the policymakers and litigator’s roundtable on decriminalizing sex work at cc18 was fucking hilarious. we’re going around the circle, name, pronouns, organization, why we’re here, and it’s all lawyers, social workers, and law students. gets to me. “avia, they/she, i’m a full service sex worker from chicago and i’m here to spy on you”
the entire atmo of the room shifts instantly. a lot of people are viscerally uncomfortable. one person, about three seats down from me, solemnly, wordlessly snaps five times. the facilitator, after a long pause, says “…fair enough”.
we continue introductions. more lawyers. then we get to the person who snapped. “i’m [name], no pronouns. i’m also a full service sex worker from chicago here to spy on you.”
anyway, we swapped numbers
how bad were their opinions?
the lawyers? straight up promoted LEAD and teaming up with anti-trafficking orgs. i actually heard the words “cops are effected by decrim too” come out of a real human’s mouth. it was a fuckn trip.
im not familiar with LEAD but holy shit???
LEAD is “law enforcement assisted diversion”, which is a… “solution”… wherein rather than sending sex workers and drug users to prison, the cops send us to community centers, etc, generally still with the threat of jail time if you’re noncooperative. and like, you’re still getting picked up by cops. it’s still traumatic. they’re still the same people who rape us before and after they arrest us. just swapping out booking with social workers who don’t have our interests at heart nor think we have the autonomy to have our own interests at heart doesn’t help.
the idea, see, is that this is an incremental change on the road to full decrim. but the thing is, it’s completely unnecessary. laws can be non-enforced before they’re repealed. but whatever, cops have quotas, private prisons have quotas, and capitalism is effected by decrim too.
gotten a couple asks about “wait why are anti-trafficking orgs bad”, “why do we want decrim”, etc. adding a bit on here since it already has the shit about LEAD on it.
full decriminalization of sex work is what we’re shooting for—“we” being most sex workers, swer-run organizations, and civilian allies—, where other models are legalization and “end demand” or the nordic model.
legalization is a model wherein sex work (usually indoor sex work, in brothels and the like) is fully legal with the right paperwork, training, etc. theoretically this makes things safer, because you can mandate hiv/sti testing, ensure that only adults are engaging in sex work, etc. but it actually does more harm than good: heightened police interaction, and legalization alongside no cultural shifts in the perception of sex workers, puts us at risk, and the “buy-in” model still criminalizes many survival sex workers, who are disproportionately queer and queer youth.
#enddemand is where, in short, selling sex is decriminalized, but buying sex is criminalized. theoretically this gives sex workers the ability to go to the police for help, because we’re not breaking the law anymore, and also, well… ends demand, which is apparently a good thing. in reality, there will always be demand, and putting pressure on the clients just makes more of them scared. this means it’s harder for sex workers to pay our bills, and it’s also directly correlated to heightened violence by clients. they’re committing a crime now, and we’re not. that means we can fuck them over. that means we become the enemy, and that’s the kind of shit that gets us killed. additionally, as mentioned earlier, when not coupled with cultural shifts in the perception of sex workers, we’re still at risk even if we’re not breaking laws. whorephobia’s a thing.
anti-trafficking orgs are… complicated, but they’re definitely not our friends. according to them, all sex work is bad, sometimes because non-trafficked sex workers obfuscate the needs of the trafficked (because you can’t always tell us apart), sometimes because sex workers apparently straight up lack the autonomy to understand that our jobs are inherently debasing and dehumanizing and whatever other slut shaming, misogynistic bullshit you wanna pull.
anti-trafficking orgs aren’t pushing for decriminalization, as you can imagine, and that hurts… everyone, including the currently-trafficked (which in most cases ends up including literally every single minor in sex work), because the criminalization of sex work makes it impossible for us to safely come forward to report rape, assault, and other crimes committed against us by clients, by traffickers, by strangers, or by the police. because we all lack access to these resources, the issue is compounded.
this is all even more relevant now that FOSTA/SESTA has passed. as usual, anti-trafficking lobbying threatens both non-trafficked SWers and trafficking victims, because even the appearance of competence is too much to ask for.
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Overdressed & Underappreciated 