The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022

And: What is the purpose of shame? O’Neil posits that shame is intended to change others’ behavior. In situations where values are agreed upon and violations are clear, she finds that shaming nudges individuals to abide by social norms. When O’Neil’s husband walked around New York City maskless during a spike in coronavirus transmission, for instance, a dose of shaming by a passerby got him forever after to mask up outside their home. But I wonder if O’Neil has gotten it right. If shame is a mechanism for changing others’ choices, why do anti-vaxxers defy social pressures or even legal mandates to get the shot? Neighbors, strangers and politicians have sent subtle — and overt — messages shaming the choice to reject the needle. O’Neil cites the Rev. Gabriel Salguero of Orlando, who advised his congregation, “In getting yourself vaccinated, you are helping your neighbor.” He sermonized that those who didn’t were failing their moral responsibility to care for others. Despite hearing the message, vaccine holdouts remained. So, is shame an effective vehicle for social change, even when it comes from someone you know and trust? In my take, not always. Shaming may not work in the case of these parishio- ners, or more generally when it is leveled against a group. You can deflect shame if you don’t see the finger wagging at you personal- ly. Maybe shame is meant to bring awareness. In Nigeria, O’Neil shares, the police’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) had a bad repu-

for the largely unregulated pharmaceutical supplement industry of shaming those who fear memory loss. She takes a historical look at Lysol, and the company’s past calls for women to douche with the product to avoid being considered disgusting and encouraging a husband’s infidelity. O’Neil also exposes cafeteria staff in public schools who stamp children’s hands when they cannot pay for lunch. They do this, they believe, to encourage parents to top off accounts before the ledgers are in the red. These sad case studies do more than chastise enterprises that seek to profit from others’ suffering. O’Neil’s exposés also evoke philosophical questions, including about the definition of “shame.” Is it shame if one individual embarrasses another in private, or does it require others to see the embarrassment? Can people without power shame those with it? O’Neil offers answers to these questions and more, such as: How can people justify shaming when it hurts others so much? She suggests that shamers believe that others could have made different choices. If shamers think that people addicted to drugs and alcohol could have chosen another lifestyle, they do not have to accept the moral responsibility to help. If shamers think that those living without housing could find shelter if they tried harder, they don’t feel guilty when they ignore pleas for spare change or when they vote to withhold funding for social services and welfare programs.

the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to hold hearings into Back- page’s activities. But legal efforts to rein in Backpage ran up against a surprising roadblock: the Commu- nications Decency Act of 1996. Congress had passed the CDA to protect children from seeing pornography online. Under industry pressure, the act included a provision that shields Internet platforms from liability for what others publish on their sites. The Supreme Court struck down parts of the CDA as violations of free speech — but left the protections for Internet platforms, known as Section 230. As legal complaints landed Backpage in court, judges ruled repeatedly that Section 230 freed the owners from responsibility for the site’s sex ads. The bulk of Krell’s book examines how her team painstakingly gathered evidence and wrote warrants to prove that Backpage was not a neutral platform occasionally used by nefarious traffickers, but was actively solicit- ing and helping to create these illegal ads — or as she writes, that the owners “knew their website incited rape and torture and even murder and that they didn’t care.” Backpage.com had been launched by Mike Lacey and James Larkin, owners of the New Times chain of alt-weeklies, along with an employee named Carl Ferrer. Its headquar- ters were in Dallas. Working with authorities in Texas and California, Krell got arrest warrants for all three men. Ferrer was arrested in Dallas on Oct. 6, 2016, and the

state. They shut down a chain of outlets that advertised themselves as massage parlors and lured women to the United States with promises of legitimate jobs. But once the women arrived, their passports were taken away, and they were sold for sex. Separately, Krell and her colleagues went after individual men who lured miserable and often abused teenagers away from their homes and put them out for sale; the men controlled the girls with the same kinds of coercive tech- niques used in abusive relationships. Krell discovered that the seemingly end- less stream of abused girls and women had something in common: Backpage.com. Brothels posing as massage parlors advertised through Backpage. Sex traffickers used the website to sell girls, sometimes to more than 10 men a night, and gangs used it to move victims through illicit networks. “Back- page made this much easier, more lucrative, and more exploitive,” Krell writes. The website was so entangled with traffickers, Krell believed it was as guilty as the motel owner she took down. Others were arriving at similar conclu- sions. Parents of trafficked girls sued the website or pressured state legislators to require Backpage to confirm the ages of anyone for sale on the site. Groups that battle sex trafficking, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the Polaris Project, Shared Hope, and many others, worked with government officials, law enforcement and the media, prompting

