Thoughts on FOSTA-SESTA, DDD? I have read and listened to a couple stories about it, seems like every government effort to curb sex traffic ends up making life worse for sex workers.
FOSTA-SESTA was a tool put in the toolbox designed to smash backpage.com. Backpage.com was basically the opposite of pornhub; it had become a craigslist for sex with prostitutes. The market that it created was very real and difficult for law enforcement to regulate to mitigate some very bad outcomes.
The FOSTA-SESTA tool was a lot like other tools that the Government enacts - overbroad and drafted in a calculated way to make sure that the backpages of the world didn't sneak through a loophole.
But I think it's the way you have to do it; you need services like MCMEC. Developing a prostitution-side NCMEC would be the way to go.
https://www.missingkids.org/HOME
Here's the real problem - we live in a fucking huge world with super shitty people doing unimaginably shitty things to children and women and men all the time. Every time I think I've been exposed to the absolute floor of what a human being is capable of, another client shows up to blow the previous one out of the water.
Were you ever told as a child, "well, don't worry about what others do - a huge part of their punishment is having to live with themselves. They probably lose sleep at night over what they've done." I'm here to tell you that was a fat fucking lie - because the worst of us; the true worst of us, have less than zero remorse; and not only rationalize their actions, but often justify them in a way that makes them the "good guy."
I'm getting off track - but the real problem is scale. We can't stop all child abuse or sex trafficking because
there's so fucking much of it.
Right now, there's an SBI agent looking at a computer screen. On the computer screen is a list of about 1,000 child porn torrents. That SBI agent is harvesting hundreds of IP addresses each day, and sending them off to Spectrum, Time Warner, Charter, whatever else, to get the name/address of the person who downloaded CP from the SBI honeypot. We don't have the resources to prosecute all of those people. We just don't. It's THOUSANDS of different people a month. So the SBI agent gets this list of 100 people from Tuesday or whatever and starts going down the list; "is this person a teacher? A daycare worker? Someone who can get to kids? Someone who lives in a house with a lot of kids? Are they a repeat offender?" And then maybe 1 person a week is prosecuted. Of the 4 a month, maybe 1 actually eventually goes to prison.