Mayor Mike McGinn

For more than three months, she was sold online for sex. She had run away at 15, gone back home, then run away again. Finally, an undercover police officer caught her, and her pimp. This time she went home and stayed, but she was not the same.

“She was a different child after that,” her father said. “It was like she was programmed. She spoke different. She looked different. They cut her hair, they dyed her hair, they bought her new clothes.”

Now 17, the girl is in counseling and in college, “on her way,” her father said.

Mayor Mike McGinn has written a letter to Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin expressing concerns about Backpage.com, the VVM-owned classified site that has been implicated in a long string of underage prostitution charges.

In the letter, McGinn noted that the policies VVM claimed they had in place to prevent pimps from trafficking underage prostitutes do not appear to be working; last month, for example, Seattle police rescued a 17-year-old girl who was posting Backpage ads for herself on a public library computer on behalf of her pimp, who remains at large.