The Migrant Sex Workers Right's Movement
Solidarity with the sex-worker led movements all over the world that engage in an existential struggle to win basic human, and labor rights for one of the most criminalized, stigmatized, and persecuted workers in history.
SESTA/FOSTA legislation enacted in 2018 made sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation by abusive clients, police, the FBI, DHS/ICE, and various corporations and nonprofits attempting to exploit the issue for social capital, financial gain, increased social and surveillance powers, all while congratulating each other with awards and praise for “liberating slaves”. It has led to virtual “book burnings” of their words, protests, safety networks, and existence online. Causing a “moral gentrification” of some sex workers offline, and into the streets. This is a continuation of the violent crackdowns on the sex trade during the 70s and 80s, including NYPD’s Operation Crossroads, broken windows policing, and the “pimp squad” division that forced sex workers into indoor work, and criminalized/policied youth. Similar and not separate from the drug war, it allows capital, the state, and various non profits, to capitalize on the lack of social welfare that they destroyed. Not only does this lead to the gatekeeping of basic needs, but it also allows people invested in these systems, to act as “experts” over communities they seek to help, while ignoring and demonizing them (eg. homeless people, drug users, sex workers etc). This has led to a proliferation of “anti-sex trafficking” businesses, missionary groups, lobby groups, and tax havens in the form of non profit organizations. They rely on fear, ignorance, the appropriation of slavery, the abolitionist movement to end the Atlantic Slave trade, and progressive sounding language to gain legitimacy. They mostly lobby for criminalization laws domestically and internationally, form social enterprises, work empowerment programs, or work therapy programs that exploit the labor of criminalized people and victims of abuse.
As of this writing, sex workers are being targeted by “end demand”/”equality model”/”nordic model” policies, on a local and state level with intentions of becoming federal. One of the more notable ones is the “end demand” model in Atlanta that plans on getting the media, churches, schools, police, and corporations to “shift the language: from ‘prostitution’ to sexually exploited children’, from ‘john’ to ‘buyer/perpetrator’ ”. Other plans are to create ads, banners with messages like “We See You”, to promote a fear of police. And funding research to create a correlation between foster care and trafficking, targeting youth as “potential buyers”, and mandating “buyer schools”. All over the country vice divisions of police are creating partnerships with the few places that offer basic needs, most notably domestic violence shelters. Because these places are one of the few that offer social needs like housing, police are promoting them as the new “human trafficking experts”, because they could hypothetically house one. These nonprofits, and shelters are being trained by police vice divisions (now rebanding themselves as “human trafficking divisions”). This is to continue a greater pattern of human trafficking’s continued evolution, where once it was about kidnapping, crossing borders, and being sold, now human trafficking is being reshaped into a domestic violence kind of scenario. Similarly “youth involvement in the sex trade... [has evolved from] reframing ‘juvenile prostitution’ of the 1970s as ‘commerical sexual exploitation of children’ in the 1990s, and then as ‘domestic minor sex trafficking’ in the 2000s...the very frames that have made these movements so successful in achieving new laws and programs for youth have limited their ability to achieve systematic reforms that could decrease youth vulnerability to involvement in the sex trade.”
