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First Congress Took Sex Workers’ Websites. Now It's Coming For Their Bank Accounts.

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U.S.A war on sex continues


A new law that shuttered websites used by voluntary sex workers to screen clients has already forced some to risk their lives by returning to the streets to find business.

But the broad bipartisan alliance that passed that legislation last month isn’t done. Now, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who both voted for the first bill, are pushing a proposal in the Senate that would impose similar restrictions on sex workers’ bank accounts — a move that sex workers say could further endanger their income, safety and lives.

Just like last month’s Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, Warren and Rubio’s End Banking for Human Traffickers Act is intended to crack down on human trafficking. The bill, which passed the House in overwhelming fashion last month, would increase pressure on banks to shut down the accounts of anyone suspected of engaging in trafficking. Besides Warren, five other Senate Democrats are co-sponsoring the bill; a Senate vote is not yet scheduled.

“Human trafficking generates $150 billion a year in illegal profits,” a representative for Warren told HuffPost. “Our bill would connect federal regulators, law enforcement, and the banking industry to help strengthen existing anti-money-laundering efforts that combat traffickers — Congress should pass it.”

The bill doesn’t put the same restrictions on the banking industry that last month’s bill applied to websites. But by increasing the federal government’s focus on sex trafficking ― including by adding the Secretary of the Treasury to an existing task force on the subject ― it could, some sex workers fear, cause already jittery financial institutions to crack down harder on a vulnerable population’s access to financial services.

Given the frequency with which sex trafficking and voluntary, consensual sex work are conflated, sex workers including webcam performers, adult film actors and business owners, strippers and escorts fear these efforts will hit them too.

“What a lot of organizers are worried about is how these broad anti-trafficking initiatives are often applied in a targeted manner that hurts more vulnerable people rather than helps them,” Liara Roux, a sex worker and producer of independent adult media, told HuffPost. “If this bill is passed in a climate where sex work is so stigmatized that no distinction is made between a trafficked individual and someone who is just trying to survive, you’re just as likely to see vulnerable people’s bank accounts closed as actual traffickers caught.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry...77e4b0740c25e5efd1?ec_carp=900509074750669841
 
Actually the bill has been inactive for almost a year, held up when went the Senate.

It also only applies to severe forms of trafficking - as defined in the 2000 Act as:
The term "severe forms of trafficking in persons" means-

(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or

(B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

I disllike Warren with her yelling and white or black approach to everything. But it does not include consenting adult sexwork as far as I can tell. Since we are now in a new Congressional session I think it would have to be reintroduced.

Hopefully Congress has more serioius stuff on its plate like fighthy the silly Trump vanity wall or hopefully impreachment.
 
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