1AC

[10/28/14, Nathan Goodman is the Lysander Spooner Research Scholar in Abolitionist Studies at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), “The
Weekly Abolitionist: Sex Work and the Police State”, http://c4ss.org/content/33048]
This weekend
I had the pleasure of attending Students For Liberty’s New Orleans Regional Conference
. It was a delightful event, featuring a talk by C4SS’s own Roderick Long along with many other radical, principled, and insightful speakers. One of the most interesting presentations was by Maggie McNeill, a retired sex worker who blogs at The Honest
Courtesan. Her talk debunked a variety of common myths surrounding sex work, and made a compelling case for decriminalizing prostitution . Moreover, she argued that the criminalization of sex work undermines everyone’s liberties, even for people who never intend to buy or sell sex, and that the “War on Whores” is beginning to take the place of the War on Drugs . Increasing enforcement of anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking laws enables the state to target the same people they’ve targeted under drug prohibition
, McNeill argued. She explains that when young people join gangs, one of their roles is bringing in revenue. Men largely do this by selling drugs, while women often do this by selling sex . Thus, the War on Drugs enables the police to arrest and incarcerate young men of color for selling drugs . In the case of prostitution, however, the men in the gang can be arrested and indicted as “traffickers” or “pimps.” In both cases , McNeill argues, young men of color are criminalized. Another similarity between prostitution prohibition and drug prohibition is the way they empower police to detain, search, and arrest people for utterly absurd reasons . In some cities, police arrest women for prostitution simply for possessing condoms . Yes, the desire to have safe sex is considered evidence of prostitution, especially if you’re a transgender woman of color.
In my home state of Utah, police can arrest someone basically for “acting sexy.” When
Andrew McCullough and I argued before the Utah State Legislature that this law was overly broad and would criminalize perfectly legal speech, especially that of strippers, the bill’s proponents adamantly denied this. However, our view was grounded in direct quotes from the bill’s text, while the bill’s proponents never referenced the bill’s text and instead indulged in paternalistic fear mongering about prostitution. The bill was sponsored by Democrat Jennifer Seelig and argued for by Chris Burbank, a police chief who is praised for his liberal approach by ordinarily skeptical commentators like Radley Balko . Anti-prostitution laws often get support from liberals, progressives, and even some leftists, largely because they are promoted in the name of protecting women and stopping sex trafficking . Just as prison abolitionists invoke the name and the moral appeal of the struggle to abolish chattel slavery, anti-prostitution activists cast their work as a struggle against slavery and name their movement for increased police state power after abolitionism . One anti-prostitution group calls themselves “Demand Abolition,” for example. Conflating prostitution with slavery has a long history . The early 20th Century movement against so-called “white slavery” was used to criminalize people of color and lay the groundwork for the surveillance state, Thaddeus Russell argues. Today, pro-criminalization radical feminists smear opponents of criminalization as misogynists.
Amnesty International has been repeatedly attacked for supporting the decriminalization of prostitution , for example. Feminist support for criminalizing consensual sex acts and enabling racist, misogynistic, and transphobic police repression represents a disturbing theme that
Angela Keaton explored in her talk at the NOLA Conference: the co-option of liberation movements by the state .
Keaton pointed to Gay Inc’s silence on the plight of Chelsea Manning, the push to allow gays and lesbians to serve in the imperialist armed forces, and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s support for war in
Afghanistan (against the wishes of feminists in Afghanistan). Other examples include the push for hate crimes laws and the carceral feminist positions on both domestic violence and prostitution . Presentations at the NOLA Conference by
Maggie McNeill, Thaddeus Russell, and Angela Keaton all touched on this crucial issue in various ways.
I’m glad young libertarians were introduced to serious and radical thinking on issues of social oppression, as well as critiques of the cooption of liberation movements to serve the interests of the state.
There are still more SFL regional conferences happening this fall. Check here to see if there’s one coming up in your area.

[Spring 2012, Crystal Faye Sheets, "STATE INJUSTICE: TRAPPING BLACK WOMEN AS “SEX OFFENDERS”
FOR PROSTITUTION IN “THE BIG EASY”", digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZ
WRpYS8xNjQ5MDE=.pdf]
**Note: “Crimes Against Nature” law is the name of the New Orleans anti-prostitution law
Quantitative data confirms that the vast majority
(78%) of those convicted
of a Crime Against Nature and registered as sex offenders are Black women
(Flaherty, 2010).
The data from this qualitative study identifies that intersectional oppression for Black women in poverty works to track or socially position them into the street sex economy, where policing is more prevalent
.
Rooted in history
, social realities of power and oppression place women of color into more limiting life circumstances, making the sex economy an only option for some
.
Black women in poverty
in New Orleans can more easily become targets of the state due to being socially positioned in poverty and on the streets
. The agency of Black women in this position exists within the debilitating aspects of race/class/gender intersecting oppressions.
The historical backdrop of a former slave society and the continued oppression of Black people
in New Orleans is an underlying explanatory theme as to why and how this injustice has been performed
. The following quote by the Community Worker speaks particularly to the ways oppression is performed and felt in the Southern United States. It raises notions of inequality, where for some groups there is freedom and for others there is constriction.
The state’s use of this charge reinforces historical oppression as it is used against people already situated in intersectional oppression
. I can always feel that as many freedoms as we do have in this country, we
also live in a country that continues to keep their foot on the neck of poor women, poor people period
. But
, it always seems to affect people who are oppressed, already, they’re dealing in some form of oppression
. Being, you know people always talk about the South versus the North but, being here in the South and the fact that this law disproportionately affects women, and women of color. It would just speak to everything we know about, you know, the country in which we live. (Community Worker)
The track to the street sex economy is related to historical oppression and poverty
.
