Now, if prostitutes were legalized, licensed, and regulated, and sites like Backpage were required to retain identification and registration records for all their advertisers, it would be easy to distinguish between a service that protects sex workers and a service that collaborates with human traffickers. But we can't have that, so instead we have gray market actors like Backpage, and a bunch of investigators and prosecutors who have to decide (based upon much fuzzier and less complete evidence!) whether they're just protecting sex workers or outright collaborating with human traffickers.
Maybe the investigators and prosecutors made a bad call. But combining unreasonably strict laws with bizarrely lax and discretionary enforcement is a really shitty way to handle these problems in the first place.
When it went down, they started creating their own low cost advertising platforms or moving to Locanto that’s based in Germany.
Even before this, there were better designed, sex worker specific ad platforms run by sex workers in Australia.
So you haven’t stopped anything.
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/119-no-more-safe-harbo...
There is significant evidence and research showing that these services helped protect prostitutes and kept many of them safe. They used technology and private forums to inform one another about dangerous Johns and screen potential customers.
Where teens being trafficked? Probably. But that's an entirely different problem, one of getting more social services available to help teenagers if their domestic situations turn bad; so they have some place to go and don't end up on the streets or being taken by pimps.
Since these services went away, sex workers are already reporting people they know disappearing, or being assaulted.