Reply All - #119 No More Safe Harbor

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

Last month, the government shut down backpage.com, a site where people advertised sex with children. We talk to a group of people who say that was a huge mistake. Trigger warning: sexual assault. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, quick warning before we start the show. This is an episode about sex trafficking. So if that is something you want to skip, you should skip it. From Gimlet, this is Reply-All. I'm PJ. In January 2017, a Senate subcommittee met to hear testimony from a woman named Nicole S. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and esteemed members of the subcommittee. My name is Nicole S.

And I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today and represent myself and my family. Nicole was swiveling in her seat. She told them she was nervous to be there. She wasn't a lawyer or politician, but she'd spent years just fighting for the opportunity to sit down and make these people listen to her. Because in 2010, something had happened to her family that to her felt inconceivable. In just a few short months, our American dream would be exchanged for a third world nightmare and lead us to question everything. One day, she'd gone to pick up her daughter from track practice. She uses a pseudonym for her daughter, Natalie. She went to pick up Natalie from practice, but Natalie wasn't there. She'd run away. Nicole and her husband couldn't find her

anywhere, and as the weeks dragged on, they started to fear the worst. The police asked them for dental records. They spent 108 days in agony, just waiting for any sort of news. And then one day the detective finally got in touch. He said he'd found their daughter, she was alive, and he showed them a screenshot from this website. The screenshot was an advertisement for her daughter. She was being sold for sex online. Natalie was rescued and brought home, and she told him how she'd ended up there. After she'd run away, she'd met a woman in a homeless shelter, this 22-year-old woman who was pretending to be a teenager, who must have just immediately clocked her as an easy target. The woman told Natalie she could help her.

And as a parent, it's hard to talk about what happens next. I can't imagine her fear and bewilderment at what was happening to her as she was repeatedly raped, beaten, threatened, and treated like a sexual object every day. This woman who she'd met had coerced her into prostitution. She'd actually made an ad for her

and put it online. And the website that they used was called backpage.com. Backpage. That was the reason Nicole was speaking in front of the Senate. Backpage, she said, had made it so that men who wanted to buy children for sex could do it from the comfort of their own home.

The question is how? How could such a horrific, morally banked-up business model find success in our America? The reason Nicole had come to Washington is because when she'd gone to lawyers asking, what can we do about Backpage, she'd been told the same thing again and again. As incredible as this might sound,

we think that the law is actually on Backpage's side. What Nicole and her husband were told was that what Backpage was doing was not actually illegal because they were protected by this little loophole in the law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the Safe Harbor provision. You might have actually heard of this because it's basically the law that allows the modern internet to work. It says that when a user posts something to a website like Facebook, Twitter, whatever, any legal responsibility for what they post belongs to the user, not the website. So if I go on Facebook and I slander my boss, my boss continues. sue me, but he can't sue Mark Zuckerberg. What Nicole was being told, though, was that this law also meant that if somebody took her underage daughter and advertised her website where her daughter was advertised,

the website that was making money off the advertisement, they were blameless. So Nicole and a group of other mothers like her, they decided, we have to change this law. As soon as people heard Nicole's story, they were on her side. There was a Netflix documentary about her and other mothers. There's a celebrity PSA. Today, you can go online and buy a child for sex. It's as easy as ordering a pizza. It is inconceivable to me that this is happening here in this country.

Thousands of children are raped every day. Democrats and Republicans in both the Senate and the House were outraged. They started working on bipartisan legislation to fix this. The Senate conducted their own investigation of Backpage. This is Senator Rob Portman talking about what they found. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, has spent the last couple of years investigating back. Backpage. We took a deep dive. We found Backpage was actively and knowingly involved in illegal sex

trafficking, and it covered up evidence of its crimes in order to increase its profits. And so a month ago, on March 21st, Republicans and Democrats came together and passed the new law. Fasta Sesta, a combination of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers act, was passed. It was decided that Section 230 would no longer. protect sites like Backpage. 97 senators voted in favor, only two voted against. Authorities arrested the men behind Backpage, and shortly after, visitors to the site,

instead of getting a list of all the different cities where Backpage operated, instead they just saw a big notice from the government. Backpage was down. The monster was dead. But the thing that caught my eye in the aftermath of this story was that there were all these sex workers on the internet, and they were all saying the same thing.

This law is a disaster. Even though it's supposed to go after the story, sex trafficking, it's actually going to go after us, voluntary sex workers. And that back page, it was not the boogeyman that the government had made it out to be. It was actually a website that was doing a lot of good. And I wanted to know, like, how can that be true? Like, how can a website that sold children be good for the world? So, for the past couple weeks, I've been talking to sex workers. Can you just say your name in what you do? Sure. My name is Katie Simon, C-A-T-Y-S-I-M-O-N, as and Simon says.

