Definition and legal scope
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, an associate editor at Reason magazine, told Bob Zadek that “sex trafficking” is “a very muddy concept,” because the public imagines abduction and movement from place to place, while “none of that is required for the law.” Under federal law, she said—and it has been federal law since the year 2000—any prostitution or commercial sex involving force, fraud or coercion is illegal, and any paid sex involving a minor is illegal as well; for minors there need be no force, fraud or coercion at all, so “any juvenile getting paid for sex counts as sex trafficking.” She emphasized that she was not saying these things are not bad, only that under the pretense of a war on sex trafficking the government almost exclusively goes after sex work—adults who consent to do it—and makes “sneaky sort of power grabs” at the federal and state levels without demonstrating how the added power will help Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019).
Cathy Reisenwitz, in a later episode, gave a similar account: sex trafficking “officially is when you coerce someone into sex work and generally speaking, like move them or help them move across countries or across states in order to do sex work that they are not consenting to.” In the United States, she said, the government at the state or federal level in most cases does not differentiate between adult consensual sex work and sex trafficking, so any instance of sex work in the eyes of the law can be considered sex trafficking. Examining news reporting on trafficking arrests and stings, she said that in every case she had examined she found either adult consenting sex workers labeled as trafficking victims, or genuine coercion arising from domestic violence—a partner forcing someone into sex work—and/or shaky immigration status “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Zadek framed the concept as a conflation built for political and law enforcement convenience, comparing it to illegal immigration: people oppose the headline without separating its parts. He argued that the statutes rest on an irrebuttable presumption that a woman cannot consent to offering sex for money, so the activity must have been coerced—a presumption he called a sexist statement that women lack the emotional or intellectual capacity to consent. Reisenwitz did not dispute the framing but located the motive in organizations with evangelical roots and funding whose mission is to raise awareness of sex trafficking and which, she said, want to end all commercial sex in the United States, including online pornography “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
FOSTA-SESTA and its consequences
Zadek described FOSTA—the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”—as sweeping legislation enacted under the guise of protecting women, with a title so misleading that a consumer product seller using such a label would be imprisoned. He noted that SESTA stands for the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act,” and that the legislation transfers liability onto otherwise neutral and immune platforms “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Reisenwitz said the moral panic around trafficking online rested on the idea that every online escort advertisement was really a trafficking case with a pimp writing the ad, and that the legislation made online platforms liable for any sex trafficking that might happen on them. She said the Justice Department itself documented that Backpage, a place where sex workers advertised, proactively alerted the department to instances it thought were trafficking, and that platforms already sent millions of instances of child sexual abuse material to the Justice Department, which took zero action. Because platforms could not investigate every piece of sexual material, they booted all sexual content: people lost private Google Drive files, sex educators’ materials were taken offline, and users were banned. Most importantly, she said, sex workers lost the places where they could advertise and exchange safety information and “bad date lists,” so they could not screen clients or negotiate over the internet and had to do both in person—“far more dangerous than doing it online.” After SESTA-FOSTA passed in 2018, rates of sex workers being murdered and taking their own lives rose significantly, nearly all sex workers saw their incomes and quality of life decline, and by all indications sex trafficking rose while law enforcement had a harder time finding it. She added that law enforcement had told Congress beforehand that the bill would make finding trafficking victims more difficult because platforms’ tips were how investigations began “I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Help” - Cathy Reisenwitz (2022).
Enforcement, prosecution and decriminalization
Reisenwitz said sex work in the United States is generally regulated at the city level—at least full-service in-person sex work—and that while the laws do not vary much, prosecutions vary a lot, because prosecutors have wide discretion over whom to charge and police direct their energy accordingly. She cited San Francisco’s previous prosecutor, who went on record saying he was not prosecuting adult consensual sex work offenses, and said that where police are encouraged to work with sex workers rather than harass and arrest them, that is one of the best ways to find and rescue true trafficking victims, because sex workers often know who is being coerced and who is acting voluntarily The War on Sex (2022).
On models abroad, Reisenwitz named New Zealand as a country that does better, said she thought two others had decriminalized sex work but could not recall them offhand, and said that in every place that has tried decriminalization, rates of violence against sex workers, violence against clients, STIs and human trafficking have gone down, and working environments are less exploitative. She distinguished decriminalization from legalization: sex workers by and large support decriminalization, because legalization is highly regulated as to who gets a license, forces work in brothels of which there are few, and leaves a black market open—so a sex worker who does not want to work for a brothel still faces all the harms of criminalization, and a large black market makes it harder to find and rescue trafficking victims The War on Sex (2022).
On political trends, Reisenwitz said that in 2020, for the first time, a majority of United States voters said they favored decriminalizing sex work; that legislation had been proposed in multiple cities; that Scott Wiener in California proposed decriminalization at the state level; and that she believed Portland had a decriminalization measure and Michigan a proposed statute. She named an organization called Decriminalize Sex Work as actively working on the issue, and said she was hopeful The War on Sex (2022).
Across episodes: the same conflation, three years apart
The topic recurs across the 2019 and 2022 episodes, and the treatment is consistent rather than developing: Nolan Brown in 2019 supplies the statutory definition and the claim that enforcement targets consensual sex work under an anti-trafficking pretext, while Reisenwitz in 2022 supplies the FOSTA-SESTA case study, the enforcement and prosecution picture, and the decriminalization argument. The later episodes add the international comparison and the decriminalization-versus-legalization distinction that the earlier one does not reach; the excerpts show no episode in which a guest defends the trafficking framework or disputes the conflation thesis.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give the text or section of the federal law that defines sex trafficking beyond the year 2000, nor do they identify the Mann Act’s provisions or the case law construing it, despite the episode description mentioning it. They do not state what Backpage was charged with or how its litigation ended, nor what Section 230 says. No source states the name of the San Francisco prosecutor who declined to charge adult consensual sex work, the two additional countries Reisenwitz could not recall, or the outcome of the state and city decriminalization proposals she lists.