Sacramento police made arrangements for CNN to interview a 14-year-old girl who said she’d started selling herself as a prostitute at the age of 11. [Emphasis mine.]
“I wanted to feel loved. … I wanted to feel important,” said the teen, who wanted to be identified only as Monique.
She said she used Craigslist because it was free and she could post dozens of ads a day. Even though she understood the seriousness of what she was doing, she said she didn’t care.
“You could put stuff in your ad like ‘wet and wild,’ ‘fun and sassy,’ things like that to catch their attention, to make them want you,” she said.
Craigslist executives said they abhor the fact that their site is being used for child prostitution but believe that the problem could be harder to track if they removed the category.
“It would be a bigger problem if we removed that category and had those ads spread throughout the site,” said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer of Craigslist.
Both legal experts and police say Craigslist bears no legal responsibility. Undercover officers said the fact that the listings can be traced helps them pinpoint the girls and sometimes leads them to pimps.





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