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$pread Magazine - Issue 3.4
Market Penetration: The War on Prostitution Advertising
By Caroline Andrews
Back in 1973, the year Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion and made women’s lib front page news, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution supporting the decriminalization of prostitution. It emphasized the sentiment of the day – that women’s bodies were their own domain and only they should decide how to use them.
Fast-forward to the present. In March, 2007, the National Organization for Women’s New York City (NOW-NYC) chapter sent out a press release titled, “New York Press: The Marketing Arm of the Human Trafficking Industry.” The press release highlighted the organization’s “Ending the Business of Human Trafficking” campaign, in which print publications, particularly free weeklies, have been targeted in an effort to convince them to pledge not to accept “adult” ads for non-licensed massage parlors, escorts, and the like. In their press release, NOW-NYC took particular aim at the New York Press for initially refusing to accept their demands, charging that the Press, an alternative free weekly paper, “deliberately or not… has become the intermediary between trafficked people and the ‘johns’ who seek their services.”
In bullet points, NOW-NYC laid out their evidence for the link between adult advertising and trafficking. First, the press release cited eight “spas” in East Midtown Manhattan that are actually brothels uncovered by NOW in its “Block by Block” campaign. Next, they described a john review website (www.spahunters.com) in which they claim men have reviewed their experiences with trafficked women in New York City brothels. (For the record, I couldn’t find one example of a client posting on that website who described “trafficking...”) Then, NOW referenced a human trafficking bust by the FBI in Queens from January, 2007. Finally, they pointed to an August, 2006 bust on West 26th Street in Manhattan involving Korean women whose passports had been held by traffickers.
What do any of these examples have to do with the New York Press? No clue. Astoundingly, NOW-NYC didn’t demonstrate any link between a single one of the hundreds of ads in the Press and any verifiable or even alleged instance of trafficking, including the examples cited in that press release. While it is almost certain that some truly exploited and trafficked women have been advertised in the Press at some point, what is disturbing is that it wasn’t deemed necessary by NOW-NYC to actually prove that even one of the paper’s adult ads were really a trafficking front. All they had to do was talk about the fact that trafficking is a problem in New York City (which I don’t dispute) and then point out that those ads in the back of the Press are not actually for back rubs and companionship (duh!). The fact that prostitution is different from trafficking is irrelevant because to the general public, prostitution might as well be a synonym for trafficking.
In late 2007, the New York Press capitulated to the pressure and now no longer accepts adult advertising. To date Time Out New York, The Brooklyn Paper, Hoy, Our Town, Westside Spirit, The Westsider, Our Town Downtown, City Hall, Chelsea-Clinton News, AVENUE, New York Family, The Queens Courier, L Magazine, and New York Magazine have taken NOW-NYC’s pledge. The Village Voice and Verizon’s New York City Yellow Pages are future targets.
Earlier in NOW-NYC’s campaign, a member of Prostitutes of New York (PONY) who wishes to be identified as “Eve,” attended a NOW-NYC meeting to explain her concerns about the effort. Eve says, “I’ve been a NOW member for over a decade. I went to a meeting and told NOW that based on my personal experience the majority of these ads were for prostitution, not trafficking. They were very nice, but unfortunately the basic attitude was that anything ethnically advertised was de facto a trafficking operation. I’m not sure they wanted to believe that it was possible for escort agencies, parlors, or independent girls themselves to use ethnic advertising as a marketing strategy because of client fetishes for a particular nationality. “Hot Russian Girls 4 U” might not be politically correct or tasteful, but that doesn’t mean the girls working there are trafficked, badly treated, or even necessarily Russian. But it fit NOW’s campaign better to assume the worst. I also really believe that many of NOW’s leaders are abolitionist about prostitution; they’ve spent time visiting the worst examples of trafficking in New York City brothels and know very little about the everyday life of more ordinary sex workers. My main goal in going to that meeting was to explain that limiting advertising options for prostitutes was bad policy. If it becomes impossible for prostitutes to advertise online or in cheap print publications then we’re back to street soliciting, which is much more dangerous.”