Book World

TAKING DOWN BACKPAGE Fighting the World’s Largest Sex Trafficker By Maggy Krell New York University. 177 pp. $22.95

E.J. Graff is managing editor of The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. She has reported on human trafficking in international adoptions for Foreign Policy, Slate and The Post.

offices of Backpage were raided. Lacey and Larkin turned themselves in to authorities in Sacramento. Ferrer was transferred to Sacra- mento, and after the three men spent a weekend in prison, a California judge ruled that they could not be charged because of Section 230. A devastated Krell dove into the evidence seized in the Dallas raid and brought in a forensic auditor to examine the movements of Backpage’s money through various accounts. Two days before Christmas in 2016, she filed money laundering charges. In this round, she and her colleagues got Ferrer to plead guilty and become a cooperating wit- ness against his former bosses in exchange for a lighter sentence. Separately, the Senate Permanent Subcom- mittee on Investigations, whose members included Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), subpoenaed much of the same evidence and more. When Backpage’s lawyers refused to comply, the Supreme Court or- dered them to hand over documents. In April 2018, Ferrer pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution, receiving a reduced sentence of five years in exchange for testify- ing against Lacey and Larkin. The Justice Department then began prosecuting Lacey and Larkin, who are still under house arrest awaiting trial as their lawyers have delayed proceedings. At the Senate subcommittee’s recommendation, the FBI seized and shut down Backpage.com. At the same time, in early 2018, Congress acted on another of the subcommittee’s recommendations and passed a bill eliminating Section 230’s safe harbor provision for sites that knowingly facilitate sex trafficking, which President Donald Trump signed into law in April 2018. Of course, no one argues that the demise of Backpage means the end of child sex trafficking. In the years when the site was active, reports of suspected child sex trafficking climbed significantly. Since its demise, advo- cates say the numbers have declined. People who seek to exploit children can no longer do so with one click. Their hunt is now harder and must take place in murkier corners of the Internet, which, it is hoped, discourages some. Children and teens are still being exploited and sold. But Krell and her fellow crusaders are rightly proud of the strides they’ve made in cracking down on this scourge.

M

aggy Krell was a young prosecutor driven by a desire to do good when, in 2004 , a scene in a Stockton, Calif., courtroom jolted her. Among her tasks that day was to charge a group of zombie-eyed teenage girls with prostitution. Reading the police reports and booking information, Krell was shocked by the girls’ circumstances when they were rounded up in a late-night arrest in a motel parking lot. The police reports indicated that the girls had been skimpily dressed — “short skirts, tank tops, and heels” — in 30-degree weather. In court, Krell writes in her book “Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World’s Largest Sex Trafficker,” “they stared blankly into space and looked numb and lifeless.” Krell couldn’t see the justice in charging them. Instead, she wondered, “Who was making money off their misery?” Krell turned her attention to the motel’s owner and its manager. Realizing that the motel was set up to profit from the girls’ exploitation, she and her office came up with a way to prosecute not the girls, or the men who bought their services or the individuals who sold them, but the people who provided the setting for the encounters. Krell charged the motel owner and manager with conspiracy to commit prostitution and pimping — essentially, owning and operating a brothel. The motel shut down. In “Taking Down Backpage,” Krell tells the story of how that awakening led her to years of fighting child sex trafficking — culminat- ing in helping to shut down Backpage.com, a website that made such sales easier and more profitable. The motel case came the same year that three men who ran a chain of alternative-weekly newspapers launched Backpage.com to compete with Craigslist for erotic classified advertising. That type of advertising had migrated to the Internet, and because of the anonymity available online these ads were increasingly used to sell sex with underage girls and boys. When advo- cates for the young victims demanded that websites stop offering the ads, Craigslist complied. But Backpage.com kept going — and a loose coalition of nonprofits, government offices, outraged parents and others spent years working to shut it down. Krell offers a thoughtful account of the exhaustive, meticulous work, roller coaster ups and downs, and careful collaboration she put into the campaign to curb the sale of children for sex. After working for a few years as a county prosecutor, Krell took a job with the Califor- nia Department of Justice, where she pulled together colleagues and persuaded bosses to let them target sex traffickers throughout the

A prosecutor’s determined fight against sex tra∞cking and Backpage.com

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REVIEW BY E.J. GRAFF

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

From left, Backpage.com chief executive Carl Ferrer, former owner James Larkin, chief operating officer Andrew Padilla and former owner Michael Lacey are sworn in at a Senate hearing in January 2017 on the site’s alleged role in sex trafficking.

