In honor of Black History Month and with the recent Inauguration, we wanted to particularly recognize the history made by our new Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.
She has made history by being the first woman, the first African American, and the first Asian American Vice President, but she also made history as a United States Senator. Kamala Harris dedicated her career as California’s Attorney General and United States Senator to fighting human trafficking. President Joe Biden joins Harris in a shared drive to elevate human trafficking on the new administration’s agenda.
Harris’s Anti Human Trafficking Work
Kamala Harris leveraged her role as California’s Attorney General to elevate the issue of human trafficking. She led the push to investigate and prosecute the owners of Backpage.com as she and other state attorneys general became increasingly concerned with the trafficking activity that occurred on the website.
In April 2014, California Attorney General Kamala Harris gave the keynote address at the Domestic Human Trafficking Symposium in Los Angeles, and her speech focused on how law enforcement can best address the issue. “When we think about what should be done, our response understandably is we want to protect that child, hug her,” Attorney General Harris said. “But to really do justice, to make justice a reality, it’s not just about hugging the victims. It’s about prosecuting the offender.”
After no action had been taken in response to the letter Kamala Harris and her colleagues signed and sent to four members of Congress, Harris supported one of her deputies, Maggy Krell, in launching an investigation into Backpage.
“When I saw that Backpage was really the hub, I wanted to do something to be able to disrupt this pipeline… so the idea was to see if there was a way to shut that down,” Maggy Krell said in an interview on The Empower Podcast. “The team consisted of different investigators at different times, but we had several different law enforcement officers within our agency and also within other agencies who were helping to put the case together… There were many, many interviews of sex trafficking victims. There were even interviews of buyers who used Backpage. There were more than a dozen, potentially 2 dozen or more, search warrants that they did for different records and documents that were reviewed,” Krell said about what went into the investigation. “It was essential to our team that our investigation be a trauma-informed investigation.”
This investigation yielded plentiful information regarding Backpage’s involvement in the sex trafficking of minors. In 2016, Krell filed charges against the CEO and founders of Backpage with the support of Kamala Harris. Though they did not do it alone, she and her deputy Maggy Krell sparked the match that would lead to the ultimate destruction of Backpage, whose CEO Carl Ferrer pled guilty to charges including facilitating prostitution and money laundering.
Senator Harris and SESTA/FOSTA
Later on, as a United States Senator, Kamala Harris played a key role in crafting legislation to target Backpage. In April 2018, the combined Stop Enabling Child Traffickers Act / Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA), was signed into law.
SESTA/FOSTA made changes to the infamous shield granted by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230). Section 230 holds that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” For years, Section 230 allowed websites like Backpage to thrive as it negated the responsibility of Internet platforms for their user’s content, despite the knowledge of illegal and harmful activity.
SESTA/FOSTA created an exception to Section 230 that allowed website publishers to be held responsible if their third-party users were found to be posting ads selling sex on their platforms. SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law with the goal of reducing human trafficking by addressing Section 230 of the CDA, because it was directly cited in previous failed attempts to hold Backpage responsible for illegal content on its site due to Section 230’s dictum that websites were not liable for their users’ posted content.
SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law on April 11th, 2018, only five days after Backpage was seized by the United States Department of Justice on April 6th, 2018. The prosecution that followed a federal grand jury’s indictment of seven people behind Backpage – on 93 counts including charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering – was successful in taking down one of the most notorious platforms for online sex trafficking in the United States.
Kamala Harris and Trafficking Awareness
While this battle knows no political party, our team at Marinus Analytics is heartened by the arrival of Vice President Kamala Harris who has spotlighted the issue of human trafficking into the national and global political conversation, as both Attorney General of California and a United States Senator. Harris has made leaps and bounds in making history not only for the black community with her election to the role of Vice President of the United States, but also for the anti-human trafficking community as she contributed to the fight against human trafficking through her involvement in the Backpage shutdown. Kamala Harris’s achievements perfectly demonstrate United States Congresswoman Yvette Clarke’s statement to commemorate the observance of Black History Month: “We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.”
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