New York might decriminalize sex work. But will it do so safely and responsibly?Geoffrey MakIn an odd twist, leftwing groups support a libertarian, free-market approach, while some sex trafficking survivors support a more cautious, regulated approach The New York state legislature is debating between two bills that decriminalize sex work. The bills agree on the need to decriminalize sex workers but offer very different approaches for doing so. The Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act seeks to fully legalize the sex trade. The Sex Trade Survivors Justice and Equality Act, which is adapted from the Nordic model, would decriminalize sex workers while keeping in place laws penalizing pimps and clients.In an odd twist, the first bill, which takes a libertarian and free-market approach to sex work, is supported by leftwing groups including the Democratic Socialists of America. Sex trafficking survivor groups, political moderates and prosecutors have mostly supported the more cautious, regulated approach. I believe advocates for both bills want the best for sex workers. But the first approach – a blanket decriminalization of sex work, including of pimps and johns – may make sex workers less safe, not more.No one disputes that sex workers face serious and constant risk of violence, and that the status quo is unsustainable and unjust. Since sex work is illegal in all states except Nevada, sex workers – who are at high risk of violence by clients, pimps and the police – generally have no way to organize for better labor protections, or to report violence without risking incrimination. In other countries, decriminalizing sex workers has made them safer. Studies of Sweden and Northern Ireland found that even partial decriminalization reduced street prostitution, lowering client violence.Decriminalization also aims to break the vicious cycle of police violence, incarceration and deportation. “I have so many issues with the vice squad,” New York state senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored the Stop Violence bill for full decriminalization, told me. She accuses the police of either doing too much or too little.When a Queens vice squad raided a Flushing massage parlor in 2017, a worker fell off a second-floor balcony and died. In 2018, police officers across New York, including members of a vice squad in southern Brooklyn, were arrested for providing protection for a sex trafficking ring. The ring operated across boroughs – including in the district Ramos represents, where mostly Latina sex workers, some of them undocumented immigrants, walk the streets.“People who are most often targeted for police harassment or arrests or for violence – due to or related to sex work – are women, poor people, people of color, immigrants and trans people,” Mark Mishler, the legislative director for New York state senator Julia Salazar, who sponsored the Stop Violence bill, told me.There’s some evidence that arrests of sex workers in New York might already be decreasing on their own. The NYPD cites an overall decline in prostitution-related arrests (including of buyers and pimps as well as workers) in recent years. Arrests went from 1,069 in 2019 down to 193 in 2021. In an emailed statement, an NYPD spokesperson told me, “The NYPD’s enforcement priorities shifted in early 2017, and have continued, leading to fewer arrests over recent years of sex workers for prostitution and a greater share of arrests of those who buy sex and promote sex for sale.”Nevertheless, advocacy for full decriminalization has conjoined itself with vast, increasing leftwing support for police abolition. Leftwing and sex workers’ groups have embraced the abortion rights slogan “My body, my choice,” readapting it to sex workers’ freedom to do whatever they choose with their bodies. Under the slogan “Sex work is work,” the DSA considers full decriminalization as “a central fight for the labor movement and for socialist feminism”.Perhaps. But a misguided legislative intervention can hurt more than help. In 2018, for example, Congress passed Fosta/Sesta, a law that banned online sex ads – inadvertently flushing more sex workers out into the streets, where rushed negotiations put them at even greater risk of client-perpetrated violence.The movement for full decriminalization is anti-discrimination, anti-carceral and anti-police. But what do its arguments have to say about the concrete reality of sex trafficking? The Stop Violence bill might be more ideologically photogenic, but its opponents worry that full decriminalization might provide loopholes – or a carte blanche – for sex trafficking, a prospect that supporters of the Stop Violence bill don’t seem to acknowledge.Alexi Meyers, a former prosecutor and a consultant for the partial decriminalization bill, told me that if the Stop Violence bill repeals a statute criminalizing “promoting prostitution” (which refers to pimps) at the felony level, it would take away “the bread and butter of trafficking cases”.In New York, sex trafficking laws look for material force – like drug use, physical violence, kidnapping by withholding someone’s passport, or the destruction of property – as evidence of sex trafficking. But force is often psychological, with consent manufactured.Cristian Eduardo, a Mexican immigrant and sex trafficking survivor, told me that his traffickers often made him believe that he was choosing the life. This was in 2015, when he lived in an apartment in Queens operated by traffickers who gave him food, housing and vital HIV medication – which they convinced him he couldn’t get elsewhere – in exchange for sex with whichever john they assigned him.“The sex buyers are often very violent and abusive,” Eduardo said about his years in trafficking. “I never knew what was going to happen. The only thing I knew was I was going to be used as an empty vessel.”He says that if had been asked in court if he had consented to his treatment, he probably would have said yes, at the time. “I didn’t know it was exploitation, I thought it was my own fault and my own choice,” he said.Meyers, who worked on trafficking cases at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, added, “We don’t always have victims who are cooperative with prosecutors – whether they are so highly traumatized by what they’ve been through, or whether they are terrified of their trafficker.” For this reason anti-pimping statutes are all the more important; they are a way to get traffickers off the streets without having to prove in court that their victims were definitively coerced.Yet advocates for full decriminalization often seem blithely uninterested in this dilemma. When I asked Mishler, Julia Salazar’s legislative director, about trafficked workers who might be hesitant to testify against their traffickers for fear of violence or homelessness, he said, “That’s not our problem. The law is the law.”I put the same question to Mariah Grant, the research and advocacy director of the Sex Workers Project, which supports full decriminalization. “You aren’t going to arrest your way out of this problem,” she said. “What we need is money that is being wrongfully diverted towards trafficking cases – that, in fact, are not actually trafficking, but people who are adults consenting to work in the sex trades – to be instead moved towards social services.”But this stance – “not actually trafficking” – feels like willed ignorance, ethically lazy or naive in the extreme. Yes, trafficked sex workers need social services, but they also need laws, not ideals, to protect them. You can’t girlboss your way out of trafficking.According to the New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking, there were about 1,000 confirmed victims of sex trafficking in New York between 2007 and 2019, a number that Meyers told me is probably an undercount of the actual victims. If the Stop Violence bill passed, that number could go up. One 2013 study of 150 countries showed that, on average, countries where prostitution is legal reported larger human trafficking inflows. For instance, sex trafficking in Germany declined gradually through 2001, then – after sex work was decriminalized in 2002 – began to increase again.There are persuasive advantages to full decriminalization. Sex workers would be able to unionize. Third-party workers, like those operating phone lines or client screeners, could work without fear of being prosecuted as pimps, creating a safer workplace. An increased demand of buyers, once decriminalized, would give sex workers more bargaining power. A 2007 study in New Zealand has shown that after full decriminalization, almost 65% of sex workers found it easier to refuse clients, and 57% reported improved police attitudes towards sex workers.But even as “sex work is work,” the sex trade can’t be treated like any other service industry, because most service industries aren’t inextricably entangled with violence and organized crime. Any law decriminalizing sex workers needs to address the sex trade as a whole, and prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged. It’s possible to reduce violence against sex workers while also protecting those in trafficking; partial decriminalization would accomplish that.“It’s just so sad that people are like, yes, sex work is empowering, sex work is work,” Eduardo said. “And I’m like, You are not fighting for the vulnerable when you’re not fighting for the ones who are in need. You’re fighting to give more power to those who already have it.”
Geoffrey Mak is a New York-based writer
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