Welcome to the new “White Slave Panic”
They work with public schools, local police, federal agents, domestic violence shelters, churches, and others to create marketing campaigns, ads, movies, and propaganda to “shift culture” towards a hatred of the latest criminalized enemy, who is blamed for social problems. This can be seen with MoreThanMe, that used Liberian girls advertised as “child prostitutes” in their “I am Abigail” ad campaign. Katie Meyler the CEO, was homeless during the time and gained wealth, celebrity endorsements, praise, power, and awards from this narrative. Similarly Somaly Mam of The Somaly Mam Foundation (praised by Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Hilliary Clinton, and the UN) was found to have lied about her trafficking story, and coached other girls to lie including the “former child sex slave” Long Pross, famously covered by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times. On October 4th, 2019, Nicholas Kristof and Delta Airlines were honored by the United Nations Association of New York, with Humanitarian of the Year awards for their leadership and work in “ending the heinous crime of human trafficking”. Businesses operating as non profits, like Thistle Farms that employ criminalized labor, thrive from sex trafficking narratives. Tim Ballard, CEO of Operation RailRoad that believes building a wall will save children from sex trafficking. Gary Haugen, CEO of International Justice Mission, one of the biggest international anti-trafficking organizations in the world, “believes that the biggest problem on earth is not too little democracy, or too much poverty, or too few anti-retroviral AIDS medicines, but, rather, an absence of proper law enforcement. Haugen also said “for nearly a decade, the World Bank has been reiterating its finding that crime and violence have emerged in recent years as major obstacles to the realization of development objectives.” One would wonder if the activism of Berta Cáceres was seen as a major obstacle to “development objectives” of the World Bank. Poverty, according to him, has little to do with a lack of resources or money. Both Tim Ballard and Gary Haugen mostly focus on brothel raids, that lead to arrests and deportations of sex workers globally. Wealthy academics like Kevin Bales who study “underground populations” (because they are criminalized and stigmatized) are hailed as slave liberators. They drafted the narrative and numbers used by the UN, and global institutions to crack down on organized crime, human trafficking or slavery. Kevin Bales *guessed* that there are 27 million human trafficking victims, that it is the third largest organized crime enterprise (later increased by governments, corporations, and non profits to be the 2nd or 1st largest), and that human trafficking is “modern day slavery”. This has led to a very popular expression, “there are more people in slavery today than at any time in human history”, downplaying the Atlantic Slave Trade. These guesses and opinions from a white man are now unquestionable fact that international policy and discourse is based on.
We must learn from the past on a local, state, federal and international level. We cannot allow this country to continue these narrative that delegitimize marginalized labor, and pits them against “free white labor”. The narrative historically towards sex workers, Chinese, Mexican, undocumented immigrants, and others has been that they are cheap, unskilled, uneducated, immoral, criminals, and slavelike people eroding Western society, and destroying the lives and wages of “free white workers”. The mere existence of a predisposed ‘slave like’ class is viewed as a threat to everyone in our society, and all other ‘free workers’. These narratives are used to further erode worker’s rights, criminalize, and outright ban ‘slave’ labor often depicted as ‘vulnerable’, racialized, and sexualized labor. This can be seen with the various laws targeting Chinese immigrants, with the creation of our Federal Immigration Service funded by an “immigrant fund” collected from the “head tax” (and creating the doctrine of “public charge”), and the Bureau of Investigations (later called the FBI) first gaining federal power with the “White Slave division” creating a sex worker registry to ensure they weren’t “white slaves”, and helping the immigration bureau deport migrant sex workers. We are not threatened by those exploited more than other workers, we want them to have the same rights that others have and fight for our collective liberation. In the past these narratives helped to pass the Coolies Act, Sodomy laws, the Mann Act, the Page Act, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. All these laws targeted and banned sex workers, African Americans, people of mixed race, interracial marriage, Chinese women, immigrants and anyone deemed too vulnerable to forced labor and slavery to be allowed to exist.
The “human trafficking” definition was created by the UN, a collaboration of nation states agreeing to a treaty aginaist “Transnational Organized Crime”. This was a continuation of “The International Agreement for the suppression of the White Slave Traffic” treaties. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is responsible for implementing the protocols through laws, resources, and “anti-trafficking strategies” including the DHS’s blue campaign.
In our capitalistic system, if you are not seen as a worker, you are not seen as fully human with a free will, a voice, or rights worth upholding. The compounded exploitations of working in a criminalized sector under capitalism leads to deepened poverty, immiseration and trauma, and has brutally victimized many. As socialists we recognize and hold space for these experiences, and we commit ourselves to supporting the work of sex-worker-led movements who are navigating this difficult reality every day. The reasons or motivations of the workers involved in an industry shouldn’t be the center of concern, it should be on the systems that made someone work to survive, and to change the system so that no one has to.
We acknowledge that:
All workers are exploited
Worker’s motivation or reasons for being workers in a certain field should not divide us, and does not exclude them from labor rights or organizing.
Our top concern is the most exploited workers and people, we will not be ignoring or uncritically accepting capital and state definitions of slavery or trafficking, we will be closely monitoring them and what they do to our fellow workers and human beings.
While the mainstream celebrates police raids as liberating slaves, we will be focused on the victims and the workers themselves.
Instead of celebrating massage parlor raids like the Robert Kraft case, we will be focused on the fact that those women were all charged for prostitution, had their money and property taken by the state, were put in jail for weeks and made to cry from interrogation with the threat of deportation.
