Backpage blackout: Sex workers and advocates fear the worst for marginalized women since site’s partial shutdown

A classified ad website finally caved to government pressure this month by taking down its adult services section, leaving sex workers feeling attacked by U.S. officials and advocates concerned for marginalized women’s safety.

Backpage.com shuttered the adult pages on January 9, the evening before the site’s founders and current owners were scheduled to testify before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations in response to allegations that they were to blame for acts of prostitution and sex trafficking resulting from ads on the site. They refused to answer questions at the following day’s hearing, citing their Fifth Amendment rights.

Sacramento advocates warn the website’s censoring will force many marginalized women out onto street corners, where they are much more likely to fall victim to trafficking, rape, robbery and arrest.

“It’s ineffective if the intention is to give help to people who are trafficked or exploited,” said Kimberlee Cline, co-founder of the Sacramento chapter of Sex Workers Outreach Project, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the rights of those in the sex trade. “All they’ve really done is made it harder to find those people and give them help.”

Sex workers and Backpage executives have allies in First Amendment advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who have argued successfully in court that online companies should not be legally responsible for third-party ads, and that websites being sued for user-generated content would have a chilling effect on speech.

A Sacramento Superior Court judge recently agreed, last month tossing out criminal pimping and conspiracy charges brought by the California Attorney General’s Office against Backpage’s chief executives.

But government pressure persists, and it is that very pressure that shut down the adult ads section on Craigslist in 2010. Backpage founders Carl Ferrer, the company’s CEO, and Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, former owners of the alt-weekly newspaper chain Village Voice Media, filled the void with their site, which maintained its own adult ad section. SN&R partners with Backpage on its website advertising section.

That fight may be over for Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer, whom the state has dragged back in court. One month after losing her case and weeks before leaving office to join the U.S. Senate, former Attorney General Kamala Harris leveled the three men with 40 felony allegations each related to criminal money laundering and pimping. They were scheduled for arraignment on January 24, after print deadline.

But the sex industry always seems to find a way. Many sex workers have already moved their ads to the dating portion of Backpage, and sites like Ava.fm, a Tinder-like matching forum for escorts and clients, are reporting a surge in sign-ups.

Though happy about Backpage’s internal troubles, Andrea Powell, founder and executive director of FAIR Girls, a Washington D.C.-based group that provides aid to human trafficking victims, dismissed the company’s disabling of its adult section as “a publicity stunt.”

In a release, Powell wrote that the company could have done more to root out exploiters and cooperate with law enforcement while also protecting consensual sex workers who rely on the service for their survival.

“Backpage’s business practices did not strike that balance,” Powell contended.

Law enforcement and lawmakers have yet to show an interest in striking such a balance.

Sex work advocates such as SWOP Sacramento urge U.S. lawmakers to approach sex work and human trafficking separately, and with an added sense of empathy for those involved.

“They have completely excluded the voices of the people who are most affected,” Cline said. “It feels more like an attack on us than an effort to protect the victims.”