostitution cases where there is no evidence of physical coercion, and a very slowly increasing number of cases brought using existing legislation, in part because of the need for special training of criminal justice personnel. Nonetheless, there are tools available that provide both criminal and civil remedies.

   Compartmentalization of the various arms of the sex industry, regardless of their location or legal status, has confused and sometimes derailed policymakers, the public, and law enforcement and has resulted in a failure to understand prostitution and trafficking as crimes against vulnerable women and children. Prostitution is the sale of a sex act. (2) Payment for sexual use is usually made in cash but can also be made in housing, food, drugs, clothes, gas, or other basic needs. (3) For young women with few alternatives, Internet prostitution is a portal into the sex trafficking industry. (4) Prostitution is glamorized and mainstreamed for women who believe the recruitment messaging, "prostitution is fun!" "sexy!" and "you make tons of money!" (5) Online classified websites Backpage, myredbook, escortpost, theeroticreview and others have sections advertising prostitution--thus functioning as online brothels. Craigslist was described as "training wheels" for selling sex. (6) In third world or recessionary economies, prostitution is a last-ditch survival option for poor young women or for women who are marginalized because of racism. (7) Korean women, for example, are recruited by traffickers for prostitution in the United Sates via Internet advertising. (8) An advertisement aimed at financially vulnerable women on the cafedaum.net website read: "We know that in Korea these days, unemployment, the recession and the Special Law on Prostitution make it hard to earn even half of what you made before." (9) Enticing the women into prostitution, the traffickers then specify how much money can be made in a bar or massage parlor, declaring: "Advances possible. We take care of visas and bad credit." (10)

   Most contemporary legal definitions of trafficking do not require physical movement, but rather coercion, force, fraud, or abuse of power to trap a victim in an exploitive situation. In some international legal definitions, consent is irrelevant. (11) For the purposes of this article, we will use a definition of trafficking like that used in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act: "[T]he recruitment, [enticement,] harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act." (12)

   Prostitution often meets the legal definition of human trafficking in that pimping or third-party control of a prostituted person cannot be distinguished from the identical crimes perpetrated in trafficking. (13) According to estimates from eighteen sources including research studies, government reports, and nongovernmental agencies, on average 84% of women in prostitution are under third-party control or pimped or trafficked. (14)

   Fifty years ago pimps coerced women to solicit on the street where they were advertised to the relatively limited marketplace of sex buyers who evaluated the women's physical appearances and made selections on the street corner. Prostitution is now a business that is advertised on the Internet, expanding the reach of pimps to a wider market of potential sex buyers. Women can be sold for 15 minutes or for a week for johns' sexual use, selected and purchased online like a rental car. As the following evidence shows, the vast majority of prostitution today takes place online. Police in Syracuse, New York estimated that 90% of that city's prostitution trade had gone online between 2009 and 2011. (15) Eighty-eight percent of sex buyers in a 2011 research study had bought women and children for sexual use indoors via Internet-advertised escort agencies, strip clubs, gentlemen's clubs, brothels, and massage parlors. (16) In the early 2000s, about half of all searches on the Internet search engine AltaVista were related to the business of sexual exploitation. (17)

   The Internet and computer technology have been developed and exploited by sex businesses to offer prostitution to men across the globe. (18) Internet websites provide contact information, specifics on sexual acts that will be performed, pornography of the woman to be sold for sex, coded prices, and reviews by sex buyers. (19) Technology, smartphones and other digital devices make it possible to conduct business, advertise, and increase earnings from women who have for the most part been trafficked or coerced by a combination of joblessness, poverty, racism, and sexism into sex businesses. (20) Bitcoin, (21) an unregulated online currency that unlike credit cards provides the anonymity of cash, is being used to pay for web access to sites containing extremely violent or illegal images of real women and children, including online auctions of them. (22) Adapted by traffickers, pimps, and pornographers, the global reach of the Internet has facilitated sex buyers' access to prostituted women and children, thereby increasing sex trafficking. (23) The Internet has facilitated prostitution's shift from the street to indoor locations: to massage parlors, residential brothels, hotels, (24) call girl or escort prostitution (more accurately described as cell phone prostitution), and strip club or gentlemen's club prostitution. (25) Although there is a myth that indoor prostitution is safer than street prostitution, little evidence for this exists. Instead, the evidence of physical and emotional harm caused by prostitution holds constant wherever it happens. (26)

   The development of the Internet requires new prosecutorial strategies for arresting pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers--a challenge that requires law enforcement officials and prosecutors to keep up with traffickers' familiarity with, and skills in, web technologies. Online prostitution provides greater anonymity for johns and pimps and it blurs jurisdictional boundaries since Internet content can be accessed and published anywhere. Social networking media such as Facebook, classified advertising websites such as Backpage, message boards, and dating sites all provide platforms for prostitution marketing with relative anonymity and impunity. Sex buyers and traffickers benefit from the relative lack of accountability of Internet service providers for their websites' content, despite token gestures described below. At the same time, online prostitution results in an online record that can be used as evidence in prosecutions.

2. MARKETING PROSTITUTION: ORGANIZED CRIMINALS' USE OF WEB TECHNOLOGY FOR THE PURPOSE OF TRAFFICKING WOMEN

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