Polaris commends the bold actions taken by these two Attorneys General offices and the years of work that went into building this case. If the Adult Escort section of Back shuts down, the magnitude of the ripple effects on sex trafficking markets throughout the U. We first learned about sex trafficking victims on Back. They walked us through how their trafficker would take photos of them, write the content of the , post the on Back.
Back at that time, Craigslist and Back were the two major sites where commercial sex was being sold online through online classified . I distinctly remember the day on May 20, when Craigslist shut down its adult services section. That left the vast majority of the market to flood to Back, and Back has been the predominant player in the online sex market ever since.
What started as local knowledge of sex trafficking happening on Back in the D. Sometimes these hotline calls have come directly directly from the survivors themselves, and sometimes the calls have come from parents who discovered their was child being sold on the site. Advocacy efforts about trafficking on Back now go back almost a decade.
Survivors have been sounding the alarm describing their direct experiences being sold on the site. State Attorneys General have written strong letters to Congress raising a red flag about sex trafficking on Back. Last July , several major credit card companies removed their services as payment options from the website in order to curb sex trafficking. In March , Congress held Back in contempt after it ignored a subpoena to hand over documents for a Senate sex trafficking investigation. Back requested to block the subpoena, and the U.