Intersectional social injustices uniquely place Black women , as both a gendered symbol of sex, and as a racially limited or constricted group, into the street sex economy
. The following quote exemplifies the position of people socially or economically tracked into the street sex economy: Sex workers I think are people, predominantly women who are put in a position either socially or economically where they are sort of kind of forced into doing what they have to do in terms of soliciting for Prostitution or Crimes Against Nature. And the difference there is that it’s an economic, I think it’s an economic issue more than anything. I think it’s women in bad positions in life who may feel like they don’t have any other opportunities. (Public Defender) Historical oppressions which constrict people from having economic freedom can make them more desperate for money than people historically privileged. Their motivations to perform in the sex economy may be rooted in feelings of desperation. Without appropriate support from service groups or state services, and due to living in isolation, they can become desperate for a plate of food or a place to stay for the night. Limited from other forms of employment to generate income, the sex economy can become the easiest quick-fix for people in their position. Often times women and girls are propositioned by men for sex throughout their lives, and if they are poorer and on the streets, men driving by and soliciting them can be a common occurrence. Within the context of their socially and economically defined position, the sex economy may even offer some sense of autonomy for women to get the things they need. Desperation is an aspect of poverty at the intersection of race/gender which positions this population into the streets, as discussed in the following quote: I think it’s about the broader issues of race that we have to deal with in this country that is the problem. It’s also the broader issues of economics. It goes back to what I told you before, if you don’t have an honest way to make a living, you’ll find a dishonest way.…I mean I would imagine that if you’re hungry and you’re desperate you’ll do a lot of things that a lot of people have never had to do. So, you said yourself, well, more African Americans are getting convicted of crimes does that mean that they’re inherently more criminal? No, maybe it means that they’re in inherently more desperate a situation. (Prosecutor) Drugs may be an aspect of their lives due to the desperation of their social and economic position. The following quote discusses the interlocking nature of oppression and drugs, and how drugs and further social limitation become a cycle: I think economically, they’re in poor condition. Most of these people are on the street soliciting are going for drugs. So they don’t have a job, they easily could’ve had prior convictions for something. And this would be their last resort to get money, it’s a desperation. You’re not going to have a call girl, a topless call girl, we’re talking about the girl on the street who has nothing else to sell but herself. She’s not working, she’s probably I can’t say but her education level is probably very low. And the need, the habit is very severe. (Judge)
The different categories of sex workers
the Judge discussed in the previous quote exemplify how social position of being in a historically oppressed or privileged group can track people differently and the state may treat these groups differently .
Criminalization can work to confine impoverished Black women to the streets
.
Whereas these individuals are already “dealing in some form of oppression”
as the Community Worker stated, they are being criminalized by their state of residence rather than being assisted through much needed services.
A subtheme which emerged in the data is that the lack of services available for Black and impoverished women may contribute to the social positioning or tracking element involved in this issue
. Subtheme: Lacking Services may contribute to Social tracking The lack of appropriate services makes life more challenging and can contribute in several ways to position intersectionally oppressed people into the street sex economy.
The possibility of creating a new life without drug addiction and without the streets is challenged by the inability or severe difficulty this population has with finding and maintaining housing and employment
. The lack of services available can make drugs a way to cope. Impoverished Black women are in a way positioned to rely on the only thing available and accessible to them: drugs on the streets. Drugs can create a feeling of euphoria for those who otherwise experience emotional pain. It can help one to forget their troubles entirely if only for a moment. When one is isolated and shunned by society, they may find comfort in the way the drugs make them feel. Drugs may ease pain for women who have been harmed by gendered violence, as discussed in the following quote: Majority of the women regardless of race, have been through some type of sexual trauma, as a chi-, multiple trauma, violent traumas as a child, and so if addiction was a way to deal with that, you know, there is no systems in place to move them through that. You know. And so they do the things that come easier, and what is the biggest commodity for any woman? No matter where you’re from. Our bodies is the biggest commodity we could have. It could be soooo, you could barter with it, you know. It’s the one thing we have to sell. We don’t produce, we don’t do labor like men. We end up self-, sacrificing ourselves. (Community Worker) The state has a lack of appropriate programs for people in need of assistance. Those who work for the state only have access to what the state provides to handle its population. The following quote demonstrates that people who work for the state are somewhat confined in this situation as well. There is no choice available except prison because the state is lacking in providing services. This sets the stage for a hopeless situation for many targeted by the state. See, the problem we deal with in this office is, we seek to put drug offenders in prison sometimes people will disagree with that and say it’s not a good idea, there’s no other place to put em, we put em back out on the streets they’re gonna be back in that lifestyle. If we had some sort of rehabilitative program you could put em in, then some people we would be all for that. And so it’s, we hope that by getting them in prison, we know we’re not gonna save everybody, if we get 10, 20% of people, we win. (Prosecutor) Major Theme: Contradictory Regulation of the Sex Economy
This theme contains two elements which occur simultaneously and contribute to the injustice being performed towards people targeted by the
Crime Against Nature charge
.
One element is the hyperactivity of police in poorer Black neighborhoods and the entrapment of Black women located in areas where arrests are performed
. The other element is the leniency by which the police treat the French Quarter, where there are tourists who enjoy a “centralized” sex economy.
