The report makes no allegation not directly derived from internal company policies, documents, emails, and sworn employee testimony.
Backpage.com was an active participant in human trafficking.
There is and always has been a demand and (willing and consenting) supply for those services. The best you can do is to put in a framework in which they can do so legally and safely. It's not going to knock out all trafficking. But when you have a superior service that's legal, safe and reliable. You're going to lose the financial benefit of running it on the black market. (Also you'll end up having an entire framework to deal with crimes related to the work [i.e. abuse, violence related, etc])
Other countries have legalized the work, have very stringent guidelines, and have addressed the societal issues that come about with having it.
Given that axiom, I find it very hard to believe that legal sex work which is closely monitored for any signs of human trafficking would have the same amount of that associated with it as illegal prostitution which is impossible to monitor meaningfully. I suspect the amount of sex trafficking associated with illegal prostitution is grossly underestimated.
Meaningfully reduce. The only meaningful reduction is to near zero, the point where human trafficking becomes impossible to profit from. That doesn't seem to be the case even in the USA.
Has human trafficking gone down since Backpage went down? Has sex work gotten better or worse for sex workers since Backpage went down? Have pimps and other assialiants and middle men of [rougher] sex work and trafficking stopped doing their work since Backpage went down? Or been caught more?
If nothing actually changed, but now all we have are the morally bankrupt Backpage founders fighting against government overreach and abuse, why are people monsters for being against what the government is doing (and thus in a way, on the side of Backpage.com)?