Merlyn Horton interview on CTV, June 29, 2009 (Courtesy CTV.ca). The popular online classified service Craigslist is a clearing house for all kinds of products from tools to tickets. Now, youth workers and police are sounding the alarm about something else that’s for sale there—teenagers selling their bodies online.

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Two stories on the same website on the same day illustrate something about the Web we all should know by now. First, and very simply, don’t tweet (announce via Twitter) that you’re going out of town… unless you somehow relish having your home broken into (video); and second (returning the focus to youth), if you’re contemplating going on a murderous rampage, maybe don’t tip off your intended victims via Facebook beforehand. Just a thought. Oh, and while I’m on it, you can add to that: if you value your dad’s reputation as a basketball coach, perhaps it’s not the greatest idea — family loyalty aside — to attack his critics on Facebook, to the point where Daddy himself is pleading with you to put down the laptop… slowly, now… and step away.

You know, I’ve said this kind of thing before and I’m filled with neither the hope nor the expectation that this time will be the last, but the Internet itself is not really the point here; it merely amplifies the bizarro-world behaviours and respective errors in judgement of humans. You could even argue that it’s a force for good in the second example, but no, like the hammer that can pound a nail or crack a skull, it really is neutral in itself, entirely dependent on its users.

I don’t have a link for this, but out driving the other day, I caught a part of the Christy Clark show on local (Vancouver) talk radio station CKNW. She was discussing that case of so-called cyberbullying out of Washington state wherein a group of elementary school girls uploaded a video to YouTube featuring ways in which another girl might be killed. The cyberbullying aspects were being ramped up until Clark began an interview with the always-sensible Barbara Coloroso, who at one point said (and since I don’t have any other record but my flawed memory, I paraphrase recklessly): “The issue here is people being mean. They are using the tool of the Internet with which to do it, but primarily they are being mean, and not by teasing but by taunting.” While recognising that the girls needed to be apprised of the levels of meanness to which they had reached, of the line they had crossed, she quite clearly emphasised that the electronic aspect is largely a red herring. The girls in question were merely using the tools with which they are comfortable and adept, just as in the past they might have whispered this stuff along phone lines after school or passed it along on a scrap of paper in class. 

I said “largely” just now, because it isn’t entirely a red herring when you stop and think about it. While I reiterate that complexity is a predictably ongoing theme of this blog, there really are nuances present here which we overlook to our detriment if we opt for either black or white. Yes, the girls are being mean and unkind and yes, they are using the tools available to them — and with the smooth skills of those fully immersed from birth in this new-media-saturated world, I might add — but as easy as it would be to dismiss that aspect of the story, I don’t think we can entirely. As another article wisely notes, “technology has given our kids superpowers that allow them to be both invisible and everywhere at once.” The question we face is one that is alluded to in that same article: do young people now possess powers that outstrip their judgement? Is that Spiderman cliché about great power and great responsibility suddenly all the more relevant with the Web’s (ha!) ubiquity? I’d argue that these are important questions, ones we ought to discuss both at length and in depth, but I’d also add that unless we as adults begin to role model these ideas with a little less hypocrisy, our well-meaning exhortations may ultimately fall on some decidedly unimpressed and hearing-resistant young ears.

I might get “lynched” for the pun in the header, but SOLOS and this very Hot Topics blog you’re so intently devouring right now is getting some welcome publicity after The Georgia Straight’s Tech Blog posted an article today. Thematically, you’ll recognise it as focusing (some would say obsessing) on the same concerns we always do, but it’s a nice summation of the pragmatic middle ground SOLOS often walks when addressing the opportunities and pitfalls presented when youth and technology interact/collide. Just for the sake of completion, the article’s original title was “Won’t Somebody Please Revisit The Children?” which is slightly more smartass and snarky than what the Straight eventually went with, but it’s otherwise very representative of the organisation and is another incremental step in getting our message out. Good stuff.

