Bill aimed at sex trafficking actually puts women in more danger

When I was a teenager, I found myself riding in a cab with a very creepy driver. I was stuck in his car while he told me explicit and disturbing sexual stories. He was bigger, stronger and older than I. He knew I was uncomfortable, and he relished it.

Now, when I use Lyft, I can get more information before I step into the driver’s car. If something like this were to happen again, I could talk about my experience through platforms like Hollaback.

It’s the same with the apps I use to sell my couch, find a place to spend the night or watch someone’s dog for the weekend. I can decide whether to trust someone from the privacy and safety of my laptop — not when I’m trapped in his car. Online communities let women make decisions from the safety of our homes about whom we can trust. When we’re forced to make those decisions on the street, we’re usually doing it from the wrong side of a power imbalance.

There’s a bill in Congress that threatens the services we all use to post information online. Not just apps like Airbnb and Lyft, but online community sites too: Craigslist, Wikipedia, MetaFilter and many others. It’s called the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, but despite its name, it wouldn’t do anything to punish traffickers. Trafficking is already illegal, and when a platform directly contributes to it, there’s nothing to stop the Department of Justice from prosecuting it.

What SESTA would do is put services on the hook if a court found that someone had simply used them for sex trafficking. In the face of severe civil and criminal penalties, most platforms would have to err on the side of censorship, inevitably pushing many minority voices offline — likely including sex trafficking victims. The alternative could be a lawsuit expensive enough to take down the whole community.

SESTA’s supporters claim that it will fight sex trafficking by keeping advertisements for trafficking victims off the internet. But experts who support those victims say that it would put them in even more danger. Many have pointed out that police often use the internet as an investigative tool to identify and arrest sex traffickers.

As trafficking victim turned anti-trafficking advocate Kristen DiAngelo says, “SESTA would do nothing to decrease sex trafficking; in fact, it would have the opposite effect. … When trafficking victims are pushed off of online platforms and onto the streets, we become invisible to the outside world as well as to law enforcement, thus putting us in more danger of violence.”

DiAngelo recently told me the heartbreaking story of a woman forced by her pimp to work the street after the FBI shut down a website where sex workers advertised. Her first night out, she was robbed and raped at gunpoint, and when she returned to her pimp with no money, he beat her too. As DiAngelo put it, “Since she was new to the street, sexual predators considered her fair game.”

I can’t fathom that woman’s terror and pain. But like millions of women I do know what it’s like to realize that a man might hurt me if he doesn’t get his way.

Online communities are far from perfect, but they offer women spaces where we’re not constantly outnumbered and outmuscled. Congress must explore the dark alleys of sex trafficking — its causes, its perpetrators, and the online tools law enforcement can use to fight it — and develop better solutions.

SESTA doesn’t do that. Instead, it endangers the online communities we all need.

“When trafficking victims are pushed off of online platforms and onto the streets, we become invisible to the outside world as well as to law enforcement, thus putting us in more danger of violence.” — Kristen DiAngelo, trafficking victim turned anti-trafficking advocate