How the Online Safety Bill Will Harm Sex Workers

As is typical with legislation that targets sex workers, the name of the Online Safety Bill is misleading and intends to make the average member of the public believe that its purpose is to protect people. This was also the case with FOSTA/SESTA in the US (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act/Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). When someone hears about a bill intending to address children’s access to porn or to end sex trafficking, their instinct is to support it, because most people don’t go and read the text of the legislation.

When it comes to the Online Safety Bill in the UK, the bill seeks to regulate internet services by making them legally responsible for quickly removing illegal content. It will also enforce some age-checking measures. For those who do not comply, they can face fines of up to £18 million.

Now, “illegal content” refers to a large range of things. Among those is sexual exploitation. One way the Online Safety Bill goes about placing liability onto online platforms for sexual exploitation is to obligate them to remove any content that incites or controls “prostitution for gain”. While this might seem like a good thing on the surface, the problem is how this law will impact online platforms in practice. The ads that sex workers place online are often entirely indistinguishable from ads which are placed by a brothel manager or third party. Unlike other offenses where the online content itself is an offense (child sexual abuse imagery) or where the criminality is clear (advertisements offering sexual access to children), a site cannot reasonably be expected to tell whether an escorting ad has been posted by a sex worker themselves or not. If sites can be held liable if an ad is discovered to have been placed by a third party, and to therefore meet the criteria for “controlling prostitution for gain”, then many advertising platforms for sex workers will have to drop escorting ads entirely if they want to avoid fines or prison time for the people in charge.

Some people won’t care that sex workers will lose access to advertising platforms. A common argument for sex workers to hear is that us being disadvantaged is worth it if even one victim of sex trafficking is saved. The problem is that removing the ability for sex traffickers to advertise on certain platforms online doesn’t stop them, it only drives them underground, making them harder to catch. Meanwhile, losing access to advertising platforms isn’t just a minor inconvenience for sex workers. If we cannot advertise online, many of us cannot work independently at all and so we return to agencies or managers or brothel environments. If the goal is to protect vulnerable people who are selling sex under the control of an abusive third party, denying sex workers the ability to work independently and advertise ourselves only puts more of us into that situation.

Another element of the Online Safety Bill is an enforcement option to require payment providers not to work with a platform. Sites which allow sex workers to advertise usually have different options to pay for advertisements, like charging a fee to appear as “available” or to bump an ad to be more visible. Without access to a payment provider, these sites will either be forced to shut down or will become far less accessible because of the workarounds they will be forced to use. The poorer sex workers who need these sites the most will be the least capable of using them.

Various countries are introducing legislation which is driving sex workers off of the internet, piece by piece, but we don’t disappear when we’re unable to solicit online. When clients are scarce, we rely on other groups to bring them to us. If the UK government artificially makes it more difficult for us to find clients then we’re going to have to find other ways of getting either. For some people that will mean turning to the streets and for others it will mean advertising more covertly on platforms that aren’t made for us. A lot of the people I know have gone back to brothels they hate because of the cost of living crisis, and these changes will only push the few who haven’t.

Considering the precarious situation we are in, many of us who sell sex will try to help each other and share resources. When we do provide resources for each other, we are often framed as members of a “pimp lobby” for doing so. It is suggested that providing safety information and discussing best practices incites other people to engage in prostitution. Who is to say that legislation like the Online Safety Bill won’t be interpreted that way? It’s not as though UK sex workers have reassurance of a commitment to protect sex workers’ safety tools from our MPs.

Sex workers don’t typically start selling sex because it’s our dream job or because we love sex. Like most jobs that carry a lot of risk and have undesirable elements, we do the work because we don’t have better options. The barriers we face might be disability or addiction or poverty or single parenthood, but regardless of the specific reasons it’s the case that a lot of sex workers are already selling sex as their last resort. That means that no matter how unsafe it gets or how restricted we are from finding clients, we will continue to sell sex. We won’t give up and get a different job instead if our inability to do that is exactly why we’re engaging in prostitution.

These kinds of bills do irreparable damage to sex workers. We’re a hard population to collect data about, since we’re stigmatized and often seek to avoid being found or researched, but the information we have shows that sex workers losing our advertising platforms has a detrimental effect. The loss of Backpage, for example, led to a significant increase in violence and financial instability for sex workers in the US. Loitering arrests over prostitution started increasing in places like New York, despite previously dropping, in the wake of FOSTA/SESTA. Consensual sex workers, insofar as they can be separated from victims of sex trafficking given the US definition of sex trafficking which is ridiculously broad, were made more vulnerable to sex trafficking.

The issue isn’t even whether the legislation is actually used to prosecute or fine these platforms – in the case of Backpage, it went down one day before SESTA became law – it’s about the impact the legislation has on how sites risk assess. Even if sites aren’t technically forced to take away sex workers ability to post ads, many of them won’t be willing to take the risk. Sites that don’t exclusively rely on sex workers for their revenue will cut us out, like Craigslist removing their personal ads.

To allow sex workers to work in the safest way possible, we have to reduce harm by making it easy to find and vet clients. The wider range of clients we have to choose from, the more likely we are to be able to refuse those who make us uncomfortable. When we can share information online, we can find out whether prospective clients are abusive from blacklisting tools we share. The Online Safety Bill gets in the way of these things.

If you live in the UK, it is absolutely worth logging your disapproval of these elements of the law. You can contact your MP and tell them you oppose the inclusion of these prostitution-related offences under the “priority offences” section of the Online Safety Bill. The ECP have a tool built for this purpose, with a template letter that you can edit or add to as you wish, here.