Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill to permit prosecution of, and lawsuits against, Web sites that facilitate sex trafficking.
It’s a bad idea.
On its face, of course, it sounds nice. After all, who would oppose fighting sex trafficking? Ivanka Trump, as well as a host of Hollywood celebrities such as Amy Schumer, spoke out in favor of the bill.
Truth is, the bill does little to address sex trafficking while targeting willing, adult sex workers who aren’t trafficked. It also hampers free speech online and could have the result of silencing the very sex-trafficking victims it seeks to help.
The bill would punish Web sites like Backpage, which are used by sex workers to advertise, if an ad turns out to be from a sex trafficker or underage prostitute. Sites would either need to install filters to catch these posts — a near impossibility — or, more likely, they’d manually screen each post. If a sex-trafficked victim posted about her experience, the filter would likely screen it out. Even manually, the administrator might worry mentioning sex trafficking can be seen as facilitating it.
The idea that Web sites will become responsible for every posting by anyone on their site has far-reaching implications even for sites that have nothing to do with sex work.
Additionally, the language of the bill is broad enough that many are reading it to include facilitation of all prostitution.
At Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes that what the bill “means in practice is that social media sites such as Snapchat and Facebook, classified ad sites such as Craigslist and Backpage, chat apps, search engines, and many other communication tools could be both criminally charged and sued in civil court — by individuals or by states — anytime anyone uses them to meet someone with whom they would eventually engage in commercial sex.”
The bill could also snag sex workers simply sharing information online, like warning others about a dangerous john.
And then there’s the issue of our overblown statistics, and the resulting hysteria, when it comes to sex trafficking.
A 2014 article in The Washington Post by sex worker Maggie McNeill found insane exaggerations when it came to sex-trafficking numbers. One example had the Dallas Morning News noting that there were 200,000 sex-trafficking cases prosecuted in one year in Houston alone. The actual number was: two.
The frenzy leads to stories like the one from California last April. Diandra Toyos reported that two creepy men followed her, her two children and her mother around an Ikea. She concluded that the men were trying to kidnap and sex traffic her and/or her children.
Her post about it on Facebook spread like wildfire as people warned each other that it could “happen anywhere.” Well-meaning news outlets picked up the story with tips on how people can prevent themselves from being trafficked out of their local Ikea. Of course, there was absolutely no evidence that the men meant them any harm, much less the ludicrous idea of trying to traffic a family out of Ikea.
The media play a role in such hysteria with sensational reporting. Take, for example, the monthlong sting by law enforcement agencies across 17 states last August, called the National Johns Suppression Initiative. CNN’s headline on its story about the sting was, “More than 1,000 arrests in sex trafficking operation.” Yet the story quotes a Cook County, Ill., sheriff who ran the operation as saying, “At least 1,020 sex buyers were arrested, and 15 people face trafficking-related charges.” Fifteen out of 1,020 is under 2 percent, and even that could be inflated. But you’d have to read past the sensationalized headline to know that sex trafficking isn’t actually very widespread.
This isn’t to say sex trafficking doesn’t exist. The National Human Trafficking Hotline, which claims to maintain “one of the most extensive data sets on the issue of human trafficking in the United States” reports there were 4,460 traffic cases were reported to them in 2017. In a country of 320 million, that’s a tiny number and we have no way of knowing how many of those cases ended up being confirmed specifically as sex trafficking.
Prostitution is referred to as “the world’s oldest profession” for a reason. It has existed in every society in human history and will continue to exist no matter how hard politicians try to drive it underground, making it less safe in the process. McNeill writes, “those who are truly interested in decreasing exploitation in the sex industry would be better off supporting decriminalization of prostitution.”
That would be a step in the right direction. A far-reaching bill that capitalizes on misplaced panic to quash speech is not.