Thursday, March 31, 2011

Junk Science Behind 'Underage Sex Trafficking' Charges Used to Attack Craigslist Adult Classifieds

comments_image 81 COMMENTS

Junk Science Behind 'Underage Sex Trafficking' Charges Used to Attack Craigslist Adult Classifieds

An investigation by the Village Voice found there was less to the statistics than meets the eye.

Photo Credit: Gregor Schlatte
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:

Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.

TAKE ACTION
Petitions by Change.org|Get Widget|Start a Petition �
The widely reported statistics on underage prostitution that helped shutter Craigslist's adult classifieds section last year certainly sounded ominous, but a Village Voice report on the study that produced the statistics found it to be a rather blatant example of trashy, agenda-driven “research.”

Last September, at a hearing into underage sex trafficking before a House Judiciary subcommittee, Deborah Richardson, the Women's Funding Network's chief program officer, told lawmakers that “an independent tracking report” had found that “the number of underage girls trafficked online has risen exponentially in three diverse states” over the previous six months.

“The Internet is the predominate source for domestic trafficking of underage girls,” said Richardson, showing a slide summarizing some of her group's research. “The anonymous veil of the Internet makes this crime practically risk free for traffickers and the men who buy sex with innocent girls. Laws protecting young girls have not kept up with technology.”

The study's hard numbers – which showed a 20 percent increase in underage prostitution in New York, a 40 percent rise in Michigan and a stunning 65 percent jump in Minnesota – were dutifully reported by news media around the country. But last week, the Village Voice – and its network of alternative weeklies – featured a front-page article by Nick Pinto calling out the “junk science” that went into the study. “It's now clear they used fake data to deceive the media and lie to Congress,” wrote Pinto. “And it was all done to score free publicity and a wealth of public funding.”

According to Pinto, the researchers' “methodology” went something like this: they took a bunch of photos of youthful looking women whose ages were known. They showed them to a group of people and asked them whether the women in the photos looked to be age 18 or older. From the photos, people correctly identified the under-aged girls 38 percent of the time, so the study concluded that “for every 100 'young' looking girls selling sex, 38 are under 18 years of age.”

Then they counted all the photos advertising sex with “young looking girls” on sites like Craigslist, and voila! – a trend was born. Pinto called this “dense gibberish posing as statistical analysis,” and a number of empirical researchers he interviewed agreed with the conclusion.

Pretty straightforward so far, but here the story takes a turn. Village Voice Media (VVM), to its credit, attached a prominent disclosure to its feature, noting that it owns the online classifieds site Backpage.com, which, unlike Craigslist, still features adult classifieds. According to Deborah Richardson, the site generates approximately $17 million annually for Village Voice Media, and since Craigslist's decision to drop its adult ads, Backpage has become a leading target for the Women's Funding Network and its allies. As VVM's disclosure puts it, “Certainly we have a stake in this discussion.”

And we do not object to those who suggest an apparent conflict of interest. We sat quietly and did not respond as the WFN held symposiums across America—from Seattle to Miami—denouncing Backpage. But then we looked at the 'science' and the media's willingness to regurgitate, without question, these incredible statistics. In the interest of a more informed discussion, we decided to write.

Meanwhile, the people responsible for the study mounted a half-hearted defenseof their methodology. And the woman who commissioned it, Kaffie McCullough, also acknowledged that she has an agenda, and one that you might find significantly more righteous than Village Voice Media's desire to protect its Backpage revenues.

From Pinto's article:

Kaffie McCullough first approached the Schapiro Group about conducting a study of juvenile prostitution in Georgia in 2007 when, as director of A Future Not a Past, she realized that having scientific-sounding numbers makes all the difference in the world.

In early 2007, McCullough approached the Georgia legislature to ask for money for a regional assessment center to track juvenile prostitution.

"We had no research, no nothing. The legislators didn't even know about it," she recalls. "We got a little bit. We got about 20 percent of what we asked for."

Later that year, the first Schapiro Group counts were made, and when McCullough returned to the legislature the following session, she had the study's statistics in hand.