I'm the co-editor of Kits &Sass, which is a site by and for sex workers that's been around since 2011. And I'm also a sex worker. I've been escorting for 15 years. 15 years? 15 years. Wow.

I mean, I didn't realize that, and it makes me curious just because what we want to talk to you about, like you're actually, that sounds like you've worked across the whole timeline of our story. Yes, exactly. I was just thinking today that, you know, I've been with Lacey and Larkin the whole way through back in their Village Voice media model with print ads in the back of alternative weeklies.

She's talking about Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin. They were the founders of Backpage. And Katie says these were just guys who used to publish alt weekly newspapers, the kinds that would have escort ads in the back. She said Backpage.com was just a website that took those ads and put them on the internet. It wasn't even like an original idea. Yeah, Craigslist did it first. But when Craigslist stopped doing it, Backpage became the big site. $2, $5 for a Backpage ad, that's something that's easily achievable for a lot of people.

It was cheap and also Backpage was something, you know, any man off the street could have heard of, you know. So you knew when you posted your ad on Backpage, you had a viable broad market right there. You knew that you were going to get calls. This was a huge deal. not just because it was more business, but because in the past, new clients were really dangerous for sex workers. A lot of people worked on the street, which meant that they spent a lot of time just trying to decide whether or not to trust some stranger before they got in his car. But because of Backpage in sites like it, there's been this whole generation of sex workers who have never had to do street work. Like, the idea of a world without Backpage, it's like a world without email.

I talked to one of these sex workers. Her name's Trinity Collins. She's from New Orleans. What made you first get into sex work? Wow, this question. Is that an okay question? Yeah, it's just like I always think about like, how the hell did I end up here? You know, my dad, my grandfather is a pastor, my dad's a pastor, I always thought I was going to be a pastor. And mind you, I'm trans in the middle of it. So it's like, oh, God, this is the life.

How did I end up here? You know, when I got to college, I just found out that I was different, you know? I found out that I was gay and different. So when Trinity realized that she was gay and that she was trans, it was like she watched all these job opportunities just disappear in front of her. She knew she wasn't going to be a pastor. She started taking hormones, and soon after that, she got fired from her job at Smoothie King. She said for somebody like her back then, sex work really was all she had.

It was a job that had to hire her. But she said that for a lot of people, the downside of a job like that is that once you take it, it's really hard to escape from it. It's like a pipeline. Once you get into this pipeline, you find yourself from the streets. to a jail cell. From a jail cell, you're thinking, like, oh, my God, that's when you get your phase. And you say, okay, when you get out, I'm going to change. I want to be big change. And guess what your big change is? Your big change is Backpage.

Did you use Backpage a lot? Yeah, daily, hourly. What did that look like? How would you, how would you use it? I'm one of the girls who, and I know people are going to hate me for saying this, but whatever it's like. I did post fake pictures. I did it for my safety and my protection only. I mean, I'm just to keep it real and 100% funky.

And so you would post photos of girls that looked like you, but weren't you just so that if you were walking around, somebody wouldn't recognize you from Backpage? Was that the idea? Yeah. So I would post maybe like five ads a day almost. You know what I'm saying? There were actually all these different ways

that Trinity could use the internet to just eke out like a little bit more safety for herself. So she could use different pictures of herself, but she could also do all these things to screen potential clients. Like she could Google them, she could look them up on Facebook, she could ask for references. There were whole websites you could go to where you just like exchanged lists of bad or dangerous Johns with other sex workers. So talking to Katie and Trinity, I started to just wonder, what does all this add up to? Like if you picture how many people in the United States are doing sex work and you think the internet is. making all of their lives just marginally safer,

like, what's the overall effect of that? Is it big? Is it measurable? And so I started to look around, and I found a study that looked at this exact question. And the effect that it found was so much bigger and more complicated than what I would have expected that I actually wanted to call the guy you did it

and just have him walk me through it. His name is Scott Cunningham. He's an economist who studies prostitution. And he said, okay, if you want to understand this, just the first thing you really need to get is how dangerous prostitution is. It is the most dangerous job for a woman in the United States. So it has a homicide rate of over 200 per 100,000 people.

The second most dangerous job for a female is a liquor store employee, and that has a homicide rate of 4 per 100,000. So it's just, you know, it's unbelievably dangerous. And he figured an easy way to measure this danger is just look at the murder rate. And so he went back and he looked at when Craigslist had first introduced erotic services. And the thing was, Craigslist introduced erotic services. to different cities at different times. And so that gave Scott this, like, series of before and after snapshots.

