WASHINGTON — Last week, several Democratic members of Congress sponsored legislation, both in the Senate and the House, aimed at investigating the effectiveness of FOSTA-SESTA in its purported mission of fighting human trafficking.
If passed, the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act would order the Department of Health and Human Services “to conduct a study to assess the unintended impacts on the health and safety of people engaged in transactional sex, in connection with the enactment of [FOSTA] and the loss of interactive computer services that host information related to sexual exchange.”
The new bill would also require the U.S. Attorney General to "report on human trafficking investigations and prosecutions in connection with the same."
FOSTA-SESTA was the first significant carve-out of Section 230 liability protection for online platforms, an has been widely condemned by sex workers advocates and adult industry organizations.
FOSTA was the brainchild of religious conservative Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Missouri), who named it the "Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act." Wagner consistently conflates consensual sex work with “trafficking.” FOSTA was later combined with a similar project in the Senate, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), and the combined FOSTA-SESTA package passed the Senate in March 2018 and was signed into law by Donald Trump in April 2018.
FOSTA-SESTA’s impact on human trafficking investigations has also been demonstrably the exact opposite of how Wagner sold it. In June 2021, confirming what the vast majority of sex workers and advocates had warned about in 2017 and 2018, the FBI told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that its “ability to identify and locate sex trafficking victims and perpetrators was significantly decreased following the takedown of Backpage.com.”
The SAFE SEX Act
The SAFE SEX Act was introduced by Ro Khanna (D–Pa.) and Barbara Lee (D–Calif.) in the House and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) in the Senate, the same legislators behind a 2019 effort to “study the effects of FOSTA and of the Justice Department's shutdown of websites — like Backpage and Rentboy — popular for sex worker advertising,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported today.
“So far, the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act — introduced in the House on March 3 — has seven co-sponsors aside from Khanna and Lee, all Democrats,” Nolan Brown explained. “The Senate version (also introduced March 3) has just two sponsors aside from Warren and Wyden: Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), and Cory Booker (D–N.J.). Meanwhile, the FOSTA-esque EARN IT Act has 21 co-sponsors in the Senate, albeit just six co-sponsors in the House.”
Back in Feb. 2021, when Khanna announced his intention to revive the 2019 bill, he told Capitol Hill news site Roll Call that the bill was inspired by what he saw as a lack of representation of sex worker voices in the legislative process.
“There’s no politician who gains political currency for standing up for the voices of sex workers,” Khanna added. “They’re not a voting bloc, they’re not a donor bloc, lobbyists don’t represent them on Capitol Hill. And they were just totally shut out. They were simply invisible.”
Main Image: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)