In March of this year, 25-year-old Providence escort and mother of three, Ashley Masi, posted an ad on Backpage, a Craigslist-esque message board website where one can find everything from old furniture to 15-minute blowjobs for sale. Daniel Tejada answered that ad, set up an appointment with her, then came to her house and strangled her to death.

Then in July, another sex worker who advertised on Backpage, Sanisha Johnson, 34, was shot and killed in a Massachusetts hotel by two men who were allegedly soliciting the services of prostitutes, then robbing them at gunpoint.

WIRED Opinion About Siouxsie Q James is a writer and activist. She hosts the acclaimed podcast "The Whorecast," and tweets @SiouxsieQJames.

Pressured by law enforcement officials, credit card behemoths Visa, MasterCard, and American Express have since ceased doing business with Backpage entirely, leaving bitcoin, and mailing in cash, checks, and money orders as the site’s only payment options.

Advertising online is an important tool for many sex workers as it places the barriers of space and time between the worker and the potential client, allowing the sex worker to negotiate from the safety of a phone or computer, rather than on the street. I know this because I am a sex worker, and I rely on the protection the Internet affords. Aside from the trusty can of mace attached to my keychain, advertising online and then screening my clients is one of the only tools I have to protect myself from potential bad dates.

Since the 2010 closure of Craigslist’s adult services section and the FBI seizure of MyRedbook in June of last year (both of which allowed providers to list ads for free) Backpage has been the most affordable option to advertise for adult services, allowing providers to post ads for as little as a few dollars. Now, without Backpage, sex workers who can’t afford to advertise on premium platforms, which can cost upwards of $200 a month, will have to resort to other, perhaps more risky, methods. It is the most vulnerable workers, those with the least financial security, who will now have a harder time. I am lucky. I can pay for advertising, to run my own website even; the people I am worried about are the working-class men and women that this change could send back out onto the street.

Aside from the trusty can of mace attached to my keychain, advertising online and then screening my clients is one of the only tools I have to protect myself from potential bad dates.

The crackdown on Backpage and sites like it is being done in the name of “human trafficking,” (ie: the force, fraud, or coercion and exploitation of labor, sexual or otherwise) which has captured the attention and pocketbooks of celebrities, politicians, and scores of bleeding heart Junior League types over the past decade, but experts say that going after advertising platforms in the name of combatting human trafficking is, in fact, accomplishing the exact opposite.

"Those who may have worked independently...may now have to rely on third parties, including traffickers, in order to meet their needs,” Board Chair Lindsay Roth of The Sex Workers Outreach Project told USA Today on July 9.

But it’s important to remember that though Ashley Masi and Sanisha Johnson’s stories have been hijacked by the anti-trafficking agenda, these women weren’t children incapable of making their own choices. They were adult American women trying to make a living in an economy with a vanishing middle class and fewer jobs every moment.

They were not victims of human trafficking—they were victims of murder.

Backpage is not to blame for these women’s deaths. The real culprit is the systematic hatred and dehumanization of sex workers, reinforced by their continued criminalization. In a world where the kind of work I do is outlawed, I know that if I were robbed, raped, or even killed on the job, the likelihood that I would ever be able to access any kind of justice through our current legal system is painfully slim.

A 2003 report, from The Urban Justice Center and The Sex Workers Project of New York City found that almost 30 percent of sex workers interviewed had experienced some form of violence from police officers, which isn’t so surprising as up until just last year it was perfectly legal for cops officers in Hawaii to have sex with prostitutes before arresting them, and just a few months ago, a Russian police officer was convicted of raping and murdering 22 sex workers in his squad car in a psychotic attempt to “cleanse” his town.

This is yet another thinly veiled war on the poor.

Yet many anti-trafficking organizations, and the legislation they advocate for look to law enforcement as their main tool for combatting trafficking. Even though a 2009 report, also from The Sex Workers Project, found that both trafficking victims and social workers found police raids in the name of human trafficking to be both violent and ineffective. Trafficked victims reported having their bodies beaten and forcefully exposed to other officers during raids, and one victim who participated in the study said, “A better way to help me leave my situation would be anything that didn’t involve the police.”

Placing exploited sex workers and victims of trafficking in the hands of police shows how out of touch the anti-trafficking movement is when it comes to the needs of the communities it is trying to serve.

Taking away the few resources working-class sex workers have to protect themselves shows the true colors of what the anti-trafficking “movement” really is: yet another thinly veiled war on the poor, further empowering law enforcement to target, harass, and criminalize the most vulnerable members of our society.

Which is why Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and a dozen other human rights groups have called for the worldwide decriminalization of prostitution on the grounds that when sex work is illegal it only exacerbates the risks for the worker.

When an industry is criminalized, it attracts criminals. The Green River Killer, who murdered close to 70 sex workers in the Pacific Northwest in the ‘80s and ‘90s, said that he chose sex workers as his victims because he knew he could kill as many of them as he liked without being caught, and he successfully remained at large for 20 years.

Two World Health Organization studies from 2003 and 2005 found that most instances of violence experienced by sex workers in New York and Vancouver were not reported to the authorities at all; and if they were, the police rarely, if ever, followed up or investigated further. I recognize myself in these numbers. If I ever feel unsafe at work, I do not go to the police for fear of arrest, ridicule, or worse. All of this begs the questions: How many sex workers did Sanisha Johnson’s murderer’s rob at gunpoint before they killed her? How many women did Daniel Tejada violently choke during a session before he finally took Ashley Masi’s last breaths?

What if just one of those former victims had been able to go to the police without fear? Maybe one, or both of these women would still be alive today.

As long as sex workers are seen as criminals in the eyes of police, they will continue to be seen a disposable by people who wish to harm them.

Because at the end of the day, even the screening processes I use can only do so much to protect me. It doesn't matter how nice my client was to the girl he saw before me. It doesn’t matter if he seems like a respectable guy through a Google search, and works a cool and reputable start up. He could still rape me, rob me, or kill me and have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. As long as sex workers are seen as criminals in the eyes of police, they will continue to be seen a disposable by people who wish to harm them.

Credit card companies taking away the ability to easily advertise on sites like Backpage won’t change that. Even shutting down Backpage won’t change that. Worse, at the moment, when actual reform is so far away, all that moves like this do is send more vulnerable sex workers out onto the street where they don’t have even the safety of a computer screen to protect them.