Sex Workers Want More Than Just the Right to Work – Slate

A few weeks ago, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that his office had decided to stop prosecuting prostitution. This was widely reported as a victory for sex workers, and indeed it is a shift, considering how past initiatives that were doing something good for sex workers often just led to further crackdowns. But Melissa Gira Grant, a New Republic staff writer who has covered sex work activism for more than 15 years, saw the new rule a little differently. She says it wont do anything to change aggressive police behavior toward sex workers and that the citys continued prosecution of people who buy sex will only perpetuate harmful stereotypes. On Tuesdays episode of What Next, I spoke with Grant about the states rethinking their stances on sex work and whether the legal system can deliver the security these workers need. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: In 2016, you reported a story about a Brooklyn woman named Sarah, whos a mother and a sex worker. Sarah kept getting arrested even when she wasnt breaking the law, most often under a state law that criminalized loitering with intent to commit prostitution Basically, if police saw you standing around and thought you looked like a sex worker, they could arrest you.

Melissa Gira Grant: The most extraordinary arrest Sarah told me about was one time when she was on a public city bus and the police essentially pulled the bus over to arrest her. In the process, they physically grabbed her, and women officers looked in her underwear and made her feel really humiliated. I mean, the entire process is public humiliation.

What was the reasoning?

The only thing Sarah could come up withand I think this is accurate, from what Ive gauged from hundreds of women Ive talked to whove been in the same situationis that once police make an arrest and regard somebody as what theyll call a known prostitutethats who they always are to the department. When police have to make a certain number of arrests, theyre just going to go back for the people they can most easily arrest. In New York City, theyre not arresting all sex workers all the time, but they are also arresting women who are not currently doing sex work but may have done so at one point. A lot of the time, that is women of color, women in low income communities, trans women, and immigrant women.

You make this interesting comparison in your reporting between arrests like Sarahs and stop and frisk. A lot of times, women like Sarah were being arrested because of where they were and how they looked. Like, the reasoning behind arresting women was because they were wearing tight black leggings or tight jeans and a tight and a tank top showing their cleavage.

It is very clear to me, both from the time that Ive spent reporting in courts and the time that Ive spent talking to advocates, that 90-plus percent of the people arrested for loitering for prostitution in Brooklyn were Black. It is incredibly targeted in the way that stop and frisk was targetedand it is targeting the same communities. We found that NYPD was making about 2,0003,000 prostitution-related arrests a year, mostly concentrated in five communities that were largely low-income and largely Black and brown. So its not that they were making arrests in areas known for prostitution. Its they were making arrests in the same communities where they were already making arrests. And then those communities become known for prostitution, because thats where the arrests continue to happen.

The sex workers rights movement has made some pretty significant strides. The loitering law was repealed in February of this year, and other cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia are starting to loosen prosecution of sex work as well.

Part of it is that the culture has shifted quite a bitnot necessarily the culture around sex work, but the culture around policing. I think you can draw a line in the sand in 2014 with the murder of Mike Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement, with the questioning of what it means to look to police for public safety, with more people questioning the role of police in our lives. When you come to sex work with that perspective, youre asking not about the behavior of sex workers, but about the behavior of police. Its a very different framework. When you look at what police do to sex workers, when you look at the harassment, if not violence, and the ways these arrests upend peoples lives and expose them to harm, I dont think it can be justified. So now you have a much bigger constituency of people. Its not just sex workers pushing for thisits going to be groups pushing for all different kinds of reforms to policing, including people who are pushing for abolition. And you have groups that may never have done anything around sex workers rights but are going to be part of this broader effort because they see the damage that policing does in their communities.

And, as long as the NYPD is allowed to make arrests of people who buy sex, the impact of the DAs new decision is not that great. If anything, the rhetoric of treating sex workers as victims who should not be arrested and treating their customers as, essentially, sex offenders whom we have to go after with the full force of the lawthat itself is a very damaging message to send this message, that anybody involved in sex work by necessity is a victim we need to rescue by arresting their source of income without providing any kind of alternative. It keeps the same cycle continuing. Also, I think it creates this social perception that sex workers cant organize, that sex workers dont have community, that sex workers cant influence public policyall of which are things that actually are happening. So its incredibly dangerous, I think, to have those ideas spreading at the same time when sex workers are getting some support from legislators.

