Attorney Gen. Dustin McDaniel announced his support Wednesday for a bipartisan initiative asking Congress to grant state and local authorities the power to prosecute online sex-traffickers.
Forty-nine attorneys general nationwide have signed the appeal calling for an amendment to the federal Communications Decency Act, originally meant to protect children from accessing pornography and other indecent material online. The attorneys general and advocacy groups nationwide want the power to enforce online sex crimes to be expanded beyond the grip of federal authorities. They say the 1996 law fails to address issues of modern-day sex-trafficking.
“The traffickers have really moved their victims off the streets and put them online because it’s much more profitable, it’s anonymous and there’s little possibility of law enforcement stopping that activity,” said Pat Trueman, president of Morality in Media, a nonprofit aimed at reducing pornography consumption among society. “Trafficking is growing and one reason it is is because the federal government cannot handle all the cases that are out there.”
According to the Polaris Project, a global human trafficking prevention group, the Internet has been identified as the number one platform that predators currently use for buying and selling women and children for sex in the United States. An FBI investigation found in 2008 that more than 2,800 ads offering prostituted children were posted on Craigslist alone.Craigslist has since parted with its “adult services” section, but sites like Backpage. com, many say, continue to serve as a haven for pimps, traffickers and johns. A May 2012 Arizona State University study found that nearly 80 percent of ads posted on the adult-services section of Backpage.com were for prostitutes. Both McDaniel and Trueman cited the Dallas-based classified-ads site as a major player in adult and child sex-traffickingnationwide.
Calls to Backpage.com’s Dallas office were not returned Wednesday.
But Trueman, the head of a national faith-based organization, says the sex-trafficking problem is bigger than one website.
“The Internet is what’s causing it to spiral out of control,“ he said. “Every city has local prostitution websites.”
In their letter, the attorneys general claim the 1996 law is being used “as a shield by those who intentionally profit from prostitution and crimes against children.” Trueman and a spokesman for McDaniel said Tuesday that federal authorities, acting alone, were ill-equipped to stem the growth of child sex-trafficking facilitated through online ads.
“It is important to the attorney general and 48 of his colleagues to make sure every opportunity is available to work to eliminate human trafficking, including child sex trafficking, and a change in federal law would give state prosecutors the ability to pursue entities that help facilitate modern-day slavery and the exploitation of children,” said the attorney general’s spokesman, Aaron Sadler, in an email Tuesday. “It takes law enforcement at every level - federal, state and local - to effectively combat prostitution and trafficking.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 8 on 07/29/2013