Cheap print ads in free papers have long been the mainstay of escort agencies, parlors, fetish houses, and independent sex workers because no special skills are necessary to get an ad printed and the costs are minimal. The wide availability of print advertising means that sex workers, particularly prostitutes, who lack access to the Internet or the skills to effectively advertise online, have an opportunity to avoid resorting to street work. Specific newspapers in every city are often well known for having sex industry ads in the back of their publications, so they represent a never-ending source of new clients for sex workers and sex industry businesses – as well as a major source of operating funds for independent and alternative news publishing. It’s unclear how much traffickers rely on print ads to attract clients, and until some entity studies the subject, it’s likely to remain that way.
One reason traffickers might actually choose to avoid print publications is all the unwanted attention. Last October, a U.K. newspaper, South Wales Echo, published an exposé about trafficked women in the Welsh capital of Cardiff. The paper was caught with its pants down when it was discovered that all the brothels that held the trafficking victims advertised in their paper (and in the exact same issue as the exposé). Local police were quoted as saying that one important factor in tracking down the traffickers was their print advertising.
While the Cardiff case is just one example, it’s a general truism that what happens in plain sight is easier to monitor than what happens underground or behind closed doors. An effective ban on open advertising for the sex industry would mean the creation of an underground network of whispers to replace it – and anything that drives the sex industry further underground is not better for sex workers.
Last year, The Economist printed a story highlighting the debate around prostitution advertising in British newspaper classifieds and noted, “Allowing sex to be bought and sold in reasonably open circumstances can in fact make things safer for the workers involved [and] newspapers can do more by regulating their adverts than by dropping them altogether. In Suffolk, where five prostitutes were murdered last year, Archant Regional, a big local newspaper group, decided with the police that the small ads should continue in order to stop the trade going underground. The newspaper passes information to officers and has made simple changes—such as accepting payment only by che[ck] or credit card for adult listings—which mean that advertisers can be traced if illegalities are reported.”
While print advertising keeps everything out in the open, the in-your-face aspect of the ads themselves means that there will always be plenty of people who are offended every time they pick up a paper and see the sex industry displayed. And if they can’t stop the newspapers from printing the ads through public humiliation, some take the war on sex industry advertising to another level.
Orlando’s Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation (MBI) got really creative last year. On October 19, vice agents arrested three employees of the Orlando Weekly whose job it was to sell classified advertising for the newspaper. The three workers were charged with 17 counts of “aiding in the commission of prostitution” and the newspaper itself was accused of racketeering. At the Orange County grand jury indictment, vice agents said that the paper earned $2.3 million in five years from prostitution-related ads. The Weekly charges $80 for a three line ad, so there is clearly a huge market share of Orlando represented in this paper. Vice agents went undercover to the newspaper’s office and explicitly asked to place an ad for a prostitution business. The sting was part of MBI’s pun-laden “Operation Weekly Shame.”
Orlando Weekly publisher, Rick Schreiber, quickly denounced the arrests as “an outrageous abuse of process and an attempt to censor the First Amendment rights of a newspaper that has reported critically on the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation.”
The case is still pending and could have far-reaching and chilling effects on whether or not print publications continue to accept adult advertising. In a similar case two years ago, a grand jury in Tennessee indicted the Nashville Scene for promoting prostitution, but the state of Tennessee eventually dropped the case.
With print advertising under attack, the obvious refuge is Internet advertising, but this is a war zone too. Anyone who was selling or buying sex online in 2002 remembers Operation Flea Collar, when Florida police put together a major sting against Big Doggie website owner, Charles Kelly. As one of the net’s largest escort review and advertising sites, when Big Doggie suddenly went dark, escorts and clients alike scurried for cover.
In retrospect, it’s surprising that something like this didn’t happen sooner. With sex being openly advertised all over the Internet, shutting down major advertising and review sites would seem like an obvious goal of law enforcement.
