As I write, on a sunny Saturday morn shortly before Midsummer’s Day, the profusion of colors and scents from dozens of roses and other plants in my garden arouse my senses, the birds fill the air with song and a butterfly flits from bloom to bloom. The long, lazy summer is upon us. Did not the English poet Robert Browning capture this serenity with his words, “God’s in His Heaven; all’s right with the world”?
But the problem with this serene portrait is precisely that all is not right with the world. Indeed, large parts of our planet seem as troubled as could be, and others appear close to disaster.
In sharp contrast to those bucolic scenes outside my windows, there also lie within the house my usual reading menu: newspapers, magazines and reports from think tanks and strategic-studies institutes. All this constitutes a heavy brunch indeed, and not just because of the sheer amount of reading material, but also — and especially — because of the gravity of the contents.
Which of these stories will still be headline news in a few years’ time? Which will be entering the history books? Brazilian upheavals that, if imitated, could alter the economic priorities of the entire Latin American region? The political struggle for Turkey’s mind and soul — and Egypt’s? The end of Pakistan as a viable, functioning state? Growing authoritarianism in Moscow, and defensive xenophobia in Beijing? The further fraying of the European project, and the turn to populist, chauvinistic movements? And, watching all this, an increasingly dysfunctional American government, with a public too deeply concerned about their own problems to pay much attention (apart from brief responses to human disasters) to the world abroad?
Is it any surprise that managers at the World Bank, I.M.F. and U.N. secretary general’s office are privately very scared, whatever their public statements may say? What might be their most profound worry? My guess is that it could be the following: While all of these discontents definitely have their own local causes, perhaps something bigger is at work that makes our troubles more common in nature.
Inside so many nations, citizens sense that the pace of economic change — always inequitable in its distribution of benefits — has become much more uneven. And as the gap between haves and have-nots widens everywhere, dissatisfaction grows, political parties splinter, and secessionist groups raise their heads.
It does not matter that a country’s G.D.P. is growing nicely if there is serious maldistribution of the benefits — witness the unrest across Brazil. Even the mere perception of an unjust economic order and a corrupt elite may be enough to fan the flames.
In many places, youth unemployment and street agitation can easily intertwine with longstanding ethnic and religious prejudices. Across the Middle East in particular, as religious and secularist parties tussle, the thin crust of civilization is cracking badly.
This, of course, is not the first time that widespread discontent against the “unfair” economic and political order has arisen. The 1960s witnessed such worldwide unrest, often with more radical agendas for change and calls for revolution. And in October 1930, The Economist was wringing its hands at the extent to which “our economics and our politics are perpetually falling out of gear with one another” thus producing “a series of jolts and jars and smashes in the social life of humanity.”
Perhaps the only difference nowadays is that the pace of disruptive technological and economic change is much faster, and that the size of populations affected is so much greater. The ballyhoo about the increasing number of billionaires needs to be set alongside the vast increases in the numbers of the economically desperate and displaced.
If this gloomy thinking is more or less true, then the recent U.N. report “World Population Prospects” should give us all cause for thought. Its new forecast for total world population by 2050 raises previous estimates by 300 million people, which reflects “increasing fertility rates in populous countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to The Economist.
Conceding that long-term forecasts are tricky, the report points to world population growing from 7.2 billion today to 9.6 billion by 2050. Of the “advanced” economies, only the United States, because of its higher fertility and immigration rates, will remain among the 10 most populous countries. Traditional powers Russia, Japan, Germany and Britain will all have been relegated to the second or third decentiles, relatively prosperous perhaps but in the demographic dustbin of history. Other, chiefly Asian and African nations will be bursting at the seams, their megacities co-existing with great rural poverty.
Some political structures will appear absurd: Russia, Britain and France, three of the current, permanent, veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council, will have a combined population less than that of Indonesia.
Yet all such absurdities pale beside the really important implication of the World Population Prospects report — that the vast majority of these additional members to the human race will be born into a grinding, resentful poverty that is supposed to exist cheek-by-jowl with the luxurious new hotel resorts, Himalayan “base camps” and exclusive yacht facilities being constructed all over “exotic” spots in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
We cannot in good conscience — actually, whatever our conscience is — exist in a world in which the rich forever get richer, and billions of poor people languish, assuming that they will not protest their fate. Already, as the old farmer’s saying goes, the worms are turning. What will the world look like should 4 billion people ever turn against the current systems? Now is the time to think about such matters. Even among the bird song.
The police searched for human remains on Long Island in 2011. Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
By ROBERT KOLKER June 29, 2013, 3:11 pm
Take the Long Hill Road exit off I-95 in eastern Connecticut and curl south toward the waterfront city of Groton and you’ll find each of the places that briefly employed Maureen Brainard-Barnes. There is the TJ Maxx and the AutoZone and the Stop and Shop. And the Chester’s chicken counter, where she made the potato wedges. And the shopping center with the Groton Cinema 6, where she picked up discarded snacks from the carpet in exchange for free admission and a bag of popcorn.