"When we went to the legislature with those counts, it gave us traction—night and day," she says. "That year, we got all the rest of that money, plus we got a study commission."

There are no comprehensive data on how many under-aged girls are pimped out each year in the U.S., and the Women's Funding Network study doesn't add much to our knowledge. It's generally the case that good policy can't follow from bad analysis, and Getting Craigslist to drop its adult classifieds will do absolutely nothing to address underage prostitution.

But, armed with their “junk science,” A Future Not a Past did earn a remarkable victory with the passage of what columnist Ann Woolner called, “some of the most progressive legislation in the country on the subject.”Rather than punish the victims of traffickers – many of whom are coerced into “the life” against their will, the new Georgia statute mandates harsh penalties for the pimps and johns and requires social services be offered to the prostitutes rather than prosecution if there is any evidence whatsoever of coercion.

Woolner noted how significant the law's passage was in a deeply conservative state where as recently as the 1950s, legislators themselves held “whore auctions” to raise cash. “A private study opened lawmakers’ eyes to the deeply troubling scope of the problem and its consequences,” wrote Woolner. “A cultural shift is exactly what it took.”
submit to reddit

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Even Diane Sawyer watches craigslist TV........................

World News with Diane Sawyer

The Conversation: 'Craigslist TV'

Turning classified ads into viral video sensations

"Craigslist TV" is an online series that follows "outrageous" Craigslist postings in real time, executive producer and director Drew Brown told ABC News.
The show has chronicled a stuntman looking for a woman to light him on fire, a ninja for hire, a foam weapons league in search of new warriors, a "geek" trying to find a date and more.
"There are moments when we are sitting there filming and we're like how did we get here, like how did this happen and how do we get out of here is sometimes what I'm thinking," said Brown.
Brown produces and directs the show with Bob Gillan. It is in its third season and has never had a shortage of new characters.
The documentary series finds its stories by allowing Craigslist users in the Los Angeles area a chance to opt in and be considered for the show. All they have to do is check a box when they post to the site.
"We get 1,000 people clicking that opt-in button every day, whether we're in business or not," said Brown.
Craigslist funds the series, and sees it as a way to highlight the different types of people and ways the site is used.
"You're actually getting to see a visual representation of who are these people that post on Craigslist, and you see such a wide variety," said Gillan. "You see people doing unique things, but it's such a wide variety you kind of look at it and go these people are like you and me."
We hope you'll watch today's Conversation for more.

Here is an exclusive look at the newest episode of Craigslist TV titled "Geek Date":


Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Now this ad really stinks.......Fixxer's pick of the day.

This was emailed to me as a screenshot due to it being flagged so many times.

click on picture to see full size

Sunday, March 27, 2011

WebCritter is developing a newly redesigned classifieds website for the world to use, a formula for failure.

This is just crazy, these people think that craigslist "sucks" yet after reading their "survey" I find it to be bias, and pre-engineered to give many predictable answers, thus making this "survey" completely useless for actual case study. I love the fact that people complain about craigslist, then turn around and try to create their own "craigslist",. The "craigslist sucks, I can make a better one" attitude is one I love to hear, there will only be one craigslist. Good luck webcritter, if your "new classified website" is anything like your botched survey this should be fun to watch.
I will post some of the highlights, then a link to the actual survey. Enjoy!

"CRAIGSLIST QUESTIONAIR...because craigslist sucks 
Improve Craigslist 
WebCritter is developing a newly redesigned classifieds website for the world to use. The owner of WebCritter has been using craigslist for years and understands the needs of all of the users. 

Please forward this survey on to all of your friends and family that use craigslist. The more responses we get, the better we can make the website for you.. 


Please answer these questions honestly, and hopefully from all of your answers we can provide you with a better craigslist..


Are you fed up with the Spam on craigslist?

The spam postings are annoying
The spam emails i get are annoying
I am sick of all of the spam
I stopped using craigslist because of the spam
I have never had an issue with spam 
Would you be willing to pay a small fee for posting ads if it kept the spammers from using the site?

