Craiglist Sued As Largest Prostitution Source in U.S.

Cook County Sherriff Tom Dart announced Thursday that he was suing Craigslist to recoup some of the approximately $100,000 his department has spent discovering the rampant prostitution which the erotic services section of the site promotes.  He said,

Craigslist is the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.  I could make arrests off Craigslist 24 hours a day, but to what end? By filing the suit, I'm trying to go up the ladder.

During the press conference, they had a 19-year-old woman tearfully recount how she was drawn into prostitution after answering a modeling ad on Craiglist.

"It started out as a photo shoot. That's not enough -- they don't want you to do just a photo shoot," she said

Important to note: This woman who was lured into prostitution and obviously not happy with what was happening to her is not being called a trafficking victim, but rather a prostitute.  She falls into a squishy legal zone- she may not meet the legal definition of a trafficking victim, but she was a woman in prostitution who didn't want to be there.  And that means she deserves a way out, regardless of how she got there.

Please, stop always arresting women for prostitution!  As I've said on this blog before, I am anti-prostitution.  According to statistics from a number of sources, most women start in prostitution between 12 and 14, which is not an empowered choice.  Most women in prostitution would not be there if they felt they had another economically viable option.  Prostitution is the height of misogyny.  It is a man using a woman's body to masturbate; she becomes an object with no intrinsic value other than what the market deems appropriate, no more value than a house or a car or a sandwich.  The sexually empowered "sex worker" is the rare exception, not the rule.

However, not despite of this view but rather because of it, I am also adamantly opposed to law enforcement focusing anti-prostitution efforts on arresting women.  If most women in prostitution don't really want to be there, how on earth will arresting them help?  Especially when we arrest them, keep them in jail overnight, and then send them back to their pimps.  It's ludicrous!  We need a better policy which focuses on the real causes of prostitution- the pimps (and companies like Craigslist that act as pimps) who lure women into prostitution and the men who buy them.

Image from maggiesfarm.another.com