In lieu of an update on the original story, I thought I’d just note in a relatively short post that some kind of karmic balance seems to have been achieved in the struggle between Craigslist and South Carolina’s attorney general. I have to admit to some schadenfreude-like amusement at this story, which basically relates how that state’s top cop, Henry McMaster, has been targeting Craigslist in, quite frankly, an overblown and posturing manner for allegedly facilitating prostitution through its web-based services. While it appears that Craigslist has shown good faith and made some alterations to its policy with regard to “erotic services”, McMaster has been unrelenting, threatening prosecution as recently as Sunday (May 17). Well, Craigslist have called his bluff. In effect, they have applied for a temporary restraining order against the office of the South Carolina attorney general. 

“Despite Craigslist’s legal immunity from criminal or civil liability under state law for unlawful third-party content on its website, and despite the numerous good-faith actions that Craigslist has voluntarily taken to deter abuse of its service by third parties … McMaster has persisted in threats to criminally prosecute Craigslist on the basis of third-party content appearing on the Craigslist website,”

Which is kind of funny. Especially after McMaster responded by declaring victory and, anticlimactically (given all his previous posturing), picking up his file folders and going home:

In his statement Wednesday, McMaster belatedly acknowledged Craigslist’s shuttering of its erotic services category, “as we asked them to do. And they are now taking responsibility for the content of their future advertisements. If they keep their word, this is a victory for law enforcement and for the people of South Carolina.”

And to add to the overall positive vibe in this post, the article in which I read this (linked to above) also goes on to acknowledge the child-sex trafficking that has been facilitated by Craigslist in the past, a situation its reforms will hopefully put some serious dents in. Between that and the announcement earlier this week by the Canadian branch of Craigslist, this has been a good week for those of us concerned about child sexual exploitation everywhere.

There’s something troublingly off-kilter about the word “cyberbullying” when applied to the Megan Meier – Lori Drew case. Just as placing the word “cyber” in front of another word doesn’t necessarily confer some greater import, it’s equally true that this notorious case cannot be accurately rendered down to one handy buzzword. In many ways, in fact, we are hopelessly muddled when it comes to both our discussion of, and reactions to, the overall concept of “bullying” as it stands in the wider world.

Why indeed, do we have a category of mean behaviour we call “bullying”? How is it different from, say, committing an assault or uttering threats? Why don’t we call it persecution or intimidation? Does the notion itself end up like that famous definition of hardcore pornography: we know it when we see it? Certainly there are elements of cowardice and/or cruelty that may be lacking in other related behaviours, but who decides exactly what constitutes cowardice? Or cruelty? Must it be judged on a case by case basis? By whom? Which factors would take precedence? A difference in physical size? A difference in power? Are only children involved in bullying? And if so, as an aside, where do we think they learn these behaviours? What is it called when an adult abuses a child or youth in such a way that we would have labelled it bullying had it involved a larger child harassing a smaller one? Why is child abuse called child abuse and not bullying when often it involves all our defining characteristics of the latter (cowardice, cruelty, power imbalance, physical harm or the threat of physical harm, infliction of emotional distress, etc.)? 

So, as problematic as the concept is, when we place the word “cyber” in front of it, we only compound the confusion, at least from a legal perspective. What, if anything, makes the effects of cyberbullying different from those of mere bullying? Does, for example, the anonymity afforded by the former lead to more extreme abuses? Some would say yes, although anyone who has witnessed a real life crowd urging on a violent act might disagree. Even more controversially, are there gender differences involved? These are fascinating questions, each one equally worthy of a blog post itself, but for my purposes here, and in the interests of brevity (ha ha, too late), I’ll now return to Lori Drew.

With the case at an impasse, currently, it’s worth revisiting the details.

In September 2006, suburban mom Lori Drew allegedly conspired, along with her 13-year-old daughter and another teenager, to create a fake MySpace account under the name Josh Evans in order to inflict psychological harm on another 13-year-old girl Megan Meier, a neighbour. If you are unfamiliar with the case, you can read far more detail in the first link of my post, but suffice it to say that a very psychologically vulnerable Meier ended up taking her own life as a result of the hoax. Public sentiment, once the story had come to light, was understandably outraged, and  this woman’s appalling behaviour elicited not just criticism but harassment, vandalism and possibly even internet stalking by some of her detractors. In fact, the response was so vehement that prosecutors, in my opinion, went far beyond their normal purview in pursuit of Ms Drew, and in May 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. On the one hand, this trivialised the issue, by opening up the potential for sending people to federal prison for being annoying or obnoxious; yet on the other, it paved the way for giving website terms of service the force of criminal law, a ludicrous precedent instantly grasped by anyone who has clicked “Accept” after, at best, scanning an online Terms of Service agreement. Needless to say, a jury later reduced three of the felony charges to misdemeanors, deadlocking on the criminal conspiracy charge. As linked to above, sentencing will now take place in July 2009, and there are indications that the judge may be considering overturning the jury verdict.

