Anti-Trafficking in the Time of FOSTA/SESTA: Networked Moral Gentrification and Sexual Humanitarian Creep

Abstract

Globally, sex workers have highlighted the harms that accompany anti-prostitution efforts advanced via anti-trafficking policy, and there is a growing body of social science research that has emerged documenting how anti-trafficking efforts contribute to carceral and sexual humanitarian interventions. Yet mounting evidence on the harms of anti-trafficking policies has done little to quell the passage of more laws, including policies aimed at stopping sexual exploitation facilitated by technology. The 2018 passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the corresponding Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), is a case study in how efforts to curb sexual exploitation online actually heighten vulnerabilities for the people they purport to protect. Drawing on 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 58) and key informants (n = 20) in New York and Los Angeles, we analyze FOSTA/SESTA and its harmful effects as a launchpad to more broadly explore how technology, criminalization, shifting governance arrangements, and conservative moralities cohere to exacerbate sex workers’ vulnerability.

Good Tech, Bad Tech: Policing Sex Trafficking with Big Data

“…The introduction of the Allow States andVictims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (Pub L No 115-164, 132 Stat 1253) in the US, designed to curb sex trafficking by reducing opportunities for online marketing, is a prime example of the negative consequences of technology-oriented narratives. The Act has been reported for making sexual labour more insecure and volatile while, ironically, rendering sex workers increasingly reliant upon potentially exploitative third parties to facilitate their sexual labour and doing very little to actually prevent sex trafficking (Blunt and Wolf 2020;Majic 2020;Musto et al 2021;Tichenor 2020). Similarly, the current laws in the UK against brothel-keeping, that is, the criminalisation of two or more sex workers working in the same premises without a license, push individuals to work alone, even though harms can be reduced by working collectively (Scoular et al 2019).…”

Ethics and Efficacy of Unsolicited Anti-Trafficking SMS Outreach

“…Prior studies of technology use in the sex industry explored sex workers' use of digital platforms [41,72] and payment mechanisms [71], security considerations that sex workers take into account to do their jobs [54], and the digital discrimination they face [10,14]. Additional prior work has explored the harms of technology-related anti-trafficking legislation such as FOSTA/SESTA [14,50,58], the stigma of sex work online 10 [29], and the technology used by sex workers' rights organizations for social justice-related services [76]. These studies and news articles explain how criminalization and stigma put sex industry workers in precarious and often vulnerable positions, and made suggestions on ways to design technology to mitigate the harms unique to the sex industry; the general consensus was that including sex industry worker input in the design process of technological tools would help accommodate diversity, privacy, safety, and ease of use [16,48,62,67,78].…”

“…Further, sex work is also often equated with sex trafficking under the premise that all labor in the sex industry is coercive [36,82]. Thus, anti-sex trafficking efforts, including technology-facilitated interventions that identify and catalog sex industry workers regardless of their working conditions or autonomy, can pose significant risks to sex industry workers' digital and physical safety, which is already precarious [10,54,58].…”

Racial Profiling and The Larger Impact of Covid-19 on Migrant Sex Workers in France

“…However, this focus on cis female subjecthood/victimhood is often counterproductive for many of the women in the sex work sector, who are positioned as the ideal beneficiaries of social protection mechanisms while being specifically surveilled, bordered and deported in the process (Giametta et al forthcoming). In this context, trans people tend to be excluded by humanitarian concerns, protection and social interventions while being also subject to immigration law enforcement and deportations (Musto et al 2021). These considerations were corroborated further by our Coronavirus-related interviews, showing that throughout the Covid-19 lockdown many Latina trans women kept receiving deportation orders from the government as their visas had not been renewed at the Prefecture.…”