Over at Seattlecrime.com, shoe-leather crime reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee has some more news on the Village Voice Media story: During more than a year of investigations into local escort ads, SPD only found ads for juveniles on VVM/Seattle Weekly's Backpage.com web site.

Since 2010, detectives from the Seattle Police Department's Vice/High-Risk Victims Unit investigating online escort ads have only found ads for juveniles posted on one website: Backpage.com.

What's more, a Seattle Police Department memo obtained by Seattlecrime.com shows that more than three-quarters of all SPD investigations into escort ads in the last two years were generated from ads posted on Backpage.com, owned by Village Voice Media, parent company of the Seattle Weekly.

According to the memo In 2010, SPD investigated 30 cases of prostitution on Backpage.com. Of those cases, 11 involved juveniles.

To date this year, SPD has recovered five juveniles from Backpage ads, and investigated 13 additional cases of prostitution on the site.

In that same period, police investigated nine cases of prostitution on Craigslist, two at Men4rentnow, two at The Stranger, and one on the TNA Board website. Police say no juveniles were involved in those 14 cases, the memo indicates.

Spangenthal-Lee's reporting helps answer a question commenters have raised: What about the adult ads at the Weekly's rival, The Stranger? (Full disclosure: I used to work at the Stranger , as did Spangenthal-Lee.)

Given Mayor Mike McGinn's friendly relationship with the Stranger , McGinn's decision to condemn their rival Seattle Weekly (and pull all city advertising from the paper) has lacked the weight a stance like this needs. Spangenthal-Lee's reporting helps shore up McGinn's worthy mission.

Also at Seattlecrime.com today, a guest op/ed from McGinn where the mayor lays in to  Seattle Weekly.

The facts are clear: we have a serious problem in our region with underage sex trafficking. A Human Services Department report published in 2008 estimated there are 300 to 500 children being exploited for commercial sex each year. In the last 12 months, our service providers identified 185 cases of underage sex trafficking.

This affects children of color, low-income, transgender, abused and other vulnerable kids more than others. But any child can be exploited, and we have found that even straight-A students have fallen into exploitation. The age of victims are getting younger, and service providers are seeing more kids age 13-14. Children as young as twelve have been exploited.

This traffic is moving online. Police say more pimps are using internet ads to promote young girls. Using internet ads makes it harder to locate girls – pimps set up “outcalls” instead of a central physical location.

Backpage.com is a well-known accelerant of underage sex trafficking. Since the beginning of 2010, 22 kids advertised on Backpage.com were recovered by the Seattle Police Department. No juveniles were discovered on any other sites in that time – that includes ads on craigslist, The Stranger, and other adult sites. The problem is specific to Backpage.com.

To place an ad on Backpage.com, all you have to do is enter credit card information and check a box that says “I am over age 18.” That’s it.

You would think that when this information was brought to the attention of the Seattle Weekly and Village Voice Media, they would have immediately acted to clean up their site and implement tougher policies to prevent their sites from being used for underage sex trafficking. Instead they are arguing about numbers instead of finding ways to get underage sex trafficking off their site. Perhaps the only number that matters to them is the $2.1 million in revenue they generated from their erotic service ads.

Their irresponsible journalism masks the real problem, and takes focus off the real issue – that Backpage.com is an accelerant of child prostitution.