The contradictory regulation and performance of the city’s policing benefits those historically privileged and harms those historically oppressed. People who are targeted are treated as expendable to the state due to their social and economic status
. People who are treated with leniency continue their party activities in the French Quarter and report home to talk about all of their experiences, which helps to maintain the city’s reputation as “The Big Easy.” Meanwhile, in poor Black neighborhoods the constant, lurking threat of arrest and further confinement contributes to the

oppression of impoverished Black people.
The following quotes discuss both of these elements of contradictory regulation: Police do something called proactive patrol in this city, which literally means they drive in neighborhoods that they think are known for high criminal activity looking for crime, that’s what they do…Police activity in general tends to center around Central City, Pidgeon Town which is on the other side of Carrollton…95% of the time they’re predominantly Black neighborhoods. People that are arrested in the French Quarter tend to be white people that can afford a lawyer. But since 94% of them come to our office and I’m a good indicator of what the rest of the office is dealing with I would venture to say that there are very few people that are being arrested in the French Quarter. Once in a blue moon I’ll see it, and invariably at the first appearance it’s generally a white person who is able to hire a lawyer. (Public Defender) …They have sweep nights, where they just pick everybody up…I have been caught on those nights, and it’s not professional prostitutes or escorts, you know for the most part it will be maybe two or three escorts, and maybe a couple of real prostitutes from off the streets, and all the rest will be um people, ya know that that use hard-core drugs that just jumped in the car, you know, trying to get money for their drugs. And out of those three different types of sex workers it’ll be a whole um the whole holding cell will be all people with Crimes Against Nature and like a couple traffic tickets a couple drug tickets, ya know it’s just their sweep night. And that’s what makes the numbers so big. But it’s like really entrapment, like the crack-heads, they on crack, and the police out there ya know getting them in the car like ‘c’mon I got twenty dollars c’mon c’mon.’
They gonna jump in the car and they not gonna think about it. And then they don’t even, they don’t really be trying to fight em. They stay in there [jail]. (Sex Worker) The French Quarter offers a “centralized” location for sex tourism and is not generally policed in the same way poor and predominantly Black neighborhoods are. Black women who are confined by poverty into areas such as the Third Ward are “swept up” by police. In some ways “centralized” locations may serve the system of contradictory regulation to allow for the prison system and the tourist economy to both thrive. Black women in poverty are “centralized” in certain areas of the city, and the tourist district is a “centralized” area relatively off-limits for these kinds of arrests. In the French Quarter sex workers and customers have an environment conducive to a sex economy without the lingering threat of criminalization. Tourists do not venture into the Third Ward or other poor Black neighborhoods where criminalization is more prevalent. People dependent on the sex economy who are in areas where their clientele are not wealthier tourists are not benefiting economically in the same way sex workers in the French Quarter can. Thus those most criminalized are the people who are most impoverished and who can be profiled as potential prostitutes. The following quote offers important insights into the state’s use of Prostitution or Crimes Against Nature charges and the unjust regulation of certain people in the sex economy: French Quarters…have the strip clubs down there, the girls walking the streets, all the escorts for the most part stay in the French Quarters because it’s centralized for the guys that’s coming. If you go to jail on sweep night everybody gonna be in jail that came from the Third Ward. Everybody from the Third Ward, might be three girls from out the French Quarter, some girls from out the French Quarter and like, 50, 60 women, all different ages shapes and sizes from the Third Ward. And I have never heard of no track in the Third Ward, you know, I’ve never heard of anybody making money in the Third Ward…if you got somebody out on the street that’s hurtin’, and they want another hit, when you tell them ‘I got twenty dollars’ they gonna jump in the car. That’s why they fuck with them so hard. It’s just a easy win. (Sex Worker) “Centralized” locations make it so that police can profile prostitutes who are deemed criminal and perform automatic arrests. Chef Mentseur Highway is described in the following quote as one such area: Cause I could be..if me and you walk, say me and you walk, I say give it till that, you see where that motel sign is? We could walk right there. We both goin’ get stopped, and we both goin’ to go to jail. If we walk up this strip, all we do is walk! I’m telling you, this the track right here. They goin’ to bring us to jail! If we walk two blocks we going to jail…Any woman. Alright, if you go on any strip, any track, you bound to go to jail! It doesn’t matter if you white, Black. [Me - just by walking?] I’m telling ya. (laugh)..you wanna go up there and see? I mean I’m being so honest with you. (Sex Worker) Subtheme: Contradictory use of “Morality” Participants discussed the contradictions between social definitions of morality and the implementation of this charge towards only one group of people in New Orleans. New Orleans is a tourist-driven economy which relies on the city’s image as the “Big Easy”. “New Orleans’ main import is tourists, and tourists come here to drink and to do drugs and to do girls” (Sex Worker). It caters to party tourism, “…people come down here to party and indulge in their vices” (Public Defender). Thus it continuously promotes a culture where tourists are free to behave in ways considered inappropriate by typical standards in other cities, such as public intoxication, while Black local people are more targeted by the police. The connections between tourism and sex work have a long history in New Orleans with the notorious Storyville Prostitution District and legalized brothels in the French Quarter (see, e.g Long, 2004). Today there are images of sex and sexualized women throughout the French Quarter. Billboards advertise strip clubs as visitors exit the airport.
