I'd recommend listening to this Reply All podcast episode specifically about the child protection act that passed shortly after Backpage was taken down and which caused Craigslist to remove their adult services:
There is significant evidence and research showing that these services helped protect prostitutes and kept many of them safe. They used technology and private forums to inform one another about dangerous Johns and screen potential customers.
Where teens being trafficked? Probably. But that's an entirely different problem, one of getting more social services available to help teenagers if their domestic situations turn bad; so they have some place to go and don't end up on the streets or being taken by pimps.
Since these services went away, sex workers are already reporting people they know disappearing, or being assaulted.
This is kind of similar to the immigration debate, where the laws actually on the books are so strict that many people are unsatisfied with just enforcing them, but leaving a large illegal-but-unenforced gray area sitting around just creates a massive haven for outlaws.
Now, if prostitutes were legalized, licensed, and regulated, and sites like Backpage were required to retain identification and registration records for all their advertisers, it would be easy to distinguish between a service that protects sex workers and a service that collaborates with human traffickers. But we can't have that, so instead we have gray market actors like Backpage, and a bunch of investigators and prosecutors who have to decide (based upon much fuzzier and less complete evidence!) whether they're just protecting sex workers or outright collaborating with human traffickers.
Maybe the investigators and prosecutors made a bad call. But combining unreasonably strict laws with bizarrely lax and discretionary enforcement is a really shitty way to handle these problems in the first place.
I listened to it when it ran. They address no part of the allegations against Backpage and are in no way relevant to the criminal complaint against Lacey and Larkin.
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-harbo...
There is significant evidence and research showing that these services helped protect prostitutes and kept many of them safe. They used technology and private forums to inform one another about dangerous Johns and screen potential customers.
Where teens being trafficked? Probably. But that's an entirely different problem, one of getting more social services available to help teenagers if their domestic situations turn bad; so they have some place to go and don't end up on the streets or being taken by pimps.
Since these services went away, sex workers are already reporting people they know disappearing, or being assaulted.