Love146 Craigslist "Call to Action" Campaign

As the New Year approaches Love146 continues their efforts to combat child trafficking with renewed hope and ambition. They recently launched a Craigslist "Call to Action" campaign.

Some background on the campaign

The Internet with all of its conveniences has unfortunately become a major platform for facilitating human trafficking, prostitution and sexual exploitation of children. Currently, approximately 400,000 women and children are being prostituted in the U.S. annually. Surprisingly only 10-20% of prostitution is street-based. Behind closed doors, hidden by the anonymity of the Internet the exploitation of children is surging.

Craigslist, an Internet company well known for enabling users to conveniently advertise everything from jobs to housing, has now become a popular marketplace for the sale of human- beings. With its free postings and relative anonymity for its users, Craigslist's "Erotic Services" site has become a vehicle for the trafficking and exploitation of women and children. There have been numerous reportings of children falling prey to traffickers advertising on Craigslist and victims as young as four years old have been sold on the Erotic Services site.

Craigslist in the media

Recent headlines include the January 11, 2007 Cook County, Illinois arrest of three adults, two of which were posting advertisements on Craigslist for girls ranging in age from 14 to 16 years old to perform sex acts. ABC 7 Chicago reported that "some of these girls were forced to turn 10, 12 tricks a day resulting in tens of thousands of dollars for the pimps." (See full article on ABC7Chicago.com: ( http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=4928094). In response to the mounting evidence that its site is being used for these insidious purposes, Craigslist often refused to comment or claimed lack of resources to effectively monitor postings.

The Craigslist "Call to Action" campaign, urges Craigslist as a multi-million dollar company and face of other philanthropic causes to take responsibility for the role its site is playing in facilitating child trafficking and exploitation. In light of the New Year, we are asking Craigslist to make a New Year's resolution to follow in the footsteps of MySpace and Google and implement better preventative policies and monitoring efforts to protect its site from being used as a resource for child traffickers. Through several speaking engagements, a national press conference to take place in the spring and a petition directed at Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, Love146 hopes to raise awareness about this issue and encourage Craigslist to take action.

You will notice that at the bottom of the petition we have given Craigslist a deadline of January 1st to proclaim there intent to implement the proper safeguards and monitoring, otherwise we plan to boycott use of their site. While Craigslist claims to have a philanthropic mindset, it also has a bottom line and pressure from its users may put pressure on its financial stability. We have already sent our first mass mailing of the petition from the Love146 office with a message to Craigslist and CEO Jim Buckmaster that the time to act is now.

What YOU can do!

Please join us in our efforts by mailing the petition(preferably certified mail) and e-mailing it to the Craigslist staff: jim@craigslist.org, craig@craigslist.org, conrad@craigslist.org, abuse@craigslist.org.

Click here to download the petition:
http://www.love146.org/uploads/CL_Petition_11_2007.doc
Click here to download the petition and factsheets:
http://www.love146.org/uploads/Craigslist_campaign_2007.pdf

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