Senate Bill 1693, commonly referred to as SESTA/FOSTA, is a new federal law aimed at curbing sex trafficking by holding online platforms accountable for the content their users post. And since the legal definition of sex trafficking is consistently conflated with consensual adult sex work, several websites that advertised in-person adult entertainment services have shut down, or began blocking access from the United States.
But instead of helping reduce exploitation, say sex trafficking survivors and advocates, taking away their ability to unse the Internet has actually increased the risks facing their community, and crippled efforts for harm reduction. Moreover, they say the law does not address issues that truly contribute to trafficking: homelessness, poverty and a broken foster care system. Instead, SESTA/FOSTA drastically limits the tools available to those who survive in the sex trade, pushing workers further underground, into the streets and the dark web, where they are easier targets for those who aim to exploit the vulnerable.
"This was unlike anything we'd ever seen," says Meg Munoz, a sex-trafficking survivor and founder of the OC Umbrella Collective, an organization that serves sex workers and those being domestically trafficked in Southern California. "The immediate impact was swift and, honestly, terrifying. We watched people literally walk back to their pimps knowing they had lost any bit of autonomy they had. We watched people wind up homeless overnight. We watched members of our community disappear."
SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law just days after the FBI seized Backpage, one of the largest and most affordable online platforms available for sex workers to advertise and screen clients. Platforms such as Backpage, and the dozens of similar sites that shuttered in response to the new law were also an important tool for those who serve victims of trafficking.
"Every client I have ever worked with has had ads associated with online websites, the majority being Backpage," says Jamie Walton, a survivor of childhood sex trafficking and founder of the Wayne Foundation, an organization in South Florida that provides direct services to young people victimized by exploitation. "Those ads are forms of evidence. Those ads are ways that we were able to find children who were missing. Now, all that information has been driven to places online that are difficult to search, making the work almost impossible." ... In a post-SESTA world, Phoenix Calida, a Chicago based social-justice advocate and co-host of The Black Podcast, says that her community is scared. Calida entered the adult industry out of economic necessity as a teen mother nearly a decade ago, having survived abuse while growing up in the foster care system. She's been a sex-worker on and off ever since. She says that since the passage of SESTA and the seizure of Backpage, she's been increasingly contacted by pimps on social media, namely Twitter. "Nobody knows where to advertise, and while this is happening, everyone is getting hit up by pimps."
However, due to the tenuous nature of sex workers' safety on these platforms, some say they are reluctant to report abuse, for fear their accounts will then be surveilled, scrutinized or deleted in response. Since SESTA, Calida says, the online private group chats where sex workers could share survival strategies and harm reduction techniques to stay safe have also disappeared, leaving victims and vulnerable workers with even fewer options for safety and justice.