We will be working to give all exploited/abused workers free housing, basic needs, legal aid, and an end to their continued stolen wages, property, family separations, imprisonment, and deportations.
We refuse to be “white saviors” or to “speak for the voiceless,'' because this is violent erasure. Instead we will build trust, understanding, and care for the most marginalized and persecuted, and give them our power and platform to speak for themselves and lead us. We will listen, learn, fund them, and cosign them.
The anti-full decrim crowd operates on the premise that all people involved in the sex trade are trafficked and are engaging in it because they are forced to. We operate on the premise that whether or not the premise is true or false is irrelevant. All workers regardless of coercion, and exploitation deserve rights
If we do not stand for the exploited, unwilling, coerced, criminalized, forced workers, stolen wage laborer, this worker’s movement would be meaningless.
Instead of following the definitions and criteria of institutions that oppress the people….
We the people, we the workers
We will define what slavery is
We will define what freedom is,
We will define what labor exploitation is,
We will DECIDE when enough is enough,
We will determine the criteria by which it is measured,
The institutions will bend to our will and our collective reality,
Or risk being overthrown or irrelevant
We, the authors of Res 53, would like to offer the following points of clarification as we embark on our internal education work:
The slogan “sex work is not trafficking”, or “there’s a difference between consensual sex work and trafficking” is harmful.
I’ll let Juno Mac and Molly Smith (two sex workers from SWARM) from the book “Revolting Prostitutes” explain:
“When possible, we need to be pointing more clearly to the border as the problem. Otherwise the effect can be to disavow those working in exploitative or abusive conditions - to say, ‘these issues are not our issues; these people are not the concern of our movement.’ It places them outside the remit of ‘sex worker’s rights’. It implicitly accepts carceral ‘raid-and rescue’ approaches, so long as the target is ‘right’....
To assert simply that sex work and trafficking are completely different is to defend ONLY documented sex workers who are not experiencing exploitation but says nothing about those exploited at the intersection of migration and the sex industry.
[it] suggests that the current mode of anti-trafficking policy is broadly correct and merely - on occasion - misfires …. carceral anti-trafficking policy is not misfiring: like the global prison industrial complex, of which it forms a part, it is a system which is working in the way it is supposed to be. As the Migrant Sex Work Project writes, ‘it is an intentional and effective system’ Immigration and Border control are crucial to maintainnig the exploitation of workers and resources of the global south, and to maintaining an exploitable pool of undocumented and insecurely documented workers in the global north, while border policing and the incarceration of migrants funnel huge sums back and forth between corporations and governments….the claim that sex work and trafficking are different operates as a way of refusing to talk about ‘trafficking’, since such conversations are often used to attack us when we organize...sex workers should start welcoming such discussions. They are an opportunity to talk about how border enforcement makes people more vulnerable to exploitation and violence as they seek to migrate - an analysis which should be central to sex worker’s rights activism…
To defend the migrant prostitute is to defend all migrants: she is the archetype of the stigmatized migrant. Borders were invented to guard against her. There is no migrant solidarity without prostitute solidarity and there is no prostitute solidary without migrant solidarity. The two struggles are inextricably bound up with one another.”
“Sex work” covers a wide range of professions, both legal and extralegal, and all workers and victims of abuse are threatened by criminalization
A sex worker is someone of any gender whose labor or livelihood is the exhange of sexual, or erotic entertainment, services, and products directly, or indirectly for money or resources. Sex work is a self designation term and a political term used to destigmize, acknowledge a person’s labor, and view their labor in the sex trade as separate from their personhood. Sex work can occur temporary, on and off, or be a long time career. We acknowledge that the criminalization of FSSW (Full Service Sex Workers) is tied to our patriarchal society’s need, to make ‘feminine labor’ freely accessible, trivial, and unspoken but expected by all feminine presenting people in our society. People’s whose identities are viewed as sexual are also targeted at the peripheral of anti- sex work/anti-trafficking policy. This includes members of the LGBTQ community existing online, talking about their identity or orientation, ASMR creators, sex education content, erotic comic book creators, etc.
Sex work exists within legal markets, extralegal markets, both at the same time or different times, or within gray areas, or undefined. Sex work can be strippers, webcam models, porn performers, selling foot photos, nude modeling, burlesque, dating/marriaging for money, citizenship, or housing, full service sex workers (aka escorts), sex surrogacy, phone sex operators, or sexting for money, selling private snapchat, and all other means of capitalizing on ones sexual energy and labor.