And what Scott found was that on average, when Craigslist opened erotic services in a city, the female homicide rate went down 17%. We found that female homicide rates were 17% lower after erotic services opened in a city. And you're not talking about the female homicides. You're not talking about among prostitutes. You're talking about the overall female homicide rates. So we don't know that. We don't know that it's just the sex workers.

We just know female homicide rates were 17% lower after erotic services. It just seems like such a, like that's nearly 20%. Like I just think it's, I think most people don't even realize, I wouldn't even realize that, I don't know. I don't think I realized exactly statistically how dangerous prostitution was. I don't think I exist. I realized how many people, I don't know, that just seems like a lot of people to suddenly not die. Well, it may not always be, it may, one, it is very dangerous. It is historically, obscenely dangerous.

And just because we find a 17% reduction in female homicide rates associated with erotic services doesn't mean that every single one of those is an averted sex worker homicide. It could be there are violent men and the availability of basically a very efficient commercial sex market causes them to substitute away from. violence more generally. Oh, wow. That's fascinating. So it's it's it could be a combination of sex work has become more safe, but also the kind of guy who would like just hurt a woman instead is visiting prostitutes and not hurting them. Yeah. Yeah. I have another study where I do find evidence for that. And Scott says there's other places where he's seen effects like this. Like

for instance, there's a period of time where Rhode Island largely decriminalized prostitution, like You couldn't go out on the street, but anything indoors was allowed. During that time, the female gonorrhea rate went down more than 40%. And the amount of reported rapes went down 30%. Again, this is for all women. Overall, not just sex workers. I feel like there's something disturbing in there. Like, the idea that there are enough men at the margins who are, for whom, like, the paying for sex or raping a person are hard.

Substitutes for each other. Yeah, yeah. Well, it doesn't have to be a bunch of guys. It actually could be serial rapists, which is really common. But yeah, it is disturbing that they exist. It's disturbing that there might be a very unusual public policy, which could be a deterrent that on the face of it is very objectionable to people. I think that that also is disturbing, is that we might be able to use

voluntary sex work to pacify violence. Scott says that actually right now, today, we are at the beginning of what he thinks will be the largest natural experiment in prostitution policy in American history. Because this law that was just passed, Scott says that what the law actually does is it says that any website that promotes or facilitates prostitution,

not just trafficking, but prostitution, is now criminally liable. which means that after the vote, before the law even passed, all these different websites that just helped sex workers stay safe online, they started closing. Do you think people are going to die because of this law? Yeah, I do actually. If they end up having to go back to the streets,

if they end up having to work with clients that they were not able to check out before or screen in any way, they are going to die. There's going to be violence committed. there's going to be violence committed against them. There'll be no more blacklists. There'll be no more white lists. There'll be no references.

I mean, it's not even clear what the new market's going to look like, but I can't imagine that any of the safety infrastructure is going to be there. Scott says here's the worst part. For all the damage he believes this law will do to sex workers and to their industry, he thinks when the dust settles, sex traffickers, they might actually just be the cockroaches who survived the blast. traffickers might be the most stubborn of the participants in the market. Why?

You know, well, because they've got women that have literally no other outside options, and they themselves have no other outside options, and they might be the best game in town for finding people. Because what the Internet did was it gave women the ability to not work with pimps and not work with coercive people. But now of a sudden, you know, if he thinks that he can round up some clients for her, she may not have a better choice. Coming up after the break,

we talked to somebody who pushed for this law, and we asked them what they think about all this. Welcome back to the show. I wanted to talk to somebody who supported this law. I wanted to know why they had, and I just wanted to know if they'd considered any of what these sex workers were saying. Like, did they not agree?

Did they not know? So I called somebody. My name is Carol Smolenski. I'm the executive director of ECAT USA, where an organization that works around the world to protect children from commercial sexual exploitation. Carol said she has been fighting to save exploited children for 27 years. When I told her, I wanted to ask her about problems that people had with the law, she just helped pass.

She said, sure, go ahead. So basically what they say is they say that the goal of reducing child sex trafficking, obviously they're on board with, they feel like the way the law is written because it criminalizes websites that facilitate prostitution instead of just sex trafficking, that it has, that it has like a much bigger area of effect than it would otherwise. Well, I mean, I guess we'll see how that plays out. You know, after a law's past, I think there's still this period where you're not sure. And so, yes, I know that they say that.

And I'm not sure that that outweighs the need to protect our kids from being bought and sold on the sex trade in the sex trade. I mean, I think what they, I think in their mind. the people I've spoken to, they don't think that it's like, they don't think that it's like, oh, kids should be at more risk so sex workers are more safe or whatever. What they say is they think that with a website like Backpage, basically they think that trafficking exists and a website like Backpage is going to make it visible, but the absence of Backpage isn't going to make it go away.

