Recently, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4225, or the “Stop Advertising and Exploiting Victims Act of 2014″ (“SAVE Act”) by a comfortable bi-partisan majority of 392 to 19. The SAVE Act is aimed at those who “knowingly benefitting financially” from advertisements for sexual acts by those who were coerced into participating. Although it is always difficult to discern the intent of a collective body, the House seemed motivated by concern about the plight of women and children sold into slavery. Representative Ann Wagner (R-MO), the sponsor of the bill, called it a “key link in the chain of shutting down sex slavery in the worst, horrific ways” at a press conference. She added that “People are profiting, making millions of dollars advertising and selling our children.”
But in the drive to do something “for the children,” concerns about the bill’s potential effects on free speech seem to have been largely overlooked. Media lawyer Kevin Goldberg wrote in April that the SAVE Act “creates a situation where you are effectively liable for the bad acts of any of your advertisers, the most obvious and likely situation being the one where you accept advertising from adult services that appear to be purely legal, but then that service is found to be engaged in illegal sex trafficking. In other words, a legitimate seeming escort service places an advertisement, someone coerced into prostitution meets a client through that advertisement, something bad happens and the prosecutors feel they can also bring charges against the paper that carried the advertisement.” Gabriel Rothman of the ACLU similarly observed that the SAVE Act will result in “a ‘notice-and-takedown’ regime where both law enforcement and members of the public will notify platforms that a particular ad looks troubling, and risk-averse advertisers will immediately take it down without any due diligence to make sure it is, in fact, illegal. The most risk-averse will ban certain ads — and other speech — wholesale, just to be safe.”
The SAVE Act also hands down stiff mandatory minimum penalties that have troubled some. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the lone Republican to vote against the bill, told The Daily Dot that “For example, the bill would have imposed a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison for even a part-time secretary of a company that hosts a website for sex trafficking.”
It remains to be seen whether the Senate will take these concerns more seriously.
The House vote on the SAVE Act is not the first occasion in recorded history of moral panic over sex trafficking. As Gail Heriot recounts at The Right Coast, overblown fears about white slavery in the 1910s led to the Mann Act. Much more recently, fears that the Super Bowl was a “magnet for sex trafficking” have been exposed as unfounded. And the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a briefing on “Sex Trafficking as a Gender-Based Violation of Civil Rights” at which I feared the discussion was longer on heat than light. The final Commission report should be published within the next few months; I understand that one commissioner intends to challenge some of the wilder rhetoric about sex trafficking.