So while sex is important to the New Orleans economy, there is another notion of morality accorded impoverished Black women on the street. The following quote discusses the “pass” accorded sex workers in the French Quarter: It’s certain times of the year that you get a pass on Bourbon Street, and you could just work. And that’s because, like I was saying earlier, our biggest import is tourists, and that’s what they come down here for. So at certain times they just have to give in, you know what I’m saying, to what people are coming here for. Uh, um, during Mardi Gras, um, the only time that they mess with us really hard out there is for election time, and stuff like that. So if they could give that pass to that area, because that’s what’s expected of that area, then just give that pass for real. (Sex Worker) Police and legislators look the other way when it comes to “moral evils” occurring in the French Quarter. Alternatively,
Black people on the streets are targeted by the state to be punished and confined in prison
. In an effort to “clean up the streets” privileged people who control the state can serve themselves and other privileged people by hiding people who embody the signs of poverty and oppression
.
Individual officers, prosecutors, and Judges are workers within the system but they are required to perform under the direction of laws and police Department policies
. Oh and it serves people in power who don’t want to have to deal with the realities of life that poor Black women have to deal with
, right, we’re gonna push that out you know, we don’t want to see it. Not in my backyard kind of thing, right, I wanna rid this city of all these moral evils, or this country of all these moral evils…And the people that are making these laws are not Black women they’re fucking generally rich white, rich or white legislators! So it’s sort of moralizing them I think, it serves them, right it serves them to feel better about their lives because they don’t have, and it happens less like I don’t have to see it, right. If they get picked up by the cops at least they’re in jail and I don’t have to see them and they’re not hopefully going to be on my street when they’re soliciting, right. (Public Defender) Subtheme: Justifying the Arrest The findings suggest that the Crime Against Nature charge may be another way to criminalize drug use. The women who are arrested on the streets often are struggling with drug addiction. Police can more easily arrest these women on Prostitution and
Crime Against Nature charges because the justification for arrest and conviction consists of police testimony that solicitation occurred
(verbal assent to perform a sex act) and no hard evidence is required
(ie: drugs). The following quotes discuss the gendered nature of drugs on the street and how women are policed as gendered bodies: It’s just the same thing with, um like for boys with um crack cocaine get more time for having crack than you get for having cocaine. So…ya know like crack heads gonna have a little piece of crack on em so they going straight to jail. And boys that’s selling crack they gonna have, you know, they gonna have some crack on em so they going straight to jail. And with us it’s the only, we have what we sell on us 24/7 whether we selling it or not. (Sex Worker) …she was on the street for a long time suffered with addiction for a long time, and she said it best she said one night when I got into it with a cop he was looking at me talking about ‘why are you out here’ she said I just told him ‘why do you think, you and I both know why I’m out here.’ And her words just kinda, they fit for me. I got it when she said it, cause she was right. This is why we’re being targeted, you know what we’re doing out here, you know I’m on crack. You know better than I know why I’m out here at three o’clock in the morning. I have an addiction. (Community Worker) Drug use is considered a legitimate crime by the state.
The perception that these women are drug addicted is used to justify the state’s disproportionate criminalization of this group.
Furthermore, the state polices drug use based on socio-economic class. The following quote demonstrates that women of color who can be more easily profiled as living a life in poverty are perceived as being more likely to be drug addicted; this is used as justification for criminalization
: You know, there’s two different kinds of prostitution, there’s the people that charge like 50 bucks and then there’s the people that charge 500 bucks. Um, the fifty dollar people, those are the people that are living a much more dangerous lifestyle. Um, and I’m not saying that there’s not some high-priced hookers that are abusing drugs, and I’m not saying that there’s not some streetwalker hookers that aren’t. But what I’m saying is that when you’re playing the averages, when you put two of them up there and you say which one has the drug habit, I’m gonna pick the streetwalker every day and I’ll be right probably more than 70% of the time. (Prosecutor) The following quote directly connects arrests for solicitation with the criminalization of drug addicted people: “Girls on the street that are arrested for drugs, they’re normally trying to get $10, $20 for some heroin. And they will solicit to get that crack or that heroin. And when they do solicitation, they get arrested” (Judge). The rationale of arrest is situated in the criminalization of drug users. However, convicting drug addicted women with a Crime Against Nature charge does not result in drug treatment, it results in a serious criminal label which can further limit opportunities after the conviction. Major Theme: Inevitable Convictions
Police authority in arresting and charging people in the sex economy has a direct influence on the offence they are convicted of in court.
Having the felony Crime Against Nature charge and the misdemeanor Prostitution charge
both available to police officers contributes to their authority to determine the degree and severity of a person’s conviction ,
as discussed in the following quotes: So the police officers would come out and they could charge either way, they could say ‘alright you solicited oral and vaginal sex.’ They could charge you for Crime Against Nature and Prostitution. And if they wanted to give you a break, they would just charge you for Prostitution. This shouldn’t be the option for the police officer to make. It should be the same crime, same penalty. (Judge) I caught the Prostitution charge and the Crime Against Nature at the same time, which was crazy. I went to jail for a whole lot of stuff and that was my first time ever going to jail. And um, when I went to jail I was in there with a bunch of different women who had the same charge as me. (Sex Worker)
Not only are police able to exercise power during arrest, their role in court is also accorded power. The law is constructed to easily convict people on prostitution charges because the offense is defined as “solicitation
.”
There is no hard evidence required in presenting the case to the court. Police testimony is the only evidence necessary to convict people
charged with a Crime Against Nature. The following quotes demonstrate that there is no defense available in the law against the testimony of a police officer who states that solicitation or agreement to perform sex in exchange for money occurred
: The only thing the state has to show, and the only thing in reality that they would ever show for Crimes Against Nature or a
Prostitution charge is they put the cop on the stand, the cop would say, literally could say ‘I was driving and this woman asked me, and I pulled over and this woman asked me if I wanted a blow job’ that’s all he has to say.
