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"Prostitution on the Internet is hardly a new phenomenon, and shocking as it might be, child prostitution isn't particularly a new problem in general, either. We've been doing the social media crime blotter series for a while now and I really haven't touched on the prostitution angle in a big way up until this point because when you look at crime related stories in connection with social media, that is the noise you filter around.\nSo it isn't particularly unexpected that CNN recently ran a fairly high profile \"special investigation\" into Craigslist and it's role in the online sex trade. Generally, it's very difficult to get brand new Craigslist CEO to comment on their erotic services section and the role it plays in the illegal business of paying for sex (underage or not), but he weighed in for the piece with a few choice words this time around:\nCraigslist executives said they abhor the fact that their site is being used for child prostitution but believe that the problem could be harder to track if they removed the category. \"It would be a bigger problem if we removed that category and had those ads spread throughout the site,\" said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer of Craigslist.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn his response to CNN, Jim Buckmaster says that if the \"erotic services\" section remains in place, it makes it all the more easy to track illicit activity; if it's all centralized, you can spot the illegal stuff more easily. He also made mention that Craigslist voluntarily works with authorities in tracking sexual crimes that have connection to the usage of their system.\nIf you look online into the places for responses to this assertion, two bloggers that cover this type of story regularly immediately spring to mind: ValleyWag's Melissa Gira Grant and CraigsCrimeList's Trench. Both bloggers provide two very disparate views of the continual onslaught of these types of incidents. In the case of CraigsCrimeList, Trench responds with:\n\"If you shut down the erotic services section of craigslist where would these ads go? Used cars? Furniture? Pets? Real Estate? You mean the places where people who don't use hookers would actually see the ads and actually flag them?\"\nOn the other hand, Melissa Gira Grant attempts to deflect the criticism to the site:\n\"Buckmaster certainly gives the role of concerned small businessman the appropriate gravitas, but it comes off as a little wooden. Personally, I would have pointed at Dave Elms, jailed proprietor of TheEroticReview and been all, \"Why are we the focus of a scary CNN feature? Where's the salacious magazine piece about that guy, Ms. De La Cruz?\"\nTaken in context of Melissa's entire body of work, though, it's clear that while she doesn't support underage prostitution, she's highly sympathetic and supportive to online sex workers. Meanwhile, Trench has traditionally taken the role of the critic, frequently citing cases that support his position that prostitution truly isn't a victimless crime, and that it's the responsibility of all social networks to take a more active role in clamping down, though Trench doesn't give a free ride to the parents of delinquent children either.\nThe truth, as usual, is somewhere near the middle.\u00A0 A drum I continually beat here is that parents are responsible for their children (not only legally, but morally).\u00A0 If your child is selling herself as a prostitute online, then you as the parent bear far more responsibility for that than Craig or his list.\nWhile I agree with Trench that if Craigslist were to take down the erotic services section, online sex trade on the site would likely halt instantly, there is nothing to prevent that same culture from migrating over to MySpace, Facebook, or any other number of very popular social networks that have dark corners that are difficult to police.\u00A0 It is a game of whack-a-mole, and just as it was pointless to take down all of the ALT.* hierarchy in USENET to eliminate a few child porn pictures, eliminating erotic services from Craigslist will do little to end online sex trade."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/06/30/Craigslist-child-prostitution/>