WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – Five months after his step-daughter ran away from home, Linton W. found her one night last August on Craigslist.
The California girl was naked and on her hands and knees. She offered a cell phone number and “a must-try XXX experience.”
Alise was 15.
“I refused to believe it,” says Linton W., a clean-cut suburban salesman.
But a few weeks later, after police found Alise and returned her home, Linton W. gathered up his courage and went back to the computer.
He found her again: the “hot exotic Caucasian bombshell available for your pleasure.” She was featured in 56 postings on Craigslist, the everything-under-one-roof site of online classifieds and community forums. The pictures showed her with heavy makeup that made her look older. Rarely was she wearing anything.
The images were stark proof of how fast Alise’s life unraveled since the forged checks and the other first signs of teen rebellion had emerged less than two years before.
They also illustrated a darker side of Craigslist: Not all of the 10 million people who use the site each month are selling furniture or seeking a job. Some want to make a deal for sex.
And with few restrictions on the flow of information, the “trusting community” that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark created 10 years ago sometimes falls prey to sinister forces who use the site to market minors in the skin trade.
“Craigslist is only one of the sites being used,” said Richard DeJauregui, executive director of the George P. Scotlan Youth and Family Center in Oakland, Calif. “But the fact is, everybody uses Craigslist.”
Links between Craigslist and child exploitation received publicity this month when a 22-year-old Martinez woman was arrested on suspicion of offering a minor under 16 for lewd and lascivious acts.
Police said she agreed to sell her 4-year-old daughter for sex to a man who contacted her after seeing the woman’s picture on the web site. Prosecutors declined to file charges and sent the case back to police for further investigation.
The same day, police in South San Francisco arrested a 20-year-old Oakland woman for allegedly offering to sell the sexual services of a 14-year-old girl whose picture was posted in an ad on Craigslist.
While classified sites focused more on the sex trade have been implicated in similar cases, the massive popularity of Craigslist raises peculiar concerns for law enforcement
“It makes this type of information so readily available, I worry that some kids may decide they want to engage as a prostitute or sex worker for an afternoon,” said Jose Marin, a Contra Costa County prosecutor who specializes in sex and vice crimes. “That’s a scary thing.”
Though it’s rare that an “erotic services” posting on the site will show someone obviously under 18, a quick surf through its offerings shows what seem to be plenty of borderline cases: women who say they’re consenting adults, but who make their youthful attributes a selling point.
A random search on Craigslist on Friday, for instance, revealed 23 postings for “erotic services” by females whose sales pitches included claims they were 18.
“I can’t say that I’ve seen any ads where the girls are 13 or 14,” Marin said. “But there are plenty where they appear young-ish – where they might be 16 or 17 instead of 18.”
Newmark, the Craigslist founder, said his site helps fight against child exploitation on the Internet by removing inappropriate ads and working with law enforcement to help build criminal cases.
“We actually make the situation regarding exploited children better, since few if any other classifieds publications go to our lengths,” Newmark said.
For law enforcement, though, keeping up with the sheer volume of Craigslist postings is a challenge, said Sharmin Eshraghi Bock, an Alameda County, Calif., prosecutor who participates in local and nationwide efforts to combat sex trafficking of children.
For instance: Between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Friday more than 300 ads offering sexual liaisons in the Bay Area were posted on the site.
As growing numbers of prostitutes leave the streets for cyberspace, said Eshraghi Bock, so it appears larger numbers of under-age girls are being offered up to online customers as well.
Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, said the recent headlines marked cases where attempts at child sexual exploitation were halted with the help of his site.
But Linton W. wonders why Craigslist refuses to close one puny door within its massive online community – and get rid of its sexually explicit offerings.
“Why do they need to have that stuff on there?” he said. “They keep using the word community to describe their site, so I guess their community includes providing venues for minors to be pimped.”
Newmark said Craigslist created its “erotic services” section about five years ago because sexually explicit ads were making their way into other areas of the site.
“We have no way to screen the 6.5 million ads per month we get,” Newmark said. “Since we trust people, we’ve given a lot of control over our ads to people who use the site.”
Part of this is giving users the option to “flag” ads they deem inappropriate. When the “flags” reach a certain level – Newmark won’t disclose how many because users try to “game the system” – an ad is automatically removed.
But Eshraghi Bock said the use of Craigslist and other sites can provide “pimps” an extra layer of removal from the sex-for-cash transaction, and thus make it more difficult for law enforcement to get at them.
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Similarly, the online ads complicate the task of advocates who work to free young girls from the sex trade, said DeJauregui of the Scotlan Center, which provides such intervention and support.
He said pimps often threaten physical harm to keep the money coming and the girls in line.
“(They) say they’re untouchable and the girls believe them,” DeJauregui said. “He’s running things from the shadows. The girl knows he’s out there.”
It’s a concern that reflects Linton W.’s reasons for not wanting his full name, or his step-daughter’s, to be published.
Concern in the family runs very deep, he said, about the 32-year-old man who Linton W. believes was marketing his stepdaughter and two other teen-age girls on Craigslist.
Though Alise sometimes cries with remorse over turning to prostitution, her mother, Marie, said she’s very concerned that chapter in the girl’s life is not fully closed.
“I’m scared to death that she’s got plans to go back to this guy,” Marie said.
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(c) 2005, Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, Calif.).
Visit the Contra Costa Times on the Web at http://www.contracostatimes.com.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-11-19-05 1917EST
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