Let's Talk Human Rights

By Anthony Talbott

In the month since its passage, and in spite of its early successes, there’s been a backlash nationwide against the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act/Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA) of 2018.

I chair Abolition Ohio at the University of Dayton, our regional anti-human trafficking coalition. At a recent meeting I had a very intense and emotional moment when one of our partners, an undercover detective from a local police department, spoke up during my presentation on the passage of the act. He was filled with sadness and anger at the law and lashed out at my praise for it. This echoes complaints by other law enforcement officials across the country.

He spoke passionately about how he felt the act already was causing more harm than good. He claimed 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 commercial sex 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 commercial sex 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 online-facilitated 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 during 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 law enforcement 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 sex trafficking victims become survivors and thrivers.

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://humantraffickinghotline.org/.

Tony Talbott, interim executive director of the University of Dayton Human Rights Center and chair of Abolition Ohio at the University of Dayton, is a member of the Ohio Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Commission and a credentialed Not For Sale Campaign citizen investigator of human trafficking.