Fordham U. Law Review Study Calls FOSTA ‘A Law With a Body Count’

A new, exhaustive study of the FOSTA/SESTA law designed to curb online sex trafficking, which passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly last year and was signed into law by Donald Trump, shows that—as sex workers and online rights advocates predicted—the law has already extracted a tragic and chilling human cost.

“Within one month of FOSTA’s enactment, thirteen sex workers were reported missing, and two were dead from suicide,” wrote author Lura Chamberlain in the Fordham Law Review paper published in April. “Numerous others were raped, assaulted, and rendered homeless or unable to feed their children.”

Chamberlain’s extensively footnoted study is titled, “FOSTA: A Hostile Law With a Human Cost,” and describes FOSTA as “a law with a body count.”

Though the law has been in effect for more than a year, and allows victims of sex traffickers to sue online sites and social media platforms that, they say, allowed the traffickers to recruit victims via the internet, no citations using the law’s provisions have yet been decided. Two lawsuits in Texas are now aimed at Facebook, saying that the social media company is responsible for online sex trafficking, but those suits are still in the court system, as AVN.com has reported

While the shuttering of classified ad site Backpage.com is often cited as an example of FOSTA’s effectiveness, Backpage was seized by the FBI and its top executives arrested before the law was even signed by Trump.

FOSTA allows an exception to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act—the law that shields internet service providers and sites from liability for material posted by third parties, laying the groundwork for open and uncensored online communications—for alleged sex trafficking activities. But none of the crimes alleged by prosecutors to have been committed by Backpage have anything to do with Section 230.

FOSTA does have a list of accomplishments to its credit, however, according to a TechDirt summary of the study. Those include, “widespread internet censorship, including information designed to help sex trafficking victims,” and putting “sex workers in much greater risk, leading to multiple deaths and disappearances.”

The law may actually have  led to an increase in sex trafficking activities, “by pushing sex workers into the waiting arms of traffickers for 'protection.'”

“FOSTA is a deeply flawed law,” Chamberlain writes. But she adds that “simply altering FOSTA’s defective provisions will not completely resolve its underlying policy shortcomings.”

Instead, Chamberlain calls for the “full repeal” of FOSTA. 

“If sex work were decriminalized and more pragmatic legislation were implemented to better inculpate traffickers, mitigate harm to trafficking survivors, and reduce future victimization, FOSTA’s stated goals could be realized,” Chamberlain, a Fordham University law student and Law review member, concludes.