Media
Latest News
Washington, DC - Today, Reps. Ro Khanna (CA-17), Barbara Lee (CA-13) and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), introduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, a bill to require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct the first federal study on the health and safety of sex workers.
When Congress passed sweeping legislation aimed at curbing sex trafficking in 2018, one group was largely excluded from the debate: sex workers themselves.
No sex workers or sex worker rights groups testified in hearings on the laws, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), one of the few members in Congress to vote against the legislation, told Vox in a recent interview. "It's just that their perspective was defeated, it's that their perspective wasn't even considered," he said.
Kate D'Adamo is witnessing a shift.
On Tuesday, lawmakers put out a new proposal that would require the federal government to study how a pair of laws that targeted online sex trafficking broadly kicked sex workers off the internet last year.
Congress rarely passes major legislation with a bipartisan vote, but last year both parties agreed that sex work should no longer be promoted online. Experts and sex workers themselves warned that punishing sites that host prostitution ads would force the industry into dangerous shadows, but Congress ignored them.
After House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement Monday on a massive annual military spending measure, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna condemned the bipartisan compromise as "a bill of astonishing moral cowardice" that will hand the Pentagon $738 billion in 2020 while doing nothing to end U.S. complicity in Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen.
Washington, DC – Today, in response to the publication of the conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2020 Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued the following statement:
Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) is drafting legislation that would study the effects of FOSTA, the bipartisan "sex trafficking" bill that bans hosting any web content promoting prostitution. Since its passage in April 2018, a host of anecdotal evidence suggests that the law has had negative outcomes for sex workers, law enforcement, and online speech.
When a group of bills known as SESTA/FOSTA was introduced in early 2018, it garnered widespread bipartisan support. The bills were intended to curb online sex trafficking, a goal that was easy for lawmakers to get behind, and one that few wanted to be seen actively opposing. One of the few dissenting votes was from Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California.