Mm-hmm. But the out front existence of it really does normalize it. I mean, you know, from my perspective, it should be underground. It should be that kids are, it's not seen that there's a open marketplace for kids, that anybody can just go and buy one and see, and we, you know, and we're okay with it. There really does have to be some pushback to, to say that's not acceptable. I asked her why the law targeted not just trafficking but prostitution,

and she said she didn't know. I asked her if she'd talked to any sex workers who opposed the law, and she said she hadn't. But she said in general she felt sympathy for them. She told me about this NPR story she'd heard about this report, about how hard sex workers had it, and how she'd gone and looked the report up afterwards. I mean, there's this one quote from that report that's really ringing in my,

I can't stop thinking about. She's being fined by a judge for prostitution. And her quote in there is what she said to the judge, I'm going to have to go suck some dick in order to pay this fine. I think that's exactly how they feel. Yeah, I know. And it's outrageous. It's outrageous.

And so, no, they should be, they shouldn't be criminalized for this. but what we really need is an economy that does justice for all. Jobs, you know, affordable housing. Well, that's what we really need. And that's what I'm working for in my spare time. The thing that I cannot square is you, like if you talked, like one of the people I talked to her name was Trinity. And if you talk to Trinity, you guys would agree on. 99% of everything.

And then at the end, she would say, also, you just support a law that I think could kill me. Yeah. I don't know what to say. It's, you know, I don't know. Anything I say will sound wrong, so I'm not going to say anything to that. You sound like a thoughtful person who's trying to solve the part of the misery that you can see. Yes. I am, you know, it's easier for children.

It's easier on the children's end of things. because adults are always seen as responsible for their own, you know, exploitation, which is also outrageous. It surprised me how much Carol seemed to agree with the sex workers. She thought arresting sex workers wasn't helping anybody. What they really needed was just more support. I didn't really see how these two sides could be in so much opposition. But then I talked to Melissa Jira Grant. She's a journalist.

She's covered sex work for a long time. and she told me she's just very sick of this kind of conversation because she says it's been like this for decades. Some of the people in power will say that part of the solution has to be giving more resources to people, give them better options, but when it comes time to pass laws, they always just pick a crackdown instead.

And she says it just doesn't help, like even with child sex trafficking. If you look at a lot of these kids who are being trafficked, it's not just like there's a pimp you can arrest. Because in the real world, a lot of the kids who have been sexually trafficked all that means is that they're under 18 and they've decided to sell sex. And the reason they're doing it is just it's for the same reasons that a lot of adults do.

They're trying to survive in a situation where they do not see a better option. So what I understand as sort of the most common experience is that the person already was facing some kind of vulnerability in their life, whether they were homeless or on the verge of homelessness, whether they were in an abusive household. whether they had a financial crisis that pushed them into a precarious position, an emergency. What is happening is somebody is able to exploit something that was already a problem. And what I hear from social service providers is that that's the problem, right? We need to make sure that young people aren't in a position of vulnerability that can be exploited. Melissa watched the Senate hearings that led to this new law getting passed. And she said what she saw was story after story of young people in vulnerable positions getting exploited.

And what she couldn't believe was that the only part of it that politicians would talk about was backpage.com. It feels like what's going on here is backpage is being scapegoated for why it is that young people run away from home. Backpage is getting scapegoated for the actions of people who exploit those young people. and those are much harder things to talk about and to face honestly. We weren't in a Senate subcommittee hearing about child abuse and neglects. We weren't in a Senate subcommittee hearing about how few resources there are for homeless youth. We were here to talk about this website. As we were finishing this story, I got an email from Katie, one of the sex workers I spoke to.

She says that one month after this vote, the community is already feeling the impact. 13 people have gone missing. two more were found dead. Two have been sexually assaulted at gunpoint, and one woman took her own life. And those are just the one she knows about. Reply All is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced by Shruthi Pitaminani, Fia Benin,

Damiano Marquetti, Caitlin Roberts, and Elizabeth Kules. We were edited this week by Tim Howard and Sarah Saracen. We had fact-checking this week by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Devin Gwynne. Special thanks this week to Emma Lanzo, Greg DiAngelo, Brennan Reese, and Lillapel Greenout. My co-host, Alex Goldman, is away for the next little bit on account of the fact that he had a baby girl. Please tweet him congratulations and ask him when he's going to visit my puppy Ralphie.

We were mixed by Rick Kwan and Catherine Anderson. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster sounder. Matt Lieber is the closest parking spot to the movie theater. Thank you for listening. We will see you in two weeks.