Sex trafficking victim/survivor is a self designation term, it has a narrow defintions in criminal law, and in international policy that most victims of abuse are unable to fit into. These definitions exist in criminal law, therefore a common experience among sex trafficking and sex workers caught within the criminal justice system is that they are treated as criminal defendants. The issue with calling people “sex trafficking victims” when advocating for criminalization or partial criminalization is that it doesn’t reflect reality. Even if they only target “pimps” and “traffickers”, sex workers will still be involved. Most sex workers are involved with management responsibilities eg. taking phone calls, managing their transportation, location, coordinating with friends, family, other workers, or clients, helping other worker’s take photos, videos, or to advertise, create websites, planning threesomes, or BDSM sessions with other sex workers. Management within the full service world is often just called “pimping” or “pimps” or “trafficking” by mainstream society. A lot of these legal terms are loosely implemented, and even though people largely know the system is unfair, they continue to use whatever these institutions put on paper as “the truth”. For instance, many prohibitionists will claim that most women in the sex industry are brown, black, or migrant women. But that would be like claiming that most people who use weed are brown and black men. That information comes from police racially targeting people. This is why romantic partners of sex workers, their families members and children are often targeted becausing they might receive money, gifts, or resources from a sex worker and that could be charged with “trafficking” or “promoting prostitution” beause they might knowingly and indirectly profit from sex work labor. Accepting their money could be defined as “promoting” it. This is why known sex workers are discriminated against from banks, housing, and child custody battles. Even if some sex workers are completely removed from management or other activities necessary to do full service sex work (which is kind of impossible), they would still not be absent from the criminal justice system targeting “pimps”, “traffickers”, or “johns”, because the police would need them to explain why they are involved in a criminal act (guilty by association), or often would require them to help them prosecute the “pimps”, “traffickers”, or “johns”. Most sex workers don’t want to or can’t imprison someone, even if the person did abuse them (keep in mind most violence is done by loved one). Most victims of domestic violence, rape, or child molestation never make it to court, and even less of those that do try to prosecute end up winning a criminal charge against the person. Human trafficking is no different from this. Police or federal agents are often a bigger help to abusers than victims. Migrants who try running away, risk being reported to ICE, youth running away from abusive parents are often found and forced back by police, anyone who helps the youth runaway including older siblings, a parent who doesn’t have custody, or friends can be charged with “kidnapping”, “trafficking” or “harboring”, victims who try to fight back are often left with criminal charges like theft (taking, hiding, or destroying weapons used to threaten a victim), or assault if you try to fight back. Police are inherently violent agents, they aren’t social workers.
The truth is that most sex workers in a criminalized model are not treated like sex trafficking victims under the criminal justice system despite any of their claims to the contrary. Sex workers in the criminal justice system are almost never willing participants, and the coercison and force put upon them is often traumatic and brutal. Most of them moving through this system do not meet the definition of human trafficking victim as defined by law, and it doesn’t reflect how the system treats them. They are criminal defendants, that’s the reality. They are required to pay fines, show up to court (if they miss it, an order of arrest will be made), they must complete certain requirements which may include labor in exchange for their freedom from the criminal justice system. Contrary to popular belief most sex workers are not perfect victims, most people aren’t. Even if sex workers can prove a sufficient affirmative defense against prostitution charges, they are left with various other charges they may have incurred, impacting all areas of their lives including the elimination of their right to vote.
Many proponents of sex work criminalization, or partial criminalization (nordic model) spend most of their time discussing all the factors (mental illness, being a drug user, not being a christian, early child abuse, living in a patriarchial society, being poor, being undocumented, LGBTQ) that would lead a sex worker to be in the sex industry. These conversations tend to become exclusionary, and stigmatizing. They tend to take a determinist philosophy that rejects free will when it comes to sex workers, painting them as brainwashed objects, or slave like, but they don’t apply this to any other worker, or person. They tend to spend so much time delegitimizing sex worker’s lives, families, relationships, voices, decisions, and their humanity (by indirectly or directly claming they don’t have souls, free will, agency etc) because they’re looking at them through a criminal and free market economic framework. In a nutshell, they spend most of their analysis on sex work preparing a defendent’s affirmative defense, despite claims that they don’t view the sex worker, or their job as “bad” or criminal”. They actively endorse targeted state violence to eliminate their existence, reducing them to economic and purely sexual objects in a simple supply and demand equation. We stand in solidary with sex workers to fight the system, instead of using the system to explain their existance and work toward their elimination.