All of which might have been avoided. By essentially charging Drew with hacking-related charges via the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prosecutors have unnecessarily muddied the waters in their understandable zeal to mete out some kind of commensurate justice for a young life tragically lost. Don’t worry, I totally get the motivation behind that. But once again, using a sledgehammer to crack a lone (and, in this case, particularly loathsome) nut only leads to legal confusion and, ultimately, to the erosion of everyone’s larger freedoms. I mean, many of us are not exactly enamoured of that most unpopular of web beasts, the internet troll, but I’m pretty sure that most of us, away from the heat of battle, would prefer to ignore them than have them hauled off to prison. Plus, who can honestly claim they have never misrepresented themselves on the internet, never signed on to a forum with a different name, never (for that matter) gotten angry with another blogger or commenter? And besides, what Lori Drew did is a far cry from trolling. I don’t know if it fits our definition of bullying — it probably does — but however you end up labelling the behaviour, that it occurred online makes it neither more nor less excusable. We’re still left with the question: what kind of bullying should be considered criminal? And that, my friends, opens up a whole raft of other questions I alluded to at the beginning of this post. So, it seems, back to the drawing board…

Are we at SOLOS the only ones out here in cyberland with a nuanced position on the Craigslist controversy? In other words, that we don’t actually have a handy unambiguous position on prostitution per se, but most definitely have a very large problem with the sexual exploitation of children? I realise we’ve been here before, and we seem to be far from alone in thinking that some of the responses to Craigslist seem cynical and calculated, but it must be pointed out over and over again that the specific issue of underage solicitations on Craigslist (note that any relevant Googleable stories are for the most part either from agencies actively involved in combating the issue, or from local media reporting on what internet safety experts have highlighted in community presentations) is getting almost no mainstream publicity at all.

Is the analog here that old story of real-world NIMBYs fighting to remove the street prostitution from their neighbourhood while everyone continues to ignore the grooming and sexual exploitation of kids right under their noses? I remember that very situation here in Vancouver in the late ’80s/early ’90s, when the Mount Pleasant area was targeted by local residents outraged by the nearby sex trade and its offshoots and, despite the attempts of organisations like Reconnect (a province-wide street youth outreach program), DEYAS (Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society) and SYS (Street Youth Services) to hijack the scandal in order to spotlight the far more disturbing issue of children and youth, the media nonetheless concentrated almost entirely on the few blocks where adult women regularly plied their trade.

To extend an earlier analogy, blaming Craigslist for prostitution is like blaming the city streets department for the street corner sex trade… all the while ignoring the fact that a couple of journalists have reported that a handful of renegade city planning personnel (currently unbeknownst to their bosses) are running a massage parlour staffed entirely with 13-year-olds! Okay, that’s probably more than a little laboured, but hopefully you get my meaning. But when does the ignorance excuse begin to move from merely absurd to completely untenable? When enough people are reporting on it, I guess. Kind of like with this story, perhaps?

And now, just as I was about to publish this post, Craigslist has responded to all the pressure and will be closing its “Erotic Services” section and opening a fee-based “Adult Services” category.* Interestingly — and in keeping with the theme of this post — there is no explicit mention of child or youth exploitation in their statement, although they do take a satisfying shot or two at the sensationalist nature of the overall reporting of this controversy.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room grows ever more astounded at the ability of observers to avoid seeing him…

*For our purposes, since we are in Canada, it’s noteworthy that this applies only to Craigslist in the United States.

[Update (May 18, 2009): Hey, if you complain about something long enough, perhaps some wrongs do actually get righted!]

