Last fall, Craigslist seemed sincere about giving up the life. Alas, she was back on the streets within days.
In November, the online classified ad site signed a deal with 40 states, Washington included, to rid its pages of come-ons from pimps and prostitutes. By then, Craigslist had let its erotic-services section become the greatest bazaar of the flesh trade in human history.
But the company didn’t exactly reform; it mainly became more discreet. Its continuing enabling of prostitution was exposed last month by a medical student’s murder of a masseuse in Boston; he’d hooked up with her on Craigslist.
Closer to home, we have the case of a Kent man who stands charged of trying to entice a woman – in a police sting – to a Seattle motel room where he intended to kill her. Police and other watchdogs have seen prostitution ads stay up on “erotic services” long after they’d besieged Craigslist with complaints about them.
The November deal “hasn’t by any stretch of the imagination eliminated the fact that the erotic-services section on Craigslist is nothing more than an Internet brothel,” said Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. Since the agreement, she said, her office has seen more than 74,000 prostitution ads posted from the Chicago area alone.
But now Craigslist is really, really going to change her ways. After getting leaned on by various state attorney generals, the company agreed Wednesday to dismantle the erotic-services section completely. Supposedly legit massage parlors and the like will still be able to troll on a newly created “adult services” section.
Skeptics aren’t impressed. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, for example, said Craigslist acted only after it had been targeted in a criminal investigation. He said, “Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked.”
We’d like to believe in Craigslist’s reformation. Maybe there’s hope for any company in this line of work. But when you’ve been plying your trade on the streets for years, it can be hard to go straight.
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