In 2005, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was a 22-year-old single mother who had difficulty holding down a steady job. She never could afford her own place, staying with her sister for long stretches and occasionally with a boyfriend. Modeling, she thought, could lead to a music career. As soon as she enrolled on a site called ModelMayhem.com [ http://modelmayhem.com/ ], she received dozens of e-mails from places that purported to be modeling agencies but that, after a few clicks, turned out to mean nude modeling and sometimes working as an escort. She wasn’t thrown by seeing this. What did surprise her was the money.
Within a few months, Ms. Brainard-Barnes was making up to $2,000 a day on trips to New York City. She posted ads on Craigslist and worked out of a hotel room in Midtown for short stretches and then returned home to care for her daughter. After so many years of depending on others, she could leave her responsibilities behind and become another person for a while — and she could earn enough money to fulfill those same responsibilities. Online, she could be her own boss and not share what she made with anyone — not a pimp, not an escort service, not a boyfriend.
In 2010, Maureen Brainard-Barnes’s body was one of four uncovered close by one another in the sand dunes of Gilgo Beach, Long Island, wrapped in burlap. Three years later, the Long Island serial killer case remains unsolved, even as six more sets of remains have been discovered nearby along Ocean Parkway and farther east. The first four bodies were identified as women in their 20s — just like another woman, Shannan Gilbert, who had disappeared three miles from where the four bodies in burlap were found. These five women clearly had much in common. Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Shannan Gilbert, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello all grew up in struggling towns a long distance from Long Island. And they all were escorts who discovered an easy entree into prostitution online.
It had seemed enough, at first, for some to say that the victims were all prostitutes, practically interchangeable — lost souls who were gone, in a sense, long before they actually disappeared. That is a story our culture tells about people like them, a conventional way of thinking about how young girls fall into a life of prostitution: unstable family lives, addiction, neglect.
But in the two years I’ve spent learning about the lives of all five women, I have found that they all defied expectations. They were not human-trafficking victims in the classic sense. They stayed close to their families. They all came to New York to take advantage of a growing black market — an underground economy that offered them life-changing money, and with a remarkably low barrier to entry. The real temptation wasn’t drugs or alcohol, but the promise of social mobility.
The Web has been the great disrupter of any number of industries, transforming the way people shop for everything, and commercial sex has been no exception. Posting ads online, escorts find clients without ever having to leave home or walk the streets. The method is easier, seductively so, almost like an A.T.M. — post an ad, and your phone rings seconds later. That ease clearly doesn’t mitigate the risk of meeting strangers, though it might seem like it to some escorts.
The great transforming feature of the Internet is its anonymity. We all have learned that a person can do practically anything online without even their closest loved ones knowing, from commenting on Yelp or Gawker to selling stolen goods or viewing porn videos. This is as true for the escorts as it was for the clients, who have turned sites like TheEroticReview.com into a sort of Yelp for steady customers of commercial sex. No one has to go to a bad part of town to look for what he wants.
While no one has yet measured exactly how significantly the Internet has increased the number of working escorts, it’s already clear that many Internet sex workers would never seriously consider working on the street. Scott Cunningham [ https://business.baylor.edu/scott_cunningham/ ], an economist at Baylor University, conducted a survey of 700 sex workers in the United States and Canada. “The Internet is augmenting the sex market by bringing in women who would not have entered the sex market without the Internet,” he says. In one month chosen at random by Mr. Cunningham — May 2009 — an average of 1,690 sex-worker ads were posted online every day in the New York City area alone.
All it took to persuade many of these women to enter the field, Mr. Cunningham theorizes, was a little financial pressure, or “economic shocks.” The explanations for entering escort work, he says, “are often surrounding loss of income or increase of expenses they need to cover. A woman told me she was getting a divorce, she had a child, her husband was not going to provide child support. She already had a 40-hour-a-week job. And so her options were, she could get another job and work about 60 hours a week. Or she could do this and see her child more and have more money.”
The women of Gilgo Beach all came from parts of the country hit hard by the recession like Buffalo, N.Y., and Portland, Me. — places where even if you did well in school, there seemed to be not much of a chance of finding a higher-than-minimum-wage job, much less one with health benefits. Some worked for escort services or walked the streets before turning to the Internet; others got their start online. Using Web sites like Craigslist and Backpage, they all made money that transformed their lives.