I can’t pre-pre-..it’s going to be almost impossible for me to present anything that will refute that cop’s testimony. It’s just legally very hard to try. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen, I think I know of one Prostitution charge taken to trial and they didn’t win.
I’ve never actually seen a Crimes
Against Nature taken to trial, because it’s impossible to try. Cause it’s just the cops word against my clients
, that’s it. I mean I could put my client up there and have her say ‘no that’s not what happened’ but who the fuck are they going to believe in reality, right? They’re going to believe the fucking cop. (Public Defender) They, I mean...The police! They not going to believe us! We don’t have no win in the court system. You could tell the judge, I mean you could be telling the honest truth. Judge goin’ to look at you ‘oh well, it’s what he say’. Alright, what about what I say! Alright, cause I’m a [sex worker]. All [sex workers] is not the same! (Sex Worker) In this way the system treats a serious crime, Crime Against Nature, as a strict liability crime much like parking offenses where there is simply no defense.
Due to the intersectional oppression of Black women on the streets, the police can more easily arrest them for solicitation charges , which there is no legal defense for. The position of people charged with a Crime Against
Nature is powerless against the state. Due to their financial and social location, they often have no resources to protect themselves
. “So women feel pressured into pleading, cause they’re not, they know they’re not going to win that trial ”
(Public Defender). With no defense from state prosecution, Crime Against Nature and
Prostitution arrests can be inevitable convictions, resulting in inevitable incarceration
. Subtheme: Doing Time Participants state that people arrested with this charge are held for the maximum amount of time the law allows before ever seeing a Judge and being convicted of the crime . For many, they are predisposed to sitting in jail when they are arrested because of the social isolation and poverty in their lives
. “These women sitting in there, even though it’s a low bond, five hundred dollars which means it’s fifty bucks, sixty bucks to get out, she has nobody, she’s gonna sit in jail the entire time until the state picks up her charge” (Public Defender). “They keep you in there for sixty days. They have up to sixty days to charge you with the crime. And um, on the sixtieth day you’ll go to court, or your fifty-ninth day you’ll go to court” (Sex worker).
Seeking, arresting, and prosecuting people with no resources results in inevitable convictions and jail time
.
The Sheriff’s Department is paid per bed filled in the prison per night. The District Attorney’s office benefits by having high conviction rates
. Thus the state benefits from jailing people who cannot bail out, and from the vulnerable position of those it targets with solicitation charges
. Subtheme: Trapping Sex workers as Sex Offenders and Felons The consequences for people convicted of a Crime
Against Nature contributes to the sustained entrapment of these women. As felons and sex offenders, they become tied to the state and held responsible for fines and fees, in addition to complying with sex offender registration requirements. According to the participants, these responsibilities are often more than people with this charge can afford, and many are forced into a cycle of reimprisonment and become even more confined to the sex economy. Regarding sex offender requirements, the Judge said, “I sympathize with the fact that when you get out of jail, you only have 30 days to register with the police. If you just got out of jail, where you going to get $1,800 from? You’re not, the next thing you know, you’re back in jail for not registering” (Judge). The

requirements for registered sex offenders are built to follow individuals any time they move. These were constructed to protect people in any area a sex offender resides or moves to, however this assumes that the convicted sex offender is a danger to society. For the women and transgender and gay men convicted of a Crime Against Nature this is not the case. These individuals are being criminalized for their position in poverty and for participating in the street sex economy. Having them register as sex offenders has worked to prevent them from being able to start a new life. “And, if you ever move you have to notify the sex offender registry, you also have to make sure you comply with not living close to certain schools, churches, whatever. And…you have to pay periodic fees which are very pricey” (Public Defender). Sex offender laws lengthen the punishment people endure. The following quote demonstrates that women with this charge have been forced to re-register even ten years after being convicted of the charge: You had women who were charged ten years ago and because they changed the law around registering [Adam Walsh Act, 2005] they actually not only had done the ten years they had to do prior, but they had to go back. So if they didn’t register and follow the guidelines completely they made them re-register for another ten years as a new charge. Um, for a penalty for not doing it the way it should have been. (Community Worker) The following quote demonstrates that the challenges associated with this charge force many women to remain in the sex economy, away from their children and excluded from society. Their life becomes limited to two contexts: sex work and prison. They life is just miserable. They miserable. That’s why they running. I mean they leaving they kids time after time, scared to go home. Scared that the police going to come to their house. I’ve talked to a lot of girls…and a lot of girls be like ‘I can’t go home’..Memphis, Texas, Milwaukee. They scared to go home! Cause they going to go to jail! And that’s not right!... I have one friend…she been gone away from us for two or three years, she’s doing ten years… she just had a lot of Crime Against Nature charges with a lot of checks and stuff, and they just put, they just gave her multiple bills, just multiple.
