Yes, it’s an unimaginative approach. As a public health practitioner, rulings like this drive me nuts. How the blazes are we supposed to care for the health of the community if people are driven underground? Same deal for drugs — make them legal, provide safe places like Canada, and save a lot of lives. We ran into this problem early in the AIDS epidemic, when we didn’t allow anonymous HIV testing, thereby keeping men leery of having their sexuality revealed and entered into the public record.
An alternate approach, about which I know not much more than that it exists, is to go after the money laundering operations associated with human trafficking. Child sex trafficking is a small component of this “business”, which is essentially dealing in slave. It’s a global operation, and at least to me, very little known. My son told me about it. He’s a fraud analyst/investigator for one of the biggest US banks, and part of his division includes several people who specialize in human trafficking and breaking up the operations by uncovering the money laundering. They don’t go kick down the doors, but they provide the evidence to the people who do.
This approach is not nearly as exciting, though, as shutting down ‘scandalous’ operations like Backpages. White collar crime causes huge amounts of harm to many people, but is treated very lightly. That, however, seems to me the best approach to the human trafficking problem.
