Coming out from my hidey hole very briefly because this whole mess was just too infuriating for me to keep quiet about.
“The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.
That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equity financiers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake.”
Nicholas Kristof, “Financiers and Sex Trafficking”
The title of this article is just as misleading as something Fox News would write. Village Voice Media is not a sex trafficking hub, as apparently Kristof would like to have us believe.
Village Voice Media does own Backpage, as well as the Dallas Observer and many other alternative weeklies. Yes, Backpage, the Observer, and most of the other weeklies allow ads for pretty much everything under the sun, including escort services. Yes, unfortunately, it turns out that occasionally a fraction of those ads are for prostituting trafficked or otherwise coerced individuals.
But to claim that Goldman Sachs investing in Village Voice Media is the same as Goldman Sachs investing in a sex trafficking website is ridiculous. Backpage is hardly only an escort ad site, just like Craigslist was never solely an escort ad site before they were pressured into dropping their “erotic services” section by anti-sex work activists. And then to refer to either as “a sex-trafficking website” is beyond absurd. I don’t know about y’all, but I definitely want to keep in business a website that allows me a cheap/free way of selling off all my unwanted furniture, text books, kitchen ware, old computer parts (Anyone need a yellowing ball mouse circa 1999?), etc. And the importance of the freedom the Observer/other weeklies have to write about controversial issues — which many larger newspapers won’t even acknowledge — far, far outweighs the small risk of accidentally helping a sex trafficker’s business.
But, hey, looks like the fear-mongering paid off for anti-sex work activists: Goldman Sachs has withdrawn its financial support of Village Voice Media.
The Village Voice had this to say about Kristof’s article: “What Nick Kristof Got Wrong: Village Voice Media Responds”.
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C.H., Web Genius, update: I think I’ve been able to salvage my blog archives from the web host transition SNAFU. I’m working on getting everything back up, but this time I’m going slowly, researching every step, because that whole not-looking-before-leaping thing I previously tried? Didn’t quite work out so well as I’d hoped.
