This week Groundswell an organization founded to bring unity within all faith-based communities, sent Village Voice Media an open letter asking for them to shut down adult ads run on backpage.com. They stated that boys and girls are being sold for sex through these ads.
The letter was sent by way of a full paged ad in the NY Times, October 25, 2011. It was addressed to the Jim Larkin CEO of Village Voice and to the Board of Directors. In the letter they state “Arrests of adults selling minors for sex via backpage.com have been reported by the media in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. And these are just some of the cases that have been documented.”
In North Texas the personal advertising section of The Dallas Observer and Fort Worth Weekly are fueled by backpage.com. The Dallas Observer is owned by Village Voice Media. During the Super Bowl when foundations were raising awareness of sex trafficking during big game events the local paper was quick to disrepute organizations that were working to protect children and minors at risk. The articles written about Dallas Women’s Foundation and Traffick 911 were based on opinion. The level of sex trafficking was not a level of hundreds of thousands but if there was any increase of minors being trafficked or international victims of trafficking at all it would be too many.
Groundswell’s letter came after 51 Attorney’s General asked Village Voice to stop adult ads in all of there papers. Online petition site Change.org has almost 60,000 signatures of people asking adult ads to be shut down from the site.
Village Voice has not caved under public pressure or even moral integrity. In North Texas it seems when looking over the local paper FW Weekly or Dallas Observer's adult ads are over one-third of the advertisements. Imagine if just in one of those ads it’s a child trapped in sex slavery? Now imagine if it were yours? If Village Voice could answer these questions would that be enough for them to shut down backpage.com.
To read the letter sent to Village Voice click here.
Information for this article came from Groundswell, Dallas Observer Articles, FW Weekly Articles and Dallas Women”s Foundation. Links above provide the information.
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