I realise I risk accusations of kneejerk contrarianism in these posts, but any unease I feel about the genuine dangers young people are faced with — trust me, as a former youth worker, head and sand are far, far apart, in my case — is tempered by my frustration with the almost comical and phobia-like displays much of the media and, consequently, most of the public exhibit when initially exotic-seeming examples come to light (I say “seeming”, as they are just updates on age-old abuses, after all). We don’t seem capable of keeping a level head when we discuss kids and sex, or indeed, more to the point: kids, sex and technology. That cultural blind spot is almost as unsettling for me as the abuses themselves. I probably shouldn’t even use the word “comical”, since real world people are getting caught up in this irrational web of neuroses, and being very much real-world hurt by the experience.

So, back to “sexting”. I recently stumbled on a story that illustrates my complaints perfectly. If you read nothing else today, read the linked article at Wired. Briefly, rumours about sexting at a Virginia high school had reached a sufficient volume that an assistant principal at the school, Ting-Yi Oei, was asked to investigate their veracity. The article continues:

“The investigation was inconclusive, but led to a stunning aftermath: Oei himself was charged with possession of child pornography and related crimes — charges that threatened to brand him a sex offender and land him in prison for up to seven years. Transferred from his school and isolated from colleagues, Oei spent $150,000 and a year of his life defending himself in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare triggered by a determined county prosecutor and nurtured by a growing hysteria over technology-enabled child porn at America’s schools.”

Compare this with those stories I linked to in an earlier post about kids themselves being charged with child pornography, and we can see that the responses are out of all proportion, and that the spirit of hysterical outrage will not only countenance but outright encourage the metaphorical cracking of a nut with a hypothetical sledgehammer. Thanks to a judge with common sense, Oei’s story had a relatively happy ending, and we should at least be grateful that checks and balances do still exist in opposition to ill-considered legislation and over-zealous law-enforcement. But a combination of our inability to discuss sensibly and rationally the overlapping topics of children, technology and sexuality keep leading to these occasionally ludicrous prosecutions.

(And in case you think I’m overstating this, I refer you to the astounding case of Julie Amero. Kafkaesque is right! Or, even more frightening, it’s as if the ghost of Franz Kafka mated with the ghost of Senator McCarthy and our current world is the result.)

It’s like some kind of diabolical Venn diagram: one circle represents children; another technology; the third sexuality. Each alone we can handle at least adequately, but where each of them intersects, not only are we not at the races, but we haven’t even begun to saddle up. In fact, where all three intersect in the centre, we’re still asleep dreaming that we’re panicking about being late for the races…

Seems I wasn’t the only person who noticed some of the melodramatic handwringing that tends to accompany certain topics du jour. The Globe and Mail writer, Ivor Tossell, does a nice job linking the recent apocalyptic response to the outbreak of swine flu with our not-dissimilar reactions toward the “Craigslist moral panic”. Like me, Tossell speculates on the coining of the term “Craigslist Killer”:

“[J]udging by the way the case sparked a moral panic about Craigslist itself, the ready association people drew between the two words seems more than just phonetic. [...] The copious coverage that followed seemed to feature almost as many screenshots of Craigslist as they did pictures of the suspect himself. Columnists sounded off about the Internet’s dark corners. Local TV news squads took to the streets, filming passersby as they shook their heads and vowed they’d never answer an ad from those creeps online.”

He even mentions a piece I ended up not linking to despite initially considering it when I wrote my original post (and which also seemed to me very bizarre), before coming to the obvious conclusion: “There is nothing about Craigslist that contributed to this crime.” I mean, nobody thought to dub the perpetrators of this equally appalling crime “The Facebook Rapists”, for instance, even though the initial contact with their victim was made at that social networking site. No, as with the earlier MySpace predator panic, there does seem to be an element of Web-anxiety underlying these recurrent phobias, a lurking what-monster-have-we-created? kind of feeling, or even just a sense that many adults feel increasingly left behind by a burgeoning yet progressively more arcane technology.

However — and isn’t there always a “however”? — Tossell does point out that Craigslist has always had its sleazy, amoral underside (hmmm, like the Web itself?), recalling shelter-for-sex ads he’d seen at the site after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and he spares little sympathy however misguided he believes the hysteria to be. But I do wish he had pointed out the use of Craigslist for child exploitation, an aspect of all this that remains largely unexplored by either the mainstream or the margins. A few more brows knotted in that direction might not go amiss.