Who are the oppressors of sex workers?
According to @prolepeach a sex worker who describes herself as “ stripper because I like luxury, socialist because luxury is for the people”
“Anti-sex work advocates mistakenly think the most antagonistic dynamic in sex work is between us & our customers.
In reality the most antagonistic dynamic is between
- sex workers & cops
- strippers & managers
- porn performers & piracy/conglomerates [WGCZ Holdings, Hammy Media and MindGeek]
- undocumented SWers & ICE [Borders/DHS/FBI]”
Therefore it is not enough to just decriminalize sex work which will mostly help American sex workers. We must also decriminalize immigration and advocate for open borders. It’s worth remembering that much of our first federal agents, laws, and controls against immigration were to prevent prostitution from mixed raced women, and migrants to prevent race mixing and promote segregation.
Fully decriminalizing sex work means the removal of penalties specific to the sex trade.
The removal of carceral threats is a necessary prerequistite for sex workers to be able to engage in labor organizing, to swing the power imbalance of discriminatory societal/corporate policy, police, and state authority back into the hands of sex workers. This means eliminating loitering, solitation, vagrancy laws, eliminating laws that criminalize sex worker’s bank accounts, their livihood, their homes, their families, their collective organizing, and working spaces, their work online and offline.
The removal of carceral threats does NOT mean that murder, rape, child molestation and all abuse will now be legal in the sex industry. Instead what it means is that being a sex worker, and engaging in associated activity of the sex industry will not be criminalized, and discrimination from banks, housing, and other institutions under the justification that they won’t harbor their “illegal activity” can no longer be used as an excuse. Victims of abuse will not face the possibility or fear of not having their rape, assults, or abuse not being taken seriously, or being persecuted for being in the sex industry and engaging in an illegal activity. The police will not be able to just charge them with prostitution because the criminalization of it will be removed. Since the police, and ICE tend to help abusers, it’s best to eliminate penalities for the sex industry which is often used to threaten victims with the possibility of loss of home, loss of their children, arrest or deportation.
Wouldn’t eliminating “demand” fix everything?
Are we really eliminating “demand”, or are we eliminating people? This is why all parts of the full service sex trade are criminalized, to make their industry so violent, ostracized, and deadly so as to serve as a warning to everyone else.
We want to address people’s demand for housing, healthcare, fairer wages, and other basic needs. Those demands are not met by the criminalization of someone's livelihood.
Often people who use this argument believe that the “free market” controlled by violent police, and a surveillance state with “tips” by the misinformed and paranoid public will fix everything. “The demand” obscures the fact that these policies will target, hurt, and kill REAL HUMAN LIVES. “The demand” is not an abstract concept, it’s human lives. “The demand” is a racialized gendered ‘evil’ that is dehumanized and segregated into prisons. It’s not really “eliminated”, it’s criminalized with arrests, imprisonment, or deportations. But who knows? Some pro criminalization advocates do want the death penalty to “end demand”. Maybe the human bodies we use to symbolize “the demand” will one day be “eliminated” through gunshots, forced sterilization, or lifetime imprisonment. Pimps are coded as black men and boys, while traffickers are often mixed raced families or migrants, brown men and boys.
This idea has already been tried with the war on drugs, alcohol (prohibition which is where all the organized crime, and “traffic/slavery” narrratives came from), war against immigrants, and the sex trade. Ronald Reagan's Immigration Reform and Control Act, made it illegal for employers to hire undocumented immigrants, to end demand for their labor. This didn’t stop exploitation or “liberate slaves”. It actually effectively made them “illegal” and made their existence, and working conditions more precarious, and dangerous.
Currently in most states, all parts of the sex industry are criminalized, with some states or local governments doing a version of partial criminalization called the “end demand” model. Even though the model of criminalizing everything in the full service sex industry has done nothing to decrease “demand”, partial criminalization operates under the same logic.
