My Sunday column tries to pull back the veil on the owners of Village Voice Media, the company that owns (besides the Village Voice newspaper) the website Backpage.com, which is generally regarded as the leading site for trafficking of women and girls in the United States. The big surprise: Goldman Sachs turned out to be a 16 percent owner.

In writing the column, I tried to walk a fine line. On the one hand, I don’t think senior managers at Goldman knew that they were part owners of a company that is tied to sex trafficking, and I don’t want to demonize the company just because it is so, well, demonizable. In fairness to Goldman, it did some of the pioneering economic research on the benefits of empowering women, and its 10,000 Women program is a terrific initiative to bring the world’s women into the business sector. On the other hand, I think investors should bear some accountability when they own companies that behave so irresponsibly. This isn’t just a victimless accounting scam: many women and girls have been daily brutalized through Backpage, as owners turned a blind eye. Goldman and the other owners could at least have tried to exert pressure to get out of that business. I see no evidence that Goldman and other private equity investors ever uttered a whisper of protest internally, even as arrests were made in 22 states for trafficking of under-age girls who had been marketed on Backpage.

So read the column and tell me what you think. There’s also a debate about whether it even makes sense to target Backpage. Some people disagree with me and say that if Backpage pulled out of this market, even seedier companies would step in and be less cooperative with law enforcement. I don’t buy that (when Craig’s List pulled out of escort ads, the market shrank by half, according to a trade estimate), but what’s your take?