(Sex Worker) The “multiple bills” the Sex Worker mentioned in the previous quote was discussed by the Public Defender as contributing to the entrapment of these women in the criminal justice system: So having a felony subjects you to..if you are picked up on another felony in the state, it doesn’t matter if it’s Crimes Against Nature or any other kind of felony, you are now a doubleoffender, which enhances the possible sentence that you could get! Right, um, instead of just serving the shorter sentence, the maximum sentence for crimes against nature you’d be subject to twice that amount! Okay, as a multiple offender. They choose to bill you, multiple bill you, right, so that’s one thing, cause it’s a felony!...So, here’s how it works, if you have a prior felony conviction that occurred in the last ten years.. and when I say occurred I mean that loosely…let’s say you were convicted in ’95, that’s over ten years ago but you were on parole until, you know 2000, then that counts because the process of being under the control of the state until 2000, right, um, and let’s pretend it’s 2009. So, what happens with that is that if you are…picked up for a second felony the state has the option of charging you for the instant offence that you have just been picked up on, and then subsequent to that, there’s another procedure called the multiple bill here in Louisiana…And, unfortunately since a lot of these women are charged with crimes against nature are repeat offenders, okay, they’re not rehabilitated, they become repeat offenders, they could end up with a prostitution, I’m sorry, a crimes against nature, a second crimes against nature offence, now they’re subject to being multiple billed…Not to mention the fact that if you are multiple billed you are no longer eligible for parole…or good-time…so you have to serve that time flat, which means every single day…I just think that’s cruel and unusual in and of itself but so, what the impact is is that with a crimes against nature, since it’s a felony it subjects you to that process. (Public Defender) Major Theme: Hopelessness All of the participants discussed that this charge puts limitations on people’s ability to get a job . The system of continued social isolation, oppression, and entrapment makes people who experience the charge and people who are not criminalized but who witness the criminalization of these women feel hopeless
.
Coming from a constricted background due to social oppressions, slapped with a felony and branded a sex offender, hopelessness can set in. They are not provided the services they need to overcome poverty and drug addiction. The criminalization they endure makes finding employment more difficult
. The following quote specifies the restrictions from social advancement placed on people convicted of a Crime Against Nature: Um, well, if you are a registered sex offender, like first of all nobody is going to ask you what is on your ID, well how’d you get it. Nobody’s going to ask you that, on the job. It affects where you live, where you work, what kind of job, whether you go to school. Because, if you are a registered sex offender and convicted of a felony, and it is a felony, you can’t get, um, federal assistance to go to school…Like it basically just puts a stop to anything you can and should be able to do. No school, you probably can get food stamps but if you had a drug offense along with that you can’t get that. So, again, like I said in the last question, you can’t access anything that would be, that supposedly would be a place in society to help you. You can’t access any of it…And then, you know…I just feel like it speaks to the racism we have in this country, and the value of women… The fact that we will charge a woman who is hungry and who may exchange something that probably some women could have been demeaning to them, just to get a plate of food or five dollars to eat, that you would put, do something that would cause so much, that you would imprison them for so long and I don’t mean actually a shackle in a cell, because there are many forms of imprisonment.
But that you would do something that will affect the rest of their lives, and how they are able to flourish in this country. I can’t go to school, and I can’t get a decent job, so I’m really trapped in the system. All those systems, be it welfare, the criminal justice system, I’m trapped
. I can’t do better by my children so then the children become trapped. (Community Worker)
With the additional cost of court fees and sex offender registry fees, in conjunction with the struggle of every day survival, they can be even more trapped or confined to the sex economy . “You have to register, then you can’t get a job, you have to do something to keep paying, and then you end up being a prostitute because that’s the only profession you can get”
(Judge).
The hopelessness created by this situation affects workers within the criminal justice system because there are no tools provided by the state to help these women.
The inevitable conviction and jail time can create a feeling of hopelessness and frustration for the attorney appointed to defend them in court: And you know what sucks is that I have to go and meet with them and tell them I’m sorry, you just have to sit here until the state decides to prosecute your case number one, and when they do decide there’s really not much I can do for you because the cop is just gonna get up on the stand and say this is what happened and no amount of your denying it will ever ameliorate that, especially if you have a prior. (Public Defender) The following quote demonstrates how the charge increases harm to a person’s self-esteem. The oppression and marginalization is internalized as the limitations and social exclusion is solidified through increasing criminalization.
And I just kept going back the more charges I got the more charges I got I just stopped trying to even, when I came home from jail I stopped even playing like I was gonna get a real job, I just kept on coming straight back straight back straight back or whatever, and taking breaks and dancing and stuff. So the more charges you rack up the less you even care about the things that you can’t do because you know that you can’t do them. (Sex Worker) Discussion This critical discussion will encapsulate a broader understanding of the nuanced connections between social history, sex work, and contemporary state oppression. First, it will break down how both sex tourism and economic racism each influence the sex economy and organize it in ways which disadvantage Black women more than other groups involved .
Next it will discuss the social condemnation and stigmatization which stem from having gendered laws and gendered morals which are implemented racially and used in ways which disproportionately harm impoverished Black women. This chapter will conclude by discussing how the themes from this study deconstruct elements which work to trap impoverished Black women in the street sex economy of New Orleans. Sex Tourism and the Criminalization of Impoverished Black Women The impacts of racism are often realized economically. One example of how racism impacts economic chances for Black people in New Orleans is the public school system. White children and wealthy Black children typically attend private schools, leaving low-income children in schools which, as one scholar states, are “financed inadequately, maintained poorly, and governed ineptly" (Casserly, 2006, p. 197). The faulty public education system has worked over decades to limit prospects for many lower income people. Over time, this has resulted in observable cyclical poverty, high incarceration rates, and an underground economy. “Race, class, and geographical location make some women automatically suspect of being prostitutes” (Cabezas, 1998, p. 86).
Police profiling of suspected “prostitutes” results in the automatic arrests made during “sweep nights,” which was discussed by the sex workers in this study
. New Orleans is a major tourist destination which projects an image of culture and freedom, ignoring the realities of racial inequality (Gotham, 2007).
Ignoring racism, sexism, and poverty does not make it disappear
. Instead, these social ills show up in homelessness, drug addiction, lateral violence, high incarceration rates, and abusive policing.
