Image by edkohler via Flickr
Recently. The New York Times’ media critic David Carr took a look at Backpage.com, the Village Voice Media’s classified ads site. The website features a section labeled “adult” with categories, such as “escort” and “strippers & strip clubs,” that has received a lot of attention iin the past couple of months, as there have been instances in which the section has been used for the trafficking of minors.
While the site explicitly states it does not allow illegal ads, attorney generals from across the country began questioning and examining the website’s policies in August. But now interfaith social justice groups have also expressed their grave disapproval of the site’s policies, whatever they may be.
“On Backpage.com, you can buy a toaster, a car or a girl for sex,” Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, told Carr. “We agree with the attorney generals on the legal issues, but we are raising this as a moral issue. Even if one minor is sold for sex, it is one too many,” she stated.
Although the Village Voice Media’s administrators Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey contest that the claims of critics are exaggerated, they have expressed no desire to eliminate classifieds. “We have always had a very libertarian approach to advertising,” Mr. Larkin told Carr, adding that classifieds represented 30 to 35 percent of their business. “We don’t ban cigarettes, we take adult advertising. We take ads that sell guns.”
But the attorney generals and religious minded don’t intend to equivocate on this issue.
“I think we have to be careful to protect the First Amendment rights of publishers, but free speech does not extend to the knowing facilitation of criminal activity,” Rob McKenna, the attorney general of Washington State, stated in the article. “This is not just about children being prostituted, this is about human beings being trafficked into the sex trades, as adults and as children.”
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