“Internet giants profit from ‘pop-up’ brothels”, shouted the Sunday Times as it used its front page to call for new measures to tackle this apparent scourge, pointing to a law that is making its way through the US Congress as a model. But despite being couched in the language of “anti-trafficking”, the law has met with criticism from sex workers and anti-trafficking advocates alike. The proposals (which are still changing as they move through the Senate) would increasingly render sex workers unable to advertise online, with tech companies fearing prosecution for hosting such ads.

When people who sell sex are kicked off online platforms where we advertise and communicate, we lose a crucial tool that allows us to screen potential clients. When sites remove our ads, sex workers are pushed into working on the street, which is often more dangerous (especially for those who are new to it) and more precarious – and by increasing sex workers’ visibility, leaves them more vulnerable to arrest. People reach out to third parties: if you can no longer find clients by putting up an ad, you might seek out a manager or associate who can find you clients. Taking away our ability to advertise – while ostensibly aimed at tackling exploitation – often, paradoxically, pushes sex workers into exploitative relationships.

The law that the Sunday Times praised goes even further. In widely expanding who can go after websites associated with commercial sex, it will intensify the criminalisation of sites that host harm reduction tools such as “ugly mugs” or “bad date” lists, which carry information on violent clients. (Sites that host this information in the US are already under siege.) The anti-trafficking advocate Kate D’Adamo, who has worked for harm reduction organisations in New York for many years, writes that the law will “undermine almost every single thing I would tell people for how to stay alive. All screening, all peer references, all bad date lists I could send.” In criminalising the ways that sex workers try to stay safe, such a law will see more sex workers harmed.

If criminalisation prevented commercial sex, the US – which aggressively criminalises all aspects of prostitution – would be prostitution-free. If criminalisation prevented exploitation, it would be one of the most equal nations on earth. Is it free of prostitution? Is it free of exploitation? A look at the US reveals that criminalisation does little to prevent commercial sex, but greatly exacerbates harm to people who sell it – and that real anti-trafficking measures would look like resources, not police. People need housing, healthcare and routes to citizenship, not ever-intensifying criminalisation.

In the UK, the buzz phrase “pop-up brothels” is used to suggest that there is something new and freshly alarming about sex workers in your neighbourhood. Fuelled in part by this nonsensical implication of a new threat (in reality, sex workers have been in a flat in your neighbourhood since for ever, without anybody noticing), local police forces have been aggressively raiding working flats. The result is often to arrest the sex workers they find: in UK law, brothel-keeping is an offence so broad that any two sex workers simply sharing a flat for safety can be charged with it. Those who are not prosecuted are evicted, and migrant workers are deported.

In positioning the tackling of “pop-up brothels” as key to ending exploitation, the Sunday Times attempts to give a progressive gloss to raids, arrests, evictions, prosecutions and deportations of sex workers. There may, of course, be some journalists for whom these outcomes are desirable: but if so, those people should have the courage to say so directly, and not couch their views in the language of anti-trafficking.

Meanwhile, just last week Theresa May’s government announced it will be halving the already-meagre allowance given to survivors of trafficking. In cutting this allowance to just £37 a week, survivors will be pushed into destitution – and made vulnerable to further exploitation. Women are on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood, where detainees – many of them survivors of gender-based violence and exploitation, and all of them enduring state violence from Britain’s immigration system – are protesting at indefinite detention.

The collision of technology and commercial sex makes many reach for criminalisation, seeking to “solve” the problem of prostitutes encroaching on your leafy suburban street or your holiday let. But if the government were really interested in reducing harm or tackling exploitation – which it largely isn’t – it would end immigration detention or increase the resources given to trafficking survivors and asylum seekers, not embark on more failed and harmful attempts to eradicate commercial sex through criminalisation.

• Molly Smith is a sex worker and activist