LogFAQs > #934315641

shockthemonkey posted...

I have a hard time believing this administration dislikes sex trafficking

Yep. The act that closed places like Craigslist's personal ad section ended up hurting sex workers a lot - women who were selling services on those platforms saw their options dry up overnight, and it drove a lot of independent prostitutes back towards pimps or street work.

Women who were able to work in safer conditions, where they were able to vet clients themselves and keep 100% of the money, found themselves forced back into abusive situations where their work only earned them a cut, invited violence from a presiding figure and almost certainly saw them put into situations they wouldn't have picked for themselves. If not working under a pimp, these women saw themselves back on the streets, exposed to a similar level of danger.

https://apnews.com/5866eb2bcf54405694d568e2dd980a28/Side-effect-of-trafficking-law:-More-street-prostitution?

That article details the experiences of multiple sex workers who found themselves on the streets, some of them for the first time since they were teenagers. At least one rape is described in pretty blunt, horrific terms. Prostitutes saw acts of violence committed against them that they hadn't experienced for years, if ever.

By virtue of closing places like Backpage and strongly incentivising places like Craigslist to remove their personals, the law probably did result in human traffickers losing an avenue for which to conduct their business. By cutting out sites like that, especially the really obscure, sleazy ones, some of the scum of the earth were probably disincentivised to engage in unlawful sexual activity like selling their kids to perverts - at least for a little while, because the amount of online personal ads have rebounded since FOSTA came into power.

But laws like FOSTA, by virtue of the iron-clad, instantaneous crackdowns they invite, create a ripple effect that see people exposed to more danger. It might be in the short-term, and it might be in the long-term. But cracking down on shit hard and fast almost always hurts someone who's already having a hard time.

i.e. the War on Drugs - you see a lot of people going to jail for years over a dimebag of pot, and black people are disproportionately getting sentenced over white folks. Your big time meth-dealing bikers might be easy targets now, but some punk kid smoking a doobie is gonna be sent to jail for that shit. Of course some yuppie shitheads are gonna keep dropping ecstacy at raves and getting fucked up with no consequences, but when your common man rolls up a joint, they're gonna get hit hard.

FOSTA, whether inadvertently or deliberately - I lean more towards the former, though I have trouble imagining that the administration didn't have people warning them about the potential consequences - drove sex workers back into unsafe conditions. Human trafficking and child sex trafficking are much larger issues, and I couldn't make an informed comment on FOSTA's impact on either, but ultimately I don't think its brute force approach prevented these crimes to the fullest extent. If that article is anything to go by, it saw a lot more 14+ year old girls being seen on the streets, according to advocacy groups - so it's still happening, in arguably more dangerous conditions than ever before. It had a fallout that resulted in a return to a more dangerous form of sex work, for the patrons and for the workers. It probably did some good in the short-term and maybe even the long-term, but in some aspects, it resulted in prostitution becoming a lot harder to escape for a lot of people who don't have many, if any, other options.

And now, hundreds of thousands of dollars are going to organisations which either jam fundie bullshit up the ass of the people it's meant to be helping, or to a 1 and a half year old organisation operating out of a mansion. That doesn't sound suspicious at all, especially coming from Donald "Jeffrey Epstein is a good man who I consider a friend" Trump and his cabinet of sycophants and cronies. Shit wasn't perfect before, and change needed to happen to stem the flow of sex crimes stemming from the internet. But laws like FOSTA and government grants going to dogshit organisations like this Jesus bullshit or a refuge operating out of a mansion? Ultimately, it's just gonna fuck up sex workers and sexual abuse victims more than ever before.

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