It seems that whenever we attempt to shine a light on these murkier practices, our responses jump from moral panic to wilful blindness in an instant, almost entirely eschewing the middle ground of gathering facts, performing research and implementing measured grown-up responses.

As a short addendum to that last post, I think it’s important to point out the ways in which new media can and do have a positive impact on our world, a facet we often lose when sensationalism rules. There’s a recent story, for example, in which a teenaged girl in the U.S. helped to avert the suicide of a Facebook friend (also a teenager) in England. This kind of response requires a rare combination of compassion, decisiveness and the co-ordination of complex resources, both on and offline. And just to prove this is no isolated example, here’s a similar story involving MySpace… not to mention actor Demi Moore’s recent Twitter-based suicide intervention. If nothing else, these reports may serve as counterpoints to horror stories like this one.

First, they went after MySpace. Then it was Facebook. Now it’s Craigslist’s turn. Hmmm. Don’t get me wrong — these sites have definitely, at various times during their evolution, needed to tighten up their security in the light of predatory behaviours by some users toward minors, but sometimes a larger reality gets missed amid all the anti-Internet furore; namely, that the exploitation of youth is still a powerful feature of our wider culture, regardless of the technology currently employed in its propagation.

Take one of the most basic forms of abuse; the recruiting of underage kids into the sex trade by pimps, who initially locate, then groom, then turn out, then often beat or otherwise abuse vulnerable young people, some as young as ten. A few of us at SOLOS worked directly with that street population at one time, and way back before the Internet, predatory men (and women, on occasion) would recruit their victims in shopping malls, on street corners, in video arcades, even in group homes. This was a practice that we always had a great deal of difficulty getting across to the general public, the ease with which kids can be targeted, the insidiousness of the pimps, the amorality (to be kind) of the johns who were the “end users” in this tawdry, often tragic, transaction. And I have no doubt it is still happening in every single one of our communities. I suppose when the exact same thing occurs online and receives a corresponding bump in publicity, we should be grateful that the issue is spotlighted once again, but it does sometimes strike me as odd that we end up focussing more on the opportunistic use of current technology by some sick individuals than we do on the bigger picture of the commercial sexual exploitation of children and youth that has been going on for decades all around us, Intertubes or no Intertubes.

Which brings us to the so-called “Craigslist Killer”. Whenever a notorious (generally serial) criminal appears on our radar, the news media, and sometimes even law enforcement organisations, apparently feel obliged to concoct a snappy handle for him (and, yes, it is almost always a “him”). They base such names on the individual’s modus operandi (Boston Strangler) or the location of the murders (Green River Killer) or even on the clues he leaves behind (Zodiac Killer). It gives the story a grisly cachet I’m not sure everyone’s really comfortable with if they stop and think about it. Which is all very interesting in itself, as a social phenomenon, but by naming the Craigslist Killer — Philip Markoff —  after the location in which he allegedly stalks his victims (would we refer, say, to Robert Pickton as the “Street Killer”, after all? Or in another era, and in similar circumstances as Markoff’s, the “Classifieds Killer”?), once again we end up over-emphasising the technology at the expense of recognising (and therefore dealing with) the overarching behaviour. This man is, after all, no more significant than the numerous “bad dates” (dangerous johns) who stalk our inner city streets looking for unfortunate women upon which to offload their misogynistic resentments. Angry, powerless inadequates, in other words. Calling this man the “Craigslist Killer” is conferring a status on him he doesn’t merit. And I’m not alone. Others have taken it a step further and even see in this an attack by old media on the online world, a position not exactly undermined by the fact that there’s apparently another individual with the same monicker, and who knows how many more?

Having said all that, I  do want to point out that Craigslist has been very sloppy in policing its own practices, or to be fairer, the practices of some of its users. Personally, I’m not interested in moral handwringing over the wider practice of prostitution — it’s a complex topic that merits lengthy nuanced consideration — but when kids can so easily be drawn into such a dangerous world, robust checks and balances must be in place. I think that’s something everyone can agree on. And, lo and behold, toward that end, ingenious minds are already plotting.