CHICAGO – U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), along with U.S. Senators Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and U.S. Representatives Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), on Friday sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch requesting a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Backpage.com, the nation’s most active sex-trafficking website.
Backpage is routinely involved in the online sale of sex, frequently sex with children. An estimated 70 percent of online sex trade transactions are arranged on Backpage, which earns upwards of $26 million annually from online advertisements. Each year, more than 100,000 children are estimated to be victims of sex-trafficking in the United States.
“Backpage.com is America’s biggest sex-trafficker – so it is confusing that DOJ wouldn’t investigate Backpage for the same reasons it investigated MyRedBook.com,” Senator Kirk said. “Investigating Backpage and its profiteers, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, would send a strong message to these exploiters of children and their advertisers.”
In the letter, the Congress members wrote that sex traffickers act anonymously through website purposely designed to hide the traffickers’ activities and enable traffickers to annually exploit at least 100,000 American children.
“Among these victims approximately 80% are women and children who are bought, sold, and imprisoned in the traffickers’ underground sex service industry. The on-line selling of sex with children is a national horror that must be confronted,” they said.
The Members went on to cite the DOJ’s successful prosecution last year of the owner of MyRedBook.com, a website that facilitated sex-trafficking until the FBI shut it down in June 2014. Earlier this year, the Members sent a similar letter to Attorney General Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder.
In May, Senator Kirk and Representative Wagner’s bipartisan legislation to combat the sale of children for sex online, the Stop Advertising Victims of Exploitation (SAVE) Act, was signed into law as part of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA). The SAVE Act aggressively combats Internet sex trafficking and the selling of children under the age of 18 for sex by making it a crime for a person, such as the owner of a website, to knowingly advertise a commercial sex act with a minor.
Senator Kirk recently backed Cook County, Ill., Sheriff Tom Dart after Backpage sued Dart for encouraging major credit card companies Visa, Mastercard and American Express to prevent their customers from using credit cards to buy adult ads on Backpage.com. Senator Kirk and Sheriff Dart have partnered to crack down on sex-trafficking facilitated by Backpage. Earlier this year they announced the arrests of 72 sex solicitors in Illinois as part of a nationwide sting operation.
The letter to Attorney General Lynch can be viewed here.
