everybody was looking to sell a bike or old clothes. instead, some people started selling people. human trafficking. some of those being sold were as young as 14 or 15 years old, many of them girls. they were targeted and plucked from their communities, often forced to take drugs and sold into under age prostitution which is illegal everywhere in america. some of the girls were able to escape and fought back choosing to sue back page for children being allowed to be sold on their website. many victims lost their cases because of a 1996 law called the communications decency act or cda which basically says online service providers can t be held liable for what third parties post, meaning back page was saying it shouldn t be responsible for pimps selling teens on its website. the issue caught the attention of some in congress. they began investigating and in january they issued a report. backpage.com s knowing facilitation of online sex
to be sure that the internet is a place where girls and women and others are not sold online. one quick story, we had a person testify at our hearing whose daughter had been missing for nine months. she calls backpage because someone tells her that she ought to look on that site for her daughter, which she does. she finds a photo of her daughter, 14-year-old girl. she calls and says, oh, my gosh, nine months after my daughter going missing, i ve found her on your site. thank you for closing down that ad and the response she got from backpage, did you pay for the ad? she said, this is my daughter, 14 years old. of course i didn t. if you didn t, you can t shut it down. she continued to be exploited. so this is the kind of people we re dealing with here. i don t think anybody supports that. we ve worked with the tech community a lot on this. we ve come up with very narrow language. it s far more narrow than the house language as an example. we ve addressed their concerns. it s he not a
it talks about a website that i had not heard of called back page. maybe everybody else has. what did you discover about back page and why you think it s important to focus on this and if i could ask, do you think the new attorney general, jeff sessions, will be as focused on human trafficking as you have been? first, it s an incredibly important issue. unfortunately, human trafficking and specifically sex trafficking of minors is something that s grown over the last several years and one reason is the internet. as survivors have told me, you know, we ve moved from street corner to the internet and specifically to the iphone and backpage.com has 80% of the commercial sex traffic. they have almost a monopoly on this. we know that girls under age have been sold on this website. so we spent two years investigating them. part of what this documentary is about, which is coming out tomorrow in six theaters around the country and encourage people to see it or go online and look
ruined the game. even master mico, the old school hustler from detroit, says the boom of online ads has made the game more risky for everyone by attracting more wannabe pimps, more deviant customers, and ever younger girls with absolutely no street savvy. i think there s a tendency now for little susie in the suburbs at 16 years old, she s online, oh, what s this, backpage, those girls look kind of cute. she has low self-esteem. she thinks that maybe she could, you know, fit in somewhere. next thing you know, hey, you want to make this money, blah, blah, blah. and a lot of them guys will tell them, oh, you re so pretty. and they use that sweetheart angle, that love angle on them. and next thing you know, she thinks this guy loves her and she s doing dates out of a hotel room. for now, police nationwide just want the public to be aware of the very real dangers that lurk among the online ads for
in detroit, hunting and killing young women two at a time. when you add to that there was a connection between three of the four deceased to a website called backpage.com, the a-ha moment came very quickly in our investigation. recently, there have within two certainty incidences on december 26th chief godbee calls a press conference to alert the public to the clear and present danger of what the local media have now dubbed the backpage killer. there is an immediate danger. there is a person that s potentially preying on women of a specific age in their early 20s that have utilized backpage.com or maybe other similar websites. this tie for us is disconcerting. it would have been irresponsible for us to have