When the US government was passing SESTA/FOSTA and shutting down backpage, sex workers were very vocal in claiming it would do nothing to stop sex trafficking and would actually make it harder to track. Now thanks to this article on newly discovered government memos, we can see how right those sex workers were. Backpage was apparently incredibly helpful in tracking dubious advertisements and alerting authorities when they thought children might be being trafficked. They allowed users to report ads, flagged photographs of anyone looking underage, worked with authorities on best practices and suggested filtering based on phone numbers that law enforcement could provide.
None of this stopped prosecutors spinning horror stories in the press about backpage, because of course the attack on backpage and sex workers (by proxy) was never about stopping trafficking. It was all about the look of the thing, scoring cheap political points and imposing control over what women can and cannot do with their bodies. The end result has been exactly what sex workers said would happen. Rather than working with a site with established expertise to solve the problem, the authorities have spent a fortune prosecuting them while losing any visibility they had into genuine exploitation.
I had no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll settle for a drawing showing exactly what I’d like to happen to every prosecutor involved in this fiasco. The artwork is by Annmo Night.
Your point of view is well taken. The posturing and hypocrisy of politicians (and the evangelical religious right) help sweep the whole subject under the carpet at every chance they get only to have it reemerge amongst their own ranks with incidents of rape, misogyny of all sorts, sexual exploitation of minors (truly sick!!) and on and on it goes. What can one do except wring one’s hands when people like Roy Moore and Anthony Weiner keep reappearing.
Yes, there are a number of disgusting figures in our daily political life who seem immune to shame, sense or common decency.
And to be fair, the SESTA/FOSTA bills and sex worker prosecutions aren’t a straightforward right/left split. Democrat Kamala Harris is an ex-prosecutor who strongly supported those bills. And reason magazine, which carried this article, tends to come from the libertarian side of the right. So sadly, when it comes to sex and sex work, both sides are pretty broken.
-paltego