Full and partial criminalization proponents imagine that sex workers are similar to children, slaves, or sex objects that can be eliminated by a neoliberal concept of “ending demand”. They imagine that the desire for alcohol, drugs, and sex can be eliminated with state violence. They imagine sex workers exist because men want them to, and not because people of all genders go into the sex trade for THEIR PERSONAL “DEMAND” OF A LIVIHOOD. Poverty, economic needs, and wants caused by systemic failures is the demand. Ask anyone in the sex trade if the sole reason they exist and work is because a man magically, *through their desire* manifested them into existance. Most of them will list money, resources, or all the other results of having money (buying shelter, food, paying for school, feeding their families, buying a phone etc) as the reason. That’s the demand. Also not all buyers are cis heterosexual men but pro criminalization advocates imagine that this is true. They seem to ignore or diminish the LGBTQ community that exists in the sex industry. Or that many sex workers are also buyers themselves, they often support their fellow workers by buying their services, and work. Sex worker’s very income is criminalized, and anyone they give their money to from their family, children, or friends can be guilty of profiting from the proceeds of prostitition (aka pimping/trafficking).
Why should we care that things that help sex trafficking victims/survivors/sex slaves will hurt priviledged sex workers?
This comes from the idea that sex workers as a group are a priviledged class by being workers and not…”slaves”. Many sex workers have been homeless, have experienced abuse or stolen wages by police, abusive clients, mangement, or society. Sex workers as a group tend to be of the lower poor or middle working classes. It simply isn’t true that all sex workers have not faced the same coercison, force, and exploitation of other workers or victims/survivors.
SESTA/FOSTA was passed and signed into law by Donald Trump on the idea that online platforms would be punished for any “trafficking” on their website. Everyone understood this meant sexual or erotic content. If these bills really addressed child labor, or slave like exploitative labor, websites like Amazon would be eliminated. Platforms like BackPage, TER’s US advertising boards, escort webpages, forums, sex worker bad/abusive client lists, and many others were eliminated, or censored. Of course many people don’t care that this hurts sex worker’s lives. Instead they imagine that an evil trafficker or pimp kidnapped (most kidnappings happen in custody battles, or by relatives, or friends) a girl and has her shackled in a dungeon, will find out that they can no longer advertise her photos online. Because of this, he'll have to take the chains off, and release the slave because they can no longer profit from them. So the enslaved person will benefit from an online footprint of their existence being eliminated. Unlike priviledged sex workers that will be hurt from being erased from the internet. And soon these slaves will come out of the shadows when the traffickers or pimps return the newly unprofitable commodities. Or when the police and feds track them down without using the internet.
Another bill that has been promoted is “The End Banking for Human Traffickers Act” which would eliminate the bank accounts of traffickers. This will hurt sex workers by eliminating their bank accounts and by extension their livihood. But this is seen as good for sex trafficking victims/modern day slaves. The logic is that traffickers and pimps who control the online presence and bank accounts of sex trafficking victims/slaves, will be unable to profit after their online footprint and bank paper trail is eliminated. It’s an odd idea that driving everyone further underground is actually a good thing and will “save” victims. This idea is very popular, despite how irrational it sounds. Discriminatory policy that leads to housing discrimination, closed bank accounts, online erasure, etc are viewed as good for sex trafficking victims, and bad for sex workers. There is a whole issue of the media painting these issues in the exact same way. This idea is similar to the theory that if we eliminate food, internet access, cut water, electricity, and other resources from the people, eventually the brutal dictatorship will bend to our will and we’re the good guys for leading to increased deaths, and precarious conditions.
Things that hurt sex workers (who can also be victims/survivors of abuse) hurts everyone. Similar to how all workers having their blood and urine collected from employers are hurt, not just the “drug buyers” they’re trying to eliminate.
Does full decriminalization mean that “trafficking”, “pimping”, “buyers”, and “brothel-keeping” will be decriminalized?
Short answer: YES. (demonize us all you want)
Trafficking is usually a conflation of sex workers, and migrants and that is 110% intentional. Child separation policy was justified on the idea that the community, families, and parents that the child migrants were stripped from, might be traffickers. They were “saved” by being put into cages, or given away or sold to adoptive families. They are treated like “traffickers”. Often institutions will ignore migrants, sex workers, and people impacted by state violence, and instead talk to police as the “experts”. The reporting and public awareness around the border crisis is coming out because people are starting to ignore that rule. Unlike the pro full and partial criminalization side, we fully understand that this is intentional. We believe the migrants, we believe sex workers, and we believe and support migrant sex workers. The system is working exactly as designed everytime a sex worker or migrant (regardless of coercion, awareness, or conditions) is treated like a criminal, given charges, caged, killed or deported.
