Trump signs bill to crack down on sex trafficking

Prosecutors given tools to go after sites like Backpage.

First, federal authorities seized the classified advertising website Backpage.com last week. Then, a 93-count indictment was unsealed, charging several of its top officials with facilitating prostitution and revealing details about victims including minors as young as 14.

Now, President Donald Trump has signed new anti-sex-trafficking legislation into law Wednesday. The new law, which passed Congress with near unanimous bipartisan support, will give prosecutors stronger tools to go after similar sites in the future and suspend liability protections for internet companies for the content on their sites.

“You have endured what no person on earth should have to endure,” Trump said to victims of sex trafficking and their families who attended the signing ceremony in the Oval Office.

The federal investigation into Backpage was long in the works before the legislation passed Congress last month. Craigslist removed its personal ads section shortly after the final vote. The new law will also let state law enforcement officials pursue sites that knowingly host sex-trafficking content, and will allow victims to sue such sites for damages.

Backpage has long faced scrutiny from law enforcement and from Congress. Last year, the Senate issued a bipartisan investigative report saying that Backpage had altered ads on its site to remove evidence of human trafficking. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said that Backpage was behind nearly three-quarters of all the public reports it received on child trafficking. The indictment, unsealed Monday, also charged top Backpage officials with money laundering, and said the site also earned more than $500 million in prostitution-related revenue since it began in 2004.

Anti-trafficking groups welcomed the news of the federal seizure and indictment. But the momentum to crack down on trafficking has also renewed concerns about the safety of sex workers from their advocates.

After Backpage was seized Friday, the Women’s March group said on Twitter that the result was “an absolute crisis” for sex workers seeking safe communication with clients, drawing criticism.

“Women’s March stands in solidarity with the sex workers’ rights movement,” a spokeswoman for the organization explained Tuesday. “We believe a world is possible in which no one is trafficked or enslaved, and in which sex workers are not criminalized and ostracized by the state and our movements.”

Several prominent social conservative leaders also supported the legislation, including Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, an organization of conservative Christian women with half a million members nationwide.

“The president is standing up to Silicon Valley and with victims of abuse,” Nance said. “Evangelical women see this as ‘caring for the least of these’ and strongly supported this legislation to the point that we were able to thwart efforts by big money media to sink the bill.”