Thus social issues create a climate where Black women are positioned by a context which is historically structured to be oppressive for low-income and Black people in particular
.
Adding the gendered aspects of the sex economy create a situation where impoverished Black women may feel they have no choice or that this is their only choice or they could be bombarded with the expectation to perform as sexual laborers for men on the demand side of the sex economy. Of tourism, transnational feminist Amalia Cabezas writes, “From the discursive construction of the exotic ‘tropics’ to the neoliberal colonial arrangements, tourism’s roots lie in a colonial order of conquest, violence, pillage, and exploitation…” (Cabezas, 2009, p. 29). Any knowledgeable observer of the French Quarter can see that the colonial order is replicated, (for instance the vast majority of people dining are white while cooks are nearly all Black). In “The Big Easy,” entertainment is in the form of sexualized nightlife, drunken behavior on Bourbon
Street, and the exploitation of cultural traditions for the visiting white voyeur (ie: Mardi Gras, Jazz, Second line, Cajun food, music, and dance).
The law allows adults to drink in the streets, further adding to the impression to the white tourist that they can do whatever they want. In addition,
New Orleans has a long history of sex-tourism, with a centralized network of brothels which operated in the French Quarter (Long, 2004).
[Tesla Carrasquillo is a J.D. Candidate, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, Understanding Prostitution and the Need for Reform, Touro Law Review, 2014, 30 Touro L. Rev. 697]
B. Criminalizing Prostitution Does Not Work
The benefits that were intended to stem from the criminalization of prostitution have not been achieved, and several harms have resulted from its remaining illegality.
Criminalizing prostitution has " never significantly reduced the incidence of prostitution." n113 In fact, statistics overwhelmingly demonstrate that prostitutes are constant re-offenders
. n114
Arrests and fines do not effectively act as deterrents
; prostitutes are soon selling sex in order to pay off their fines
. n115 Prostitution is costly,

both to citizens and prostitutes. n116 Due to the fear of reporting crime, prostitutes' lives are at risk , and their ability to report crime is stifled
. n117
Criminalization is
also an attack on a woman's sexual autonomy and does nothing to prevent the spread of STDs
. n118 According to Legal Aid attorney Kate Mogulescu, "the NYPD makes an average of 2,700 arrests each year for prostitution and loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution citywide." n119 Many prostitutes face jail time if convicted in the state of New York, especially given the fact that many prostitutes are often repeat offenders. n120 It costs taxpayers $ 167,731 to house an inmate each year in a city jail. n121 That amounts to $
460 a day, per inmate, not including the cost of the New York Police Department's manpower, the cost to the courts, or lawyer's fees. Decriminalizing prostitution would free resources that could be allocated to more pressing criminal matters. Despite the fact that street prostitution accounts for a small minority of all prostitution,
90% of prostitutes arrested are streetwalkers.
Forty-percent of streetwalkers are women of color, yet 55% of prostitutes arrested are minorities
. n123 These results show [*709] that a disproportionate number of poor minority women are harassed and arrested for prostitution
. n124 Furthermore, jail time as a result of a conviction is not the only punishment that affects these women. A conviction can negatively affect a woman's opportunity to obtain housing, education, and most importantly, the ability to get a job. n125 Saddled with the stigma of a criminal record, even prostitutes who truly want to leave that lifestyle are left with few available options, forcing them to continue prostituting. n126 One of the major flaws in criminalizing prostitution
is that it jeopardizes women's lives. Prostitutes face a " risk of premature death that is forty times the national average
." n127 Studies of San Francisco street prostitutes showed that [seventy percent]
70% of the prostitutes in the study were raped an average of thirty-one times by their customers and
[sixty five percent]
65% of the women stated they were beaten by customers an average of 4.3 times
. n128 In a similar study in Oregon, "
78% of the prostitutes were raped, 48% by pimps an average of sixteen times per year, 78% by johns an average of thirty-three times per year."
n129 Perhaps the most frightening statistic is from the Justice Department, which estimates that one-third of the more than 4,000 women killed by serial murderers in 1982 were prostitutes .
n130 This statistic shows that prostitution is dangerous work, but it is made more dangerous because " criminalizing prostitution leaves victims of violence with few avenues for recourse due to fear of police action and general lack of legal protection.
" n131
Because prostitutes are "routine victims of police violence and arrests, sex workers fear reporting the violations of their rights
." n132
This reinforces the power that pimps have over their prostitutes
, thus, making leaving this lifestyle extraordinarily difficult.
n133
When a prostitute needs money for bail, she turns to her
[*710] pimp, leaving her forever in his debt
. n134
Prostitutes are not only afraid to report crimes against themselves, but also to report crimes that are linked to prostitution in general
. n135 For example, if a prostitute were a witness to a crime, she would be reluctant to report it because of the fear that her status as a prostitute would get her arrested
. n136
Crimes associated with prostitution often exist because prostitution is illegal.
n137 This is supported by the fact that areas where prostitution is legal have lower rates of crimes connected with prostitution.
n138 "
The frequency of violence against prostitutes is only exacerbated by oppressive cultural norms and biased media representations of prostitutes .