There are a few different ways governments have decided to treat sex work around the world. The first, full criminalization, is what we have in the U.S. for the most part. Then theres partial criminalization, where sex work itself isnt illegal but everything around itbeing a customer or providing a location for or transport to sex workis still illegal. Its essentially what New York has just put into place.

Decriminalization, which we see in New Zealand and a few states in Australia, does essentially get criminal laws out of sex workers work lives when it comes to their work. Sex workers still can and do bring cases around sexual harassment, sexual violence, wage theft. Not being regarded as criminals themselves mean that they can actually use the law to protect themselves in the ways they need to. Arresting them or their customers as a protection measure just exposes people to violence.

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Decriminalization is largely preferred by sex workers because, if you look at places that have put in place partial criminalization, you can see problems right awayepecially when it comes to policing.

Norway has this partial criminalization model. Amnesty International did research in four different countries looking at their prostitution laws, and it found some of the most stunning human rights abuses that I have heard around sex work. Police there created something called Operation Homeless, where they were surveilling and documenting sex workers and where they worked and then harassing their landlords, saying, If you dont evict this person, were going to come after you.

When this was exposed, how did the police respond? Was there some kind of turnabout?

Theoretically, Operation Homeless doesnt exist anymore, but the reality is theyve just pivoted. The kinds of anti-prostitution policing weve seen after the apparent end of Operation Homeless was largely targeting African immigrant women. Cops would stop people on the street and harass them to get them to turn over their papers. If they werent documented, they would be threatened with deportation. They are still penalized. They are still regarded as people who have to be corrected or excluded. Theres no way to have police in sex workers lives and not send that message that sex workers are a problem and police are the solution to the proble.

Theres also a way that any migrant sex worker is regarded as being trafficked because of myths and assumptions within the racialized way people talk about sex trafficking and sex work. In the U.S., the reality is that Asian migrant sex workers are some of the most vulnerable and targeted sex workers in the community. Theyre also organizing in their own rights groups, like Red Canary Song, which started in New York after an Asian migrant sex worker named Yang Song was killed in an NYPD raid. Their analysis of thisand I think its really important to share and credit this to themis that they are the ones who are best positioned to intervene when people are being exploited and are vulnerable. They are the ones who could help sex workers who are trafficked, or having their wages stolen or passports confiscated, or being treated in all of these other abusive ways. They have that trust right there in the community.

In reality, the idea of people being trafficked is used as justification to continue to send police in. Its claimed that sex work legalization will lead to increases in human trafficking, which I dont think theres any way of knowing, because there are very few studies that actually sort of provide a baseline as an alternative. I can say from the United States, where prostitution is fully criminalized, human trafficking actually still exists. Sex trafficking exists. And you know, the reason sex trafficking is even regarded as something different from human and labor trafficking is because sex work isnt considered work. So under our laws, its created as a separate category and is treated very differently by police

In other industries where we see traffickingagricultural work or domestic workwhat we dont do is send police into homes on the Upper West Side to ensure the domestic workers arent being trafficked. But we are sending police into immigrant communities and massage businesses. Theyre not going to other kinds of informal labor where people are vulnerable to trafficking because they dont have access to labor rights. Thats what it comes down to when you when you have a group of workers who are undocumented, whose industry isnt protected under labor lawthat creates an environment thats ripe for abuse. I dont think theres any situation in which police can correct that. For the past 20 years, weve been throwing police at the issue of human trafficking in the United States, and theres no evidence that its actually reduced anything.

What would be the answer? Should we give people a voice in their workplaces take labor abuse complaints seriously? Should we give workers some kind of amnesty so that even if theyre undocumented and they report abuses in their workplace, theyre not going to get deported? There are lots of different solutions that have nothing to do with looking to the police, which, particularly in immigrant communities, can be a source of violence.

I wonder if you see the Manhattan district attorneys new ruling as a first step, and if so, in the right or wrong direction.

My initial response to itand I still am very much in this placeis yes, do that and stop the arrests, and its only a step backward if it stops here, if its only a fig leaf for this prosecutors office. I dont think anybody whos involved in campaigns for decriminalization and for ending the police harassment and abuse of sex workers will look at this and say, Well, thats it, we won that one. Their target isnt necessarily the prosecutors office. Their target is the police, and theyre focused on that. Sure, the prosecutor does have a lot of power, but the reality is the NYPD right now has more power over sex workers lives. So if you want to stop sex workers from being criminalized, you have to look at the police.

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Sex Workers Want More Than Just the Right to Work - Slate