Shannan Gilbert worked for a high-end escort service in Jersey City, where the minimum rate was $400 or $500 an hour. But she took home only a third of that. When she switched to Craigslist, she made $1,000 many nights, enough to pay a month’s rent on her apartment. Melissa Barthelemy abandoned her pimp to be her own boss online, charging $100 for 15 minutes, $150 for a half-hour, $250 for an hour and $1,000 for an overnight stay. She made enough money to come home to Buffalo at Christmastime and take her sister and mother to a spa for massages. “You deserve to be pampered,” she told them.
Megan Waterman took three- or four-day working trips to Long Island from her home in Portland and made $1,500 on a busy night. And Amber Lynn Costello, a North Carolina native who lived briefly in West Babylon, Long Island, once raised $3,800 in just three days to bail out her boyfriend from jail — all, her friends said, from Craigslist.
“In the beginning, you make the money, and you’re making it without the drugs,” said her sister Kim Overstreet, who has also worked as an escort. “And then you get addicted to the money.”
The women weren’t the only ones to have profited. In 2010, Craigslist earned a reported $44.4 million from Adult Services ads, or about a third of the company’s total revenue (the site had started charging $5 to $10 per posting two years earlier). For a time, some believed that Craigslist and its competitors were doing well by doing good. In 2006, a research team from Princeton and Columbia said that this new wave of prostitutes had a “professional and careerist orientation.”
Three years later, Mr. Cunningham noted in one study that the Web was drawing different sorts of people into prostitution — they were better educated and they were thinner. In 2011, Jennifer Hafer, a researcher at the University of Arkansas, said people embraced online prostitution “for many of the same reasons that people enter the conventional job market — money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction.” The Internet, said to be the solution to so many problems, was expected to legitimize the entire field of prostitution, elevate the underclass and make pimps a thing of the past.
OBVIOUSLY, that wasn’t how things turned out for the women of Gilgo Beach. Maureen Brainard-Barnes disappeared in July 2007, last heard from near Penn Station. Melissa Barthelemy was said to be heading by herself to Long Island for an overnight appointment in July 2009. Shannan Gilbert vanished in the middle of a call in Oak Beach on May 1, 2010, in circumstances that still have not been fully explained. A month later, Megan Waterman disappeared after leaving a hotel room in Hauppauge. And in September 2010, Amber Lynn Costello, who didn’t like to leave her house for work, had agreed to an overnight date for $1,500. Many other online escorts have reported incidents of violence. Nearly half of the New York City online escorts surveyed by the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project [ http://sexworkersproject.org/ ] in 2005 said they had been forced by a client to do something they did not want to do, and almost as many said they had been threatened or beaten. (In his research, Mr. Cunningham has found that the escorts who needed the money the most were the ones who lacked the resources and time to properly vet their clients.)
Politicians and law enforcement officials took notice of the problem in 2009, the same year Philip Haynes Markoff was arrested and charged with the murder of a masseuse he met on Craigslist. That same year, the sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, sued Craigslist, calling the site “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation.”
Of course, if capitalism teaches us anything, it’s that a demand-heavy market will find a way to thrive no matter what the obstacles. The pressure forced Craigslist to shut down its Adult Services category on Sept. 3, 2010 — as it happens, the day after Amber Lynn Costello went missing. Right away, the main competitor to Craigslist, Backpage, experienced an explosion in new escort postings. If community pressure or the threat of litigation sinks Backpage, a dozen more sites like it stand ready to pick up the traffic (and some escorts have never left Craigslist, posting surreptitiously in other categories).
The market doesn’t care if prostitution is right or wrong, empowering or exploitative. The demand sustains human trafficking and under-age escorts engaging in survival sex. Just last month, the social-service organization Covenant House in Midtown Manhattan released the findings of a survey it conducted with Fordham University, which found that nearly half of the under-age prostitutes seeking help said they did it because they did not have a place to live.
Escorts face danger not because of the Internet but because they’re still forced to work underground. In a different world, technology could be harnessed to reduce the dangers of prostitution. The University of Colorado law professor Scott Peppet has floated the possibility of a “technology-enabled sex market” where escorts and clients are all pre-vetted and predators are screened out. “The law, however, is hostile to such innovation,” Professor Peppet writes. “It currently criminalizes not just prostitution itself, but activities — including technologies — that advance or facilitate sex markets.” As it stands, escorts online remain invisible, where they are vulnerable to predators.
At the top of the pay scale, technology is delivering on its promise. Workers can increase their hours and their output from home and even work second jobs with more ease than ever. But toward the bottom, anxiety lingers, and the Web enables some people to take risks they never would have imagined. In this way, the women of Gilgo Beach still have something to teach us. The Internet might have made pimps less necessary, but today’s escorts are as marginalized as ever, and every bit as vulnerable. The police rarely help them when they are at risk, and they rarely take their disappearances seriously. As far as the authorities are concerned, their profession still seals their fate.
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