" n139
Criminalization of prostitution makes violence against prostitutes "either socially invisible or conceptualized as "just life
.' " n140 When prosecution occurs against those who attack prostitutes, prostitutes are rarely seen as being completely innocent.
n141
They are blamed for being assaulted, battered, raped, and are thought to have assumed the risks of their lifestyles
. n142
Prostitutes are
"at best invisible and at worst considered deserving of abuse
." n143
The criminalization of prostitution
, thus, further marginalizes prostitutes from society
. n144
The consequence is a society that justifies the violence that prostitutes endure
. n145
[08/07/13, Laura María Agustín is an anthropologist who studies undocumented migration, informal labor markets, trafficking and the sex industry, Ph. D in sociology,, “The sex worker stigma: How the law perpetuates our hatred
(and fear) of prostitutes”, http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/the_whore_stigma_how_the_law_perpetuates_our_hatred_and_fear_of_prostitute s_partner/]

Rescue Industry, legal regimes and stigma
The person in a helping profession or campaign is said to embody the good in humanity – benevolence, compassion, selflessness. But helpers assume positive identities far removed from those spoiled by stigma, and benefits accrue to them: prestige and influence for all and employment and security for many.
Many believe that helpers always know how to help, even when they have no personal experience of the culture or political economy they intervene in. What I noted was how, despite the large number of people dedicated to saving prostitute s, the situation for women who sell sex never improves
.
The Construction of Benevolent Identities by Helping Women Who Sell Sex was the key that unlocked my understanding of the Rescue Industry. Abolitionists talk continuously about prostitution as violence against women
, set up projects to rescue sex workers and ignore the dysfunctionality of much that is conceived as “rehabilitation.
” Contemporary abolitionism focuses largely on the rescue of women said to be victims of trafficking
, targeting the mobile and migrant women
I mentioned earlier, who are now completely disappeared in a narrative of female victimhood.
Although much of this goes on under a feminist banner, colonialist maternalism describes it better. In classic abolitionism, whore stigma is considered a consequence of patriarchy
, a system in which men subjugate women and divide them into the good, who are marriageable, and the bad, who are promiscuous or sell sex.
If prostitution were abolished, whore stigma would disappear, it is claimed.
But contemporary movements against slut-shaming, victim-blaming and rape culture clearly show how whore stigma is applied to women who do not sell sex at all, so the claim is feeble
.
Instead, abolitionism’s aversion to prostitution probably strengthens the stigma, despite the prostitute’s demotion to the status of victim rather than the transgressor she once was.
Under prohibitionism, those involved in commercial sex are criminalized, which directly reproduces stigma.
In this regime, the woman who sells sex is a deliberate outlaw, which oddly at least grants her some agency. For advocates of the decriminalization of all commercial-sex activities, the disappearance of whore stigma would occur through recognizing and normalizing the selling of sex as labor.
We don’t yet know how long it may take for stigma to die out in places where some forms of sex work are decriminalized and regulated: New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Holland. Given the stigma’s potency in all cultures one would expect it to diminish unevenly and slowly but steadily, as happened and continues to happen with the stigma of homosexuality around the world. Prostitution law and national moralities I explained my skepticism about prostitution law at length in an academic article, Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution. All prostitution laws are conceived as methods to control women who, before ideas of victimhood took hold, were understood to be powerful, dangerous figures associated with rebellion, revolt, carnival, the world upside down, spiritual power and calculated wrongdoing.
Conversations about prostitution law , no matter where they take place, argue about how to manage the women : Is it better to permit them to work out of doors or limit them to closed spaces
?
How many lap-dancing venues should get licenses and where should they be located?
In brothels, how often should women be examined for s exually t ransmitted i nfection s ?
The rhetoric of helping and saving that surrounds laws accedes with state efforts to control and punish; the first stop for women picked up in raids on brothels or rescues of trafficking victims is a police station
.
Prostitution law generalizes from worst-case scenarios, which leads directly to police abuse against the majority of cases, which are not so dire.
In theory, under prohibitionism prostitutes are arrested, fined, jailed
.
Under abolitionism, which permits the selling of sex, a farrago of laws, by-laws and regulations give police a myriad of pretexts for harrying sex workers
.
Regulationism, which wants to assuage social conflict by legalizing some sex-work forms
, constructs non-regulated forms as illega l ( and rarely grants labor rights to workers
). But eccentricities abound everywhere, making a mockery of these theoretical laws. Even Japan’s wide-open, permissive sex industry prohibits “prostitution” defined as coital sex. And in recent years a hybrid law has arisen that makes paying for sex illegal while selling is permitted
. Yes
, it’s illogical
. But the contradiction is not pointless; it is there because the goal of the law is to make prostitution disappear by debilitating the market through absurd ignorance of how sex businesses work.
Discussion of prostitution law occurs in national contexts where rhetoric often harks back to essentialist notions of morality, as though in this highly-travelled, hybrid-culture world it were still possible to talk about authentic national character, or as though “founding father” values must define a country for all time. One intervenor at the recent Canadian Supreme Court hearing on prostitution law argued that decriminalization would defy founding values of “the Canadian community”:
“that women required protection from immoral sexual activity generally and prostitution specifically” and “strong moral disapproval of prostitution itself, with a view to promoting gender equality.” The national focus clashes with anti-trafficking campaigns that not only claim to use international law but sponsor imperialist interventions by western NGOs into other countries, notably in Asia, with the United States assuming a familiar meddling role vis-à-vis Rest-of-World. Gender Equality, State Feminism and intolerance Gender Equality is now routinely accepted as a worthy principle, but the term is so broad and abstract that a host of varying, contradictory and even authoritarian ideas hide behind it. Gender Equality as a social goal derives from a bourgeois feminist tradition of values about what to strive for and how to behave, particularly regarding sex and family. In this tradition, loving committed couples living with their children in nuclear families are society’s ideal citizens, who should also go into debt to buy houses and get university educations, undertake lifetime “careers” and submit to elected governments. