The Women’s March is criticizing President Trump for arguably the most pro-woman policy decision he has made as president.
Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, into law on Wednesday. He was surrounded in the Oval Office by a crowd of women, including survivors of sex trafficking. Several of them wiped away tears. One danced as he took pen to paper to make FOSTA law.
FOSTA allows state prosecutors and victims to sue websites that advertise human trafficking victims for sex. The biggest of these sex trade sites is (or rather, was) Backpage.
The DOJ seized Backpage on Friday while arresting the site’s two founders on charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering. Backpage knowingly allowed ads for children to run on the site, even removing words like “schoolgirl” and “Lolita” to conceal that the advertisements were for kids. Not once did Backpage remove the ads for child sex slaves. Not once did Backpage report those advertisers to authorities. Now, Backpage is gone and FOSTA prevents any other company from taking its place.
Leave it to the Women’s March to find something wrong with this. The institution’s Twitter account lit up on Monday, saying “The shutting down of #Backpage is an absolute crisis for sex workers who rely on the site to safely get in touch with clients. Sex workers rights are women’s rights.” More tweets followed expanding on the rights of sex workers. By the look of their feed, one might be tricked into thinking that Backpage was a humanitarian organization. The Women’s March never mentioned the trafficked victims.
The organization that claims to fight oppression had nothing to say about the minors who are kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. The issue was right there in front of them, and they decided to skip it. If the Women’s March is really concerned about the welfare of sex workers, they would push for legalization of prostitution and punishment for traffickers. Instead, the organization suddenly cares about consensual prostitutes when it can spin them as victims of Trump.
FOSTA is the kind of decision Women’s March should celebrate. Need more proof that it’s a partisan decision? One of the most dedicated fighters against Backpage is a Women’s March darling: Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who spoke at the Women’s March in 2017. As California’s Attorney General, Harris sued Backpage several times on the grounds that it was being used to sell trafficked women and children. She even hailed the closure of Backpage’s adult section in January 2017 (though prostitution ads reappeared in the dating section), and said she wanted to see the site close entirely.
A new law has accomplished that goal. But the Women’s March crowd isn’t happy, because Trump is the one who made it happen.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Georgetown University.
