In April, President Trump signed a set of bills into law that intends to prevent online sex trafficking by making websites responsible for prostitution ads posted by third parties.

But as a result, sex workers have lost online venues to screen customers and share warnings, threatening their livelihoods and endangering them. Many websites and forums sex workers advertised on, like Craigslist Personals and Backpage.com, shut down or were seized after the House and the Senate passed the bills.

Advocates say sex workers have increasingly been pushed to the streets to find work, losing their housing and harassed and abused by opportunistic clients and third parties.

Within days of the Backpage seizure, Tara Burns, a sex workers’ rights advocate based in Alaska, said sex workers became homeless. Before they lost online platforms to communicate with clients, they made enough day by day to pay for basic necessities and live indoors. Now, Burns knows many resorting to higher risk behaviors to survive.

“For the people who are feeling like they have no way to get customers and no way to pay their bills and no way to keep a roof over their kid’s head and food in their kid’s mouth except for to turn to the street, it’s a little bit more traumatic because our colleague was just murdered on the streets here,” Burns said. Burns was referring to Cheri Ingram, a sex worker stabbed to death by a client in February.

The Senate’s Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the House’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act are collectively known as SESTA-FOSTA. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-San Jose, said he voted against FOSTA because the overly-broad bill criminalizes sex workers as well as speech.

“I encourage them (sex workers) to reach out to our office and I’ll share their stories with my colleagues to have a legislative fix because there are these bad unintended consequences that the most vulnerable population is being hurt,” Khanna said. “What we want to do is make sure that people aren’t being forced underground, aren’t exploited and that we’re really targeting not the sex workers, but the traffickers.”

The loss of discussion boards to share insider information such as service rates or warnings about dangerous clients will hurt people new to sex work the most, according to San Francisco-based sex worker and advocate Maxine Doogan. Because state laws criminalize prostitution, physical places where sex workers can network, access resources or get training on how to perform services safely do not exist.

Through working in the business over 28 years, Doogan has a regular client base. But as a result of SESTA-FOSTA, she said sex workers will be forced to rely on pimps more. Knowing sex workers’ situation, unethical pimps increasingly demand people they work with do unprotected services without condoms, putting sex workers at risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections.

“All these sex trafficking laws just make us bigger targets for the unscrupulous,” said Doogan, who also leads ESPLERP, a nonprofit that does legal advocacy, education and research for sex workers and other erotic service providers.

Advocates say defining all prostitution as sex trafficking is harmful. Burns said policies that do this deny sex workers access to equal protection under the law because they can be charged not with just prostitution, but with sex trafficking.

Senator Kamala Harris, who has sponsored California anti-trafficking bills as the state attorney general and as the San Francisco district attorney, supported SESTA believing “it will help victims get their day in court and empower state attorneys general to seek justice,” according to a statement her office emailed to this news organization.

“Senator Harris knows we can both protect victims and survivors of human trafficking and offer support and services to those who have raised concerns,” the statement said. “Companies like Backpage that profited off the pain of others must be held accountable.”

However, two months after the SESTA-FOSTA’s enactment, the ability to investigate and prosecute trafficking crimes has not increased, said Jean Bruggeman, the executive director of Freedom Network USA, a coalition of anti-trafficking advocates. Instead, publishers closing websites in response to the bills left a vacuum.

“In the past, many investigations and prosecutions actually depended upon information and data and evidence collected through online platforms to connect the trafficker to victims and to show that they had engaged in manipulation and financially benefited from transactions,” Bruggeman said.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra was not available to comment. His office referred to his statement about the Senate passing SESTA.

“I am pleased Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, a move that heralds promising results for survivors of human trafficking and their families,” Becerra said in a March 21 press release. “This critical legislation makes clear the authority of state and local law enforcement to protect victims from those who promote, facilitate and benefit from sex trafficking online.

Like Doogan, whose non-profit filed a petition in the Ninth Circuit in January asking it reconsider the dismissal of a lawsuit trying to repeal California’s anti-prostitution law, Bruggeman said consensual sex work needs to be decriminalized. Victims of forms of exploitation of abuse, ranging from trafficking to assault to not getting paid, aren’t likely to report experiences if they fear being arrested and prosecuted themselves.

“It’s infuriating,” Bruggeman said. “So until we decriminalize sex work, we’re not going to encourage victims to come forward. It’s very difficult to encourage victims to come forward and seek assistance when they continue to see stories of people being arrested for prostitution.”

A lot of complexity exists as sex trafficking cases happen at the intersections of abuse, vulnerability, homelessness and lacking other options as well. Burns noted someone choosing to be a prostitute, but then their dating partner forcing them to work extra shifts is trafficking too.

“We like to talk about these very rare cases where a pretty little innocent blonde white girl is kidnapped from the mall and forced into prostitution by a big scary black man, but that’s really not what happens,” Burns said. “It more often happens in families, happens with romantic partners, and people that you already know. And it happens most often to people who already in the business rather than people being forced into the business.”