Portman’s anti-enabling sex trafficking bill continues gaining supporters

A growing number of advocacy groups, state attorneys general and law enforcers support a proposed bill introduced Aug. 1 by U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) that aims to crack down on websites that facilitate sex trafficking.

Specifically, the bipartisan Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017, S. 1693, would amend the Communications Act of 1934 — a.k.a. the Communications Decency Act — to clarify that Section 230 provides no legal protection to websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims, including children, according to text of the bill.

In fact, S. 1693 would stipulate “vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal and civil law relating to sex trafficking” on such websites by both federal and/or state enforcers.

Additionally, websites could be held liable for facilitating sex trafficking under Section 230, which would allow victims to hold them accountable. And depending on when S. 1693 would be enacted, legal protection would apply “regardless of whether the conduct alleged occurred, or is alleged to have occurred, before, on, or after such date of enactment.”

“This bill will allow victims of sex trafficking to get justice, and it will do so in a way that protects Internet companies that are doing the right thing,” Portman and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), one of the bill’s original 24 cosponsors, wrote in an Aug. 23 Time magazine op-ed.

“Notably, we preserve the Communications Decency Act’s ‘Good Samaritan’ provision, which protects actors who proactively block, and screen for, offensive material — thus shielding them from frivolous lawsuits,” wrote the senators, who are also co-chairmen of the Senate Caucus to End Human Trafficking.

There are 50 state attorneys general now backing the bill along with a host of anti-human trafficking advocacy groups and law enforcers across the country, all in agreement that buying and selling merchandise online doesn’t include the sale and purchase of adults and children for sex.

It’s a crusade Portman got involved in after leading a two-year review by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that concluded websites like Backpage.com had knowingly facilitated online sex trafficking without consequence.

The senators said Backpage.com has escaped legal justice in countless lawsuits brought by sex trafficking victims and prosecutors because it’s been shielded by the decency law. Under that 1996 law, courts have ruled that Backpage.com and others weren’t liable for illicit content third-party users posted on their websites, even if the companies facilitated criminal conduct like illegal sex trafficking.

“The irony is the law was originally intended to protect children from indecent material on the Internet,” they wrote. “Twenty-one years later, it is protecting websites that sell children for sex.”

And in the interim, from 2010 to 2015, there’s was an 800 percent increase in suspected child sex trafficking cases reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that it found “directly correlated to the increased use of the internet to sell children for sex.”

“Congress has an opportunity to fix a significant flaw in the justice system,” Portman and Blumenthal concluded in their op-ed. “Vulnerable women and children … deserve the ability to seek justice.”

The bill, which currently has 27 total cosponsors, has been referred to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.