In the case of Big Doggie, however, the police weren’t able to make any of the over 50 felony racketeering, obstruction, or procurement charges stick. All the chatter on the Big Doggie message boards are protected as free speech, so in order to prove their case the police needed witnesses (clients) to testify in open court, and no one was willing to talk. Moreover the operation was also extremely resource-heavy - vice officers were needed to create a fake escorting site, advertise it, entrap clients, and monitor the message boards; lawyers were needed to review the evidence and put together a case - and it’s not good to tell the District Attorney or local Sheriff that you can’t successfully prosecute the case that he or she has just sunk all the office’s staff time and money into. At the end of the day, MSNBC reported that the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (who ran Operation Flea Collar) would not be renewing an investigation into Big Doggie.
Having realized how difficult it is to prosecute the owners of online advertising sites, police have turned their attention to the providers themselves. While it has always been the case that sex workers and clients occasionally find themselves on the receiving end of online police sting operations, recently the volume of arrests has begun to live up to the sex industry’s paranoia on the subject. Nowhere is this truer than with Craigslist.
The Erotic Services section of Craigslist represents the online version of a stroll that accidentally found itself in a good neighborhood: Everyone’s complaining. Ever since Craigslist broke into mainstream consciousness, there has been a spike in cultural chatter on the subject of prostitution being advertised online. When the sex marketplace was relegated to its own particular websites that no-one who wasn’t looking for them would accidentally stumble across, the sex industry remained relatively under the radar, even though its market share of commerce on the Internet was significant and growing. With Craigslist, however, broader audiences of web users are suddenly being exposed to brazen prostitution on one of their favorite websites. If you ask most Americans about online prostitution advertising, they will probably answer, “Do you mean, Craigslist?”
Craigslist’s huge audience as well as it’s basic structure has been great for sex workers: it’s free, there are tons of people looking, and it’s very simple to use. It’s also a site that many former street workers have turned to as a way of leaving street solicitation. I spoke to “Frannie,” a 47 year old former street worker from the Bronx, about her postings on Craigslist after she responded to my Craigslist ad. Frannie told me about how Craigslist helped her to leave the street. “I never used no computer until last year when my kid – he’s 21 -- showed me Craigslist and said to me, ‘Yo, ma, here’s where they look for some so you don’t have to stand on no street corner. At my age, I don’t get mad customers, not like when I was young. I have another job too, but I put up my ad every few days, check my hotmail, and every now and then I get some extra cash without freezing my butt off or messing with crackheads. I’m too old for that shit.” When I asked Frannie if she knew of others who were able to move their work off the streets because of Craigslist, she added, “Anyone who’s not a crackhead or just likes it out there for God-knows-what reason is coming inside if they have sense.”
Last summer I attended a public meeting of Manhattan’s 10th Precinct Community Council where a Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood resident asked an officer making his report what the precinct was doing to arrest street prostitutes and clean up the area. The officer replied that NYPD sent out vice patrol every night to what were considered problem spots by the community but that there were very few arrests because they couldn’t find any street prostitutes. A few residents commented on how the strolls tended to migrate to keep up with the police, but the officer interrupted and said, “You know, a lot of these people just do this online now.”
The numbers tell the same story. The city of Chicago was reported by the New York Times to have had 43 street-based arrests in July of 2007 – and 60 Craigslist arrests. The Times story that included that fact was published as a front-pager on September 5, 2007, “As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice.” The article, which re-discovered Internet prostitution, describes how police departments from “Hawaii to New Hampshire” are spending more and more of their time trolling the Erotic Services section of Craigslist. In it, Nassau County Assistant Chief of Detectives, Richard McGuire, called Craigslist “the high-tech 42nd Street, where much of the solicitation takes place now.”
As with print advertising, online advertising creates an openness and (digital) paper-trail that can make it easier for police to track down the bad guys. I don’t just mean traffickers but also other men (clients or management) who may be abusing prostitutes.
Right now, the war on prostitution advertising is striking some serious blows against industry workers. The right to free speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution protects our ads where they appear in print (online or in print publishing), but if newspapers refuse to accept our business because they are afraid of being labeled as “facilitators of trafficking” and the major market share websites become unsafe because of police entrapment operations, there will soon be few choices left for prostitutes, many of them choices that make women less safe and less money.
Caroline Andrews is a former escort who lives and works in New York City. She chose her pseudonym because Caroline and Andrew are former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s children. In Giuliani’s eyes, we are all children.
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