The public imagines that full service sex workers only do one thing (engage in paid sexual activity), and are not involved in any management, facilitating/hosting, transporation, solicitation/ad creation, content creation, co-ops building, banking, marketing tasks, and roles.
For most full service sex workers, engaging in sexual activity is the task that takes the least or even no amount of their time. Most of their time is spent on activities outside of their job. Most of their job is marketing, advertising, writing, screening through inquiries, booking locations, hiring security, or confirming whereabouts with friends in case something happens (“pimping”), figuring out the logistics of their business, safety, and arranging everything perfectly for a smooth transaction. Sex workers employing others to do parts of their jobs like screening, answering email or calls is often labeled “trafficking” or “pimping”, workers creating safey nets, or working together for safety is often called “brothel keeping”. Rape, assault, thift, forced labor, sexual conduct with minors would still be illegal. But we wouldn’t be broadly putting a whole group behind bars. For instance, we wouldn’t criminalize all drug buyers under the idea that they are all rapists, child abusers, and murders. We can just criminalize rape, abuse, and murder. Putting all buyers into prison would mean that we wouldn’t need to prove any abuse happened, because we wouldn’t be criminalizing abuse, we would be criminalizing the act of giving someone money for a product/service.
Isn’t supporting decriminalization supporting the inherent violence of prostitution?
There is nothing inherently or naturally violent about the conditions sex workers find themselves living and working in. This is completely manufactured by state persecution, societal stigma, and dehumanization. People who believe sex wokers will inevitably live dangerous, or deadly lives cannot possibly support them, because they don’t believe a safe life or working conditions are even possible for them.
Is supporting full decriminalization supporting slavery?
Slavery or forced servitude is illegal. In the 13th amendment it states “Neither slavey nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” If you are someone who supports full or partial criminalization of the sex industry you might want to examine your views and how they align with this.
Isn’t decriminalization the same as legalization?
Sex work legalization is similiar to weed legalization, where only those who have the capital to buy or get a loan for a dispensary, the equiment, workers, and meet all the regulations can sell and profit legally. A local drug dealer, or sex worker without the capital or legal status is still criminalized in states where it’s legalized. For example, you need to have the legal right to work in a brothel in Nevada, therefore you cannot be an undocumented immigrant without working rights and work there legally. You have to apply, be picked, and are hired to work within a set amount of time. Most of the sex work in Nevada happens illegally because there’s only about 200 rooms with all the legal brothels in operation combined. This model is simply not sex worker friendly, and is oppressive to men, undocumented immigrants, and LGBTQ people working in the sex industry who must work illegally. Legalization will not eliminate oppressive state and police forces from sex worker’s lives, so supporting decriminalization is critical.
Why should I support sex work organizations?
There is a concerted effort by anti-decriminalization organizations to paint sex workers and their allies as all white men, who want decriminalization so they can exploit all women, maintain patriarchy, or enslave children. Much of this is done by directly or indirectly blaming the existance of sex workers for patriarchy, despite the fact that this entire system that criminalizes sex work is literally patriarchy. Donald Trump is a “buyer” who signed SESTA/FOSTA and talks about stopping sex trafficking all the time by eliminting abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, building a wall, and stripping migrants of rights. Nothing about partial or full criminalization is adversarial to white suprematist patriarchal capitalism which requires a racialized and gendered devalued class. The devaluation and erasure of “feminine labor” is the reason why the income and wealth inequality still exists among race and gender lines.
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC’s) receive federal funding to impersonate doctors, have discriminatory hiring practices, and lie to people seeking medical treatment about contraceptives/birth control, sex, and abortion. In comparison, they is not allowed to cover abortion. Similarly, the federal government funds anti-trafficking organizations that train or aids in global police raids, the systamic rape, abuse, and trauma of women, LGBTQ people, and children by police during their “investigations”, or “prostitition stings”. It funds the imprisonment of sex workers, their families, and loved ones. It funds the deportations of migrant sex workers, their families, and loved ones. But it doesn’t fund sex worker organizations, or sex workers directly. That is why we should do what the government will not do. We should fund them and help them. Here’s a list. We also recommend funding Third Wave Fund, www.redlightreader.org, Red Canary, and pay for sex worker’s activism, work, and content.
-Statement from October 17th, 2019