Yes i would
Yes, but i would not pay over $1 per ad
No i do not want to pay, i would rather keep dealing with the spammers"




Here is a link to the entire "survey", keep an eye out for this failure to appear in a city near you. By the way,
the reason I found out about this venture was due to webcritter posting to feedback forum asking why the
ad webcritter had posted to craigslist with the link to the "survey" had been flagged.......Ironic.

http://www.webcritter.com/

http://www.webcritter.com/index.php?option=com_jquarks4s&controller=survey&id=1

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Village Voice: Craigslist sex trafficking scandal based on bogus stats

  From: http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/03/25/6343842-village-voice-craigslist-sex-trafficking-scandal-based-on-bogus-stats

By Helen A.S. Popkin
Last September, Craigslist shuttered its controversial adult services section, replacing the link with the word "censored" in bold black font.
The move came following mounting government pressure, largely due to a study that alleged online classifieds served as a platform for rapidly increasing underage prostitution and trafficking of women against their will.
Now, Nick Pinto of the Village Voice reports, and anti-sex trafficking experts agree, the study is a load of bad science hokum, leading to tax dollars diverted to a crisis that may or may not exist.
The study, commissioned by the Women's Funding Network and conducted by the Schapiro Group — a consulting group whose "members weren't academic researchers, and had no prior experience studying prostitution," got its numbers by guessing ages of photos that accompanied adult services ads.
Further, the Village Voice reports that the study did not account for the possible inaccuracy of the photos — that the photos may not be recent and/or are of someone other than the person providing the actual "service." This lack of reliable methodology, however, did not prevent the Women's Funding Network from presenting these findings to Congress.
At the same hearing last September of a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee, where Craigslist lawyers announced the end of adult services, Deborah Richardson, the chief program officer of the Women's Funding Network "told legislators that juvenile prostitution is exploding at an astronomical rate," Village Voice recounts:
In the wake of this bombshell revelation, Richardson's disturbing figures found their way into some of the biggest newspapers in the country. USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, the Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Detroit Free Press all repeated the dire statistics as gospel.
The successful assault on Craigslist was followed by a cross-country tour by Richardson and the Women's Funding Network.
None of the media that published Richardson's astonishing numbers bothered to examine the study at the heart of her claim. If they had, they would have found what we did after asking independent experts to examine the research: It's junk science.
Experts consulted by the Voice concurred. These included:
• Eric Grodsky, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, who teaches about proper research construction.
• David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
advertisement



• Ric Curtis, chairman of the Anthropology Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who led a Justice Department-funded study on juvenile prostitution in New York City in 2008.
• Sgt. John Bandemer, head of the Vick Human Trafficking Task Force in St. Paul, Minnesota.
David Finkelhor at the Crimes Against Children Research Center says he understands the pressure on reporters to cite figures when they're writing about juvenile prostitution, but it's something they need to resist, because despite what groups like the Women's Funding Network would have you believe, there simply are no good statistics.
"You have to say, 'We don't know. Estimates have been made, but none of them have a real scientific basis to them,'" Finkelhor says. "All you can say is, 'This is the number the police know about, and we think there are more than that, but we don't know how many more.'"
The Voice report included the following disclosure statement, links to additional background on the story, as well as a link to the response on the Voice report from the Schapiro Group which conducted the study:
EDITOR'S NOTE: Village Voice Media, which owns this newspaper, owns the classified site Backpage.com. In addition to used cars, jobs, and couches, readers can also find adult ads on Backpage; for this reason, Women's Funding Network and their allies have often called attention to the site, sometimes going so far as to call for its closure.
Certainly we have a stake in this discussion. And we do not object to those who suggest an apparent conflict of interest. We sat quietly and did not respond as the WFN held symposiums across America — from Seattle to Miami — denouncing Backpage. Indeed, we were never asked for response.
But then we looked at the "science" and the media's willingness to regurgitate, without question, these incredible statistics. In the interest of a more informed discussion, we decided to write.

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Join her on a Facebook or Twitter, won't you?