Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA, a bill to fight online sex trafficking, in April 2018.

The bill garnered bipartisan support, with just two senators voting against the measure.

But so far, the bill has been a failure, making life more dangerous for sex workers and wasting taxpayer funds.

Lawmakers should admit that they made a mistake.

Karol Markowicz is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

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It has been 15 months since FOSTA-SESTA, a bill to fight sex trafficking, was signed into law by President Donald Trump.

The bill, pushed by Ivanka Trump and met with applause by Hollywood celebrities like Amy Schumer, was a rare bipartisan initiative. SESTA, the Senate version of the bill titled Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, passed 97-2, with only Sens. Ron Wyden and Rand Paul voting against it.

After all, who doesn't want to fight sex trafficking? The very term conjures up images of children being bought and sold. What kind of monster could look away? Something had to be done, and the two parties joined together to make sure it was.

The law, however, has been an abject failure. It hasn't done what it set out to do, fight sex trafficking, and instead has made the lives of sex workers, the very people the law hoped to protect, more dangerous. FOSTA-SESTA holds websites accountable for any sex work facilitated on their platforms. Sex workers can no longer share information or warn each other away from violent clients.

Even the smaller goal of the bill, to limit the advertising of all sex business, has failed.

Three months after the bill's passage, the sponsor of the bill, Rep. Ann Wagner of Missouri, said, "We have shut down nearly 90% of the online sex-trafficking business and ads." The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and gave her three Pinocchios.

Among other issues with her comment, most of the decline in sex-work ads came after the government seized the website Backpage, a move that happened before FOSTA-SESTA was passed. And, The Post wrote, "after the initial drop, advertising for the sex trade appears to have rebounded, such as on new websites that mimic Backpage with named like 'Bedpage.'"

As for the actual business of sex trafficking, there's no evidence that the law has made any difference whatsoever.

The cofounder of the St. James Infirmary, "a health clinic that supports sex workers in California's Bay Area," told The Verge "that in the weekend following FOSTA, the infirmary's mobile van outreach saw a dramatic increase of street-based sex workers in the Mission District." Sex workers weren't just going to disappear, and police departments across the country seem to have been caught off-guard by this influx.

According to the Justice Department, "In fiscal year 2018, the Justice Department initiated a total of 230 human trafficking prosecutions, charging 386 defendants and convicting a record 526 defendants." Of course, the previous year, they also announced they spent $47 Million to fight sex trafficking.

With such a small number of actual traffickers being arrested, that money has to be spent somewhere and is inevitably put toward fighting voluntary sex work.

The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Fox23 news station reported in May 2018 that police were having trouble investigating sex trafficking without Backpage. "Police said now that they can't set up stings on Backpage, they've been able to focus their manpower on investigating reports of prostitution at local massage parlors," the report said.

That's the classic rerouting of police manpower. Departments across the country are granted funding to fight the plague of sex trafficking only to spend those funds on these prostitution cases. As in the story of Robert Kraft visiting one of those massage parlors in Florida, stings are initiated to fight sex trafficking, but when law enforcement discovers no trafficking has occurred, it simply instigates arrests for prostitution. It's a racket.

In his statement explaining his vote against the bill, Wyden was spot-on in predicting these problems.

"The failure to understand the technological side effects of this bill — specifically that it will become harder to expose sex-traffickers, while hamstringing innovation — will be something that this congress will regret," the senator said.

The lack of honesty is what is most galling. Would Americans be in favor of spending these astronomical sums to fight sex work that is completely unrelated to sex trafficking? That's unclear, but they should at least be told the truth about how their tax dollars get spent and not be tricked into believing sex trafficking is happening all around them.

Even the name of the bill, "H.R.1865 - Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017" in the House, is confounding. States and victims had not previously been stopped from fighting online sex trafficking. The bill has not made it easier to fight online sex trafficking, it has actively made it harder.

FOSTA-SESTA has made sex work more dangerous, the internet less useful, and we are throwing money out the proverbial window in our zeal to fight a scourge that isn't nearly as widespread as we are led to believe. We need elected officials brave enough to say a mistake has been made.