Police take aim at prostitution’s new home: craigslist

[NashVegas]

Sex for sale is hardly new. But the sale of sex through the well-known national classifieds website craigslist.org is fairly new to Nashville, according to those whose job it is to crack down on such illegal activity.

And for the past eight months, the Metro Police Department’s Vice Squad has been quietly engaging in an operation to snuff out on-line prostitution, and craigslist has been its primary target.

..

Now police believe as much as 90 percent of the local sex industry uses craigslist as its primary means of advertising, having all but abandoned the phone book and preferring craigslist far above other Internet sites.

While that has made Nashville’s prostitutes easier to track, the near-elimination of pimps and escort services has also led to more and more women turning to prostitution, police said.

http://nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=9&screen=news&news_id=54525


What was bolded, I think, is an interesting claim. Anti-prostitution advocates speak of how women are always being exploited, in prostitution. If, in the absence of pimps and agents, prostitution flourishes on its own steam, who, exactly, is doing the exploiting? The prostitute, or the john?