WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Gilbert Cranberg: PIMPS AND THE INTERNET

Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times column has called attention to the prevalence of domestic sex trafficking, calling it “one of the most severe human rights violations in America today. In some cases it amounts to a modern form of slavery.”

Kristoff was writing about pimps who recruit young girls into prostitution and hold them in a kind of bondage, selling them for sex and pocketing their earnings.

But if you Google “pimps,” a rosier picture emerges. The Website Wikipedia reports: “Since the Internet became widely available, it has become the preferred medium for prostitution. Prostitutes increasingly use websites to solicit sexual encounters. In turn, pimps have used these sites to broker their women.

“The use of the Internet for prostitution as well as other changes in the sex industry have resulted in…allowing prostitutes to deal with clients directly. This has rendered pimps largely superfluous, at least in the United States. In 2011, Wired magazine reported that of 11 pimps working out of New York’s midtown Manhattan in 1999, all were out of work within four years.”

Perhaps, but I am skeptical. New York is atypical in many ways, and I suspect also in the sex industry. Nashville, Tenn., which Kristoff studied, is probably more representative. He found that in terms of the sex trade, Nashville “is every town USA. Sex Trafficking is an American Universal: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation reported in 2011 that over a two-year period, trafficking occurred in 85 per cent of Tennessee’s counties, including rural areas.

The truth may be somewhere in between. When I questioned a detective in the town where I live – a place with lots of visitors from out of town, a lively bar scene and plenty of streetwalkers – he confirmed that the Internet has changed the sex trade, but that prostitutes and pimps still operate the old-fashioned way.

Pimps provide support for psychologically needy women that no internet site can furnish. But that doesn’t make pimps valued members of society. Communities are well rid of them. The press nationwide should pressure their police departments to make their communities pimp-free zones.

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