The current state of US practice is that most prostitution is called "human trafficking" when it's investigated or prosecuted. Cases investigated under the headline of "trafficking" generally do not involve coercion (in reality) or even allege it (in court). You can find a lot of prostitute-sympathetic coverage making fun of prosecutors for charging women with "trafficking" themselves.
Thus, we can say that the "human trafficking" exemption is really a prostitution exemption, and not what it sounds like.
I dislike the use of the term "trafficking" in this context. We have a perfectly good word for coercing someone to perform labor: slavery. We have a perfectly good phrase for coercing someone to have sex: sexual assault.
I don't think slavery, sex slavery, or sexual assault are good reasons for removing safe harbor from sites that host user generated content. Instead, such sites have been, and could continue to be valuable resources for law enforcement.
Heck, Reason is running a story right now about a group of women suing Harvey Weinstein for "sex trafficking", with the theory apparently being that he availed himself of their services when they trafficked themselves: https://reason.com/2019/04/19/harvey-weinstein-is-not-a-sex-...
> Sexual assault and rape are bad enough on their own, of course. So why the need to force these cases into a framework that doesn't fit?
> Because the sex trafficking framework allows for a lot more prosecutorial possibilities.
> Plus, sex trafficking is such a buzzword that cases employing it are guaranteed to get more attention.
Yeah, but that happens after your door's been kicked down. We see this all the time with city and state $bad_thing "task forces". The many of the cases they bring evaporate in court if they make it that far but the damage is done.
Thing about the US courts: until that happens and precedent is established, there's no "correct". Both are equally plausible based on how past laws have been expanded past some people's ideas of reasonable. It's the whole "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it" concept.
“Smelling marijuana” is easy to push with plausible deniability.
Claiming there is imminent risk of sexual abuse is really difficult to justify on the fly. It may happen, but that’s going to be a tough edge case for cops to abuse.