THE SHAME MACHINE Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation By Cathy O’Neil Crown. 255 pp. $27

A protester outside the Nigerian Embassy in London in October 2020 joins calls to “End SARS” — Nigeria’s Special Anti- Robbery Squad, a police unit known for abuses. Author Cathy O’Neil argues that the campaign against SARS was designed to shame Nigerian officials.

tation, as did the country’s leaders who turned a blind eye to the group’s extrajudicial killings, corruption, abuse, rape and extor- tion. In the past five years, advocacy cam- paigns demanded an end to SARS. Main- stream media picked up footage showing its officers tear-gassing protesters, shooting live ammunition and using water cannons. A SARS officer shot a young Nigerian man in front of a hotel and drove off in the civilian’s Lexus. This, and other acts of police violence, led protesters to create hashtags unique to the events. O’Neil says those hashtags were acts of public shaming of the federal government. But were they? Like O’Neil, I believe that protesters were using the hashtags to prompt international curiosity and concern and change the situation. Did they think that #EndSARS would make, for example, Niger- ian President Muhammadu Buhari feel ashamed? I doubt it. Change happened, yes. But through shame, perhaps not. I’m also not convinced that shame is always intended for profit. Take the #MeToo movement. The hashtag turned the target of shame around: We could shame men, O’Neil writes, and reclaim a power that had been wielded against women. But were women using that power for monetary or social gain? I think not. Most people who added this hashtag to their Twitter posts did not name names and were not involved in litigation against attackers. Instead, the motives be- hind the trend were more likely compassion, anger or opportunity for catharsis. Nonethe- less, O’Neil’s reflections on #MeToo serve as a reminder that collective action spurred by an individual’s experience of shame can trans- form social practices. Beyond these points of contention, O’Neil offers a provocative takeaway. She argues that shame can serve as an indirect means for growth. “Shame lurks,” she writes, “in re- pressed thoughts and unspoken fear.” If we confront “shame machines,” we will “be able to dismantle them.” If we acknowledge that mistakes happen, then experiencing shame may encourage us to recognize when we’ve transgressed, and if we can give ourselves and others the latitude to change, we can acknowledge it and apologize. We can then move past shame to forgiveness. When we talk about the ugly truths of our past offenses, we can begin to redress injustice and unfair- ness. Shame may be one tool, flawed and dangerous as it is, that can shed light on dark acts and catalyze real efforts to make change happen.

I

remember one awful day in middle school when I was sitting in front of a trombone player during band rehearsal. With confu- sion first and burning embarrassment next, I felt the oil that musicians use to grease their instruments ooze down my hair, neck and face. In an act of imperious adolescent spite, that trombone player had opened his bottle and poured the oil on my head. I skipped lunch to shower in the gym locker room. I washed my hair three more times when I got home. Still, it took a week for the soap to cut the residue and for the caustic smell to seep out of my pores. It took far longer for the humiliation to fade. In “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation,” mathematician and journalist Cathy O’Neil investigates the people and institutions that benefit from creat- ing and feeding private and public shame. O’Neil begins her argument by recounting an experience with a bodega owner who worked against his own bottom line by shaming her. The shopkeeper publicly questioned whether O’Neil should be buying ingredients to bake cookies, given the size of her body. She ended up bringing home the flour, sugar, chocolate chips and an unhealthy dose of disgrace. “The Shame Machine” is not a diary of O’Neil’s grief but instead a data-driven, anecdote-fueled narrative of the multitude of human experiences that are targets for ridi- cule and others’ reward. She vividly portrays the indignities of poverty, addiction, aging, dementia and other conditions we all may face but hope to avoid, and she shows how the pain experienced by people with these afflic- tions can be used for others’ financial and social profits. For example, she unearths how diet com- panies erroneously substantiate their fraudu- lent promises of body makeovers. She warns about the psychological damage that could come from programs like the Weight Watch- ers offshoot Kurbo, which pairs children as young as 8 with virtual diet coaches ready to judge their caloric consumption. Likewise, she illustrates the irony of “The Biggest Loser,” a television show that mockingly celebrates obese individuals’ efforts to lose weight. “Why are we celebrating her body?” one show host asked with fake concern on BuzzFeed TV. It “isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes,” she offered, in a superficial attempt to disguise her disdain and disgust. Fat shaming, O’Neil argues, masquerades as concern-trolling, giving unsympathetic out- siders license to humiliate those with weight struggles and gain attention for themselves. O’Neil quantifies the booming profits that come from ganging up on and calling out individuals who deviate from socially pre- scribed ideals. She probes the financial wins

How humiliation can be exploited for profit — o r for needed change

LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES

SOCIETY REVIEW BY EMILY BALCETIS

Emily Balcetis is the author of “Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World” and an associate professor of psychology at New York University.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

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