Keep up pressure against online sex ads
about how he felt the act already was causing more harm than good. He claimed that closing Backpage, USA Adult Classifieds and other online commercial-sex websites actually disrupted ongoing investigations, ruining months of police work aimed at finding and recovering sex-trafficking victims. He admitted the law was well-intentioned, but it will cause thousands of victims to be lost forever.
While I completely empathize with his perspective, I disagree. It is simply not the case that shutting down Backpage and other sites will drive the sex trade “underground” and make it impossible to track.
The online commercialsex trade is a business that connects a product to consumer demand via advertising. A combination of factors, including unintended protections granted to online commercial-sex websites by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — which SESTA/FOSTA amended — led to a situation where sex with women, children and men was being openly sold nationwide on the internet.
In an ongoing research project at the University of Dayton Human Rights Center, we counted more than 53,000 commercialsex ads in 426 markets on a single day on Backpage alone. More than 20 percent of those ads contained red flags indicating sex trafficking, compelled prostitution or the prostitution of minors. That's potentially thousands of people being bought and sold daily without their consent.
Even if this act forces ads partly “underground,” it will severely limit the number of eyes on those ads. The act will reduce the scale of online commercial sex and the demand for victims and providers, increase the cost of doing business for traffickers and providers of commercial sex and reduce the effectiveness of their customer-outreach efforts. This act will lead to an overall reduction of onlinefacilitated commercial sex and trafficking.
It is true online ad sites made it relatively simple to research and investigate commercial sex and trafficking, and did lead to the recovery of hundreds of victims across the country. But these ads, at the same time, also facilitated the exploitation of tens of thousands of victims through an online marketplace that made commercial sex transactions — including those involving victims of sex trafficking — so easy that the market exploded in scope and scale in the past decade.
This act disrupts an existing system of sexual exploitation that has prospered for years, earning websites hundreds of millions of dollars in sex-ad revenue. This system could not be allowed to continue.
Advocates combating sex trafficking must take advantage of the current disruption in the online sexual-exploitation business model before it can adapt and recover. Government officials need to increase resources available to lawenforcement efforts to find and prosecute traffickers and for programs to protect victims. Advocates must work harder to provide alternatives to commercial sex as a form of work. Society must reduce the supply of potential victims through education, creation of opportunities and respect for human rights.
We all must address the cultural factors that promote the objectification and exploitation of our fellow human beings, and help sextrafficking victims survive and thrive.
If you suspect human trafficking, please call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733. To learn more about human trafficking, visit https://human traffickinghotline.org/.