Taking Down Backpage

Today's nonfiction post is on Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World's Largest Sex Trafficker by Maggy Krell. It is 176 pages long and is published by New York University Press. The cover is a picture of the author with a seedy motel behind her. The intended reader is someone who is interested in true crime, court proceedings, and internet culture. There is mild foul language, discussion of sex an rape, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- For almost a decade, Backpage.com was the world's largest sex trafficking operation. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, in eight hundred cities throughout the world, Backpage ran thousands of listings advertising the sale of vulnerable young people for sex. Reaping a cut from every transaction, the owners of the website raked in millions of dollars. But many of the people in the advertisements were children, some as young as twelve, who are forced into the commercial sex trade through fear, violence, and coercion.
In Taking Down Backpage, veteran California prosecutor Maggy Krell tells  the story of how she and her team battled against this sex trafficking monolith. Beginning with her early career as a young DA, she shares the evolution of the anti-human-trafficking movement. Through a fascinating combination of memoir and legal insight, Krell reveals how she and her team started with the prosecution of street pimps and ultimately took down the largest purveyor of human trafficking in the world. She shares powerful stories of interviews with survivors, sting operations, court cases, and the personal struggles that were necessary to bring Backpage executives to justices Finally, Krell examines the state of sex trafficking after Backpage and the crucial work that still remains. 

Review- An interesting examination of human trafficking from the point of view of the other side of the table. Krell starts with when she was a new prosecutor and noticed all the very young girls who were being taken in Vice stings and were saying the same things when being questioned. Over the years, she put together what was happening and she helped create a task force to stop the biggest internet page that advertising escorts. It is well written and interesting without getting too graphic with details, the average reader can understand what is happening without the gross details of what the girls lived through. I would recommend this book if you like true crime without too many gross details about the survivors. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.