International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 100

Human Trafficking Network Investigations
amounts of child pornography were downloaded. Efforts to collect data on the distribution
of child pornography can be identified as the beginning of interpreting
large datasets in relationship to human trafficking.
Human trafficking in the form of advertisements for escort and other sexual
services followed child pornography into the online environment. The prominence
of sexual online marketplaces reached a significant scale in the early 2000s.
Prior to the widespread adoption of the internet, advertisements for massage,
escort or adult services, and personal ads were scattered in the Yellow Pages, the
back of magazines, and other periodicals. By the end of 2003, there were already
over seven hundred million users of the internet, a population heavily concentrated
in the developed world, where internet access arrived first. Early users of
the internet were most often affluent and male, 7 which is the typical demographic
of a high-frequency purveyor of commercial sexual services. 8 Naturally, the
providers of these services—pimps, criminal organizations, and independent sex
workers—turned to this new form of communication to reach and expand their
customer base. The scale of online advertisements for commercial sex rose significantly
with the popularity of Craigslist beginning in the mid-1990s, which
provided the first widely used public marketplace for advertising goods and services
online. 9
The web, in this period, provided a hospitable environment for the expansion
of trafficking for sexual exploitation because the first federal legislation
recognizing human trafficking in the United States was not passed until the year
2000. Many states were also slow to adopt their own laws. Therefore, human trafficking
was not a criminal offense in all jurisdictions, unlike child pornography,
for which dissemination was strictly prohibited. 10 Furthermore, the online platforms
where sexual advertisements were placed were exempted from responsibility
for the user content they hosted under Section 230 of the Communication
Decency Act of the Telecommunication Act of 1996. This Act provides immunity
from liability for providers of interactive computer services that publish information
provided by users. This allowed webhosting services to maintain websites
that had large numbers of advertisements featuring persons available for sexual
services without liability.
Yet, as these advertisements proliferated, they attracted more law enforcement
attention. In 2010, Craigslist shut down its adult services section after mount-
7 Pew Research Center, “Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet,” retrieved August 5, 2019, https://www.
pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/.
8 Demand Abolition, “Key Facts About Preventing Trafficking Victimization through ‘Demand Reduction,’”
2017.
9 Craigslist.org, “Mission and History,” retrieved August 5, 2019, https://www.craigslist.org/
about/mission_and_history.
10 For federal jurisdiction, human trafficking must occur across state lines; this could not be established
in many trafficking cases.
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