This week's Herald column from yours truly looks at how Canadian politicians are following the lead of their US counterparts in going after the website Craigslist:
...Last Friday, the Alberta government announced it was joining Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in demanding that Craigslist remove these ("erotic services") ads. However, just seven days previous, the Solicitor General was expressing skepticism about how effective such a campaign would be.
If the Alberta government's sudden zeal seems less than genuine, there's no doubting the enthusiasm of Wildrose Alliance MLA Heather Forsyth, who was "appalled" the Alberta government took so long to get on the bandwagon.
For an ostensibly libertarian-leaning party, it's disturbing to see Forsyth's moralistic impulses guiding policy in this area. No concern about the way a private company is being bullied and harassed by government? Not a peep about the potential censorship issues?
Forsyth claims that, "one only needs to go on Craigslist and look at these kids. There's no question looking at them they're under the age of 18."
Really? And what, exactly, did Forsyth do about it? In fact, if she saw such an ad and did not report it, then she was in clear violation of the Craigslist terms of use.
The reality is that the vast majority of these ads are not illegal and not of the variety that our politicians are now grandstanding about. There is no doubt, however, that there has been, and still are, illegal and improper ads appearing on Craigslist.
In August, for example, a West Vancouver man was charged after posting an ad seeking a sexual encounter with a school-age girl.
In recent years, Calgary police say they've made upwards of 30 such arrests, including some for ads featuring girls as young as 15. As a result, a number of young girls have been rescued.
All this underscores an important question in this debate: what is to be gained from shutting down these ads on Craigslist? Does the problem go away or is it merely pushed out of sight?
Dr. Danah Boyd is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a research associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She herself is a victim of violence, and has been active for years in working to end violence against women and children.
Surely if going after Craigslist were a means to that end, she would be supportive of it. However, as Dr. Boyd wrote recently, shutting down Craigslist, "achieves the absolute opposite" result. She urges us to think of Craigslist as a "public perch from which law enforcement can watch without being seen."
The visibility of a site like Craigslist makes us more aware of the problem and makes it easier to help victims, Boyd argues.
She's right. Since Craigslist shut down its "erotic services" ads in the U. S, other sites which still offer such ads have seen a major upsurge in traffic.
Rather than solve the problem, shuttering Craigslist merely scatters it -- to other websites, or more disturbingly, the streets.
As the recent ruling from Ontario Superior Court Justice Susan Himel showed us, confining sex workers to the streets makes the profession demonstrably more dangerous.
In the process, the government would also be wrongly censoring those consenting adults seeking a sexual encounter, which suggests that the crusade against Craigslist springs, in part, from a puritanical revulsion to the mere existence of such ads. From there, it's an easy cause for politicians to latch on to, and claim they're "helping children" in the process.
There are children in need of help and more should be done to help them. Shutting down Craigslist helps no one.
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