In at least one American city, the anti-sex trafficking FOSTA law, which passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly last spring, is reportedly having a pronounced effect. The only problem is, the law is having the exact opposite effect from what it was supposed to have.
In San Francisco, California, where newly released statistics show that overall crime dropped significantly in 2018, there was one category of crime that spiked by 170 percent: sex trafficking. And activists say that the jump is directly connected to FOSTA, as well as the federal shutdown of the classified ad site Backpage.com, which have deprived sex workers of the protections offered by screening clients online, according to a report by the city’s KPIX TV.
The San Francisco stats show homicides down by 18 percent, while the overall number of shootings fell by 35 percent, according to The San Francisco Examiner. But the number of sex trafficking cases jumped from 40 in 2017 to 108 last year. Moreover, sex workers who before FOSTA had become adept at managing their own sex-related businesses suddenly found themselves without the resources that various sex-worker-friendly websites had provided to help them screen clients and weed out dangerous ones.
Bay Area sex worker and activist Maxine Doogan said that after the FOSTA legislation passed and was signed into law by Donald Trump, most major sites that accepted sex worker advertising “disappeared in the matter of a couple of days,” according to KPIX.
Almost immediately, sex workers who had previously been in control of their own online business operations found themselves targeted by pimps, and those pimps didn't stop at existing adult sex workers; they solicited underage girls who lived on the streets or were simply naive to enter the prostitution trade as well.
“I, like everybody else, received a whole bunch of texts from various nefarious people who wanted to help me with my business as soon as those websites were taken down,” Doogan told KPIX.
“It has suddenly re-empowered this whole underclass of pimps and exploiters,” added Pike Long, of the St. James Infirmary, a health clinic specifically for sex workers.”If you are a street-based sex worker, it’s much harder to negotiate your rates, to negotiate safer sex condom use, to make sure that this person who is picking you up in a car doesn’t have a knife or a gun.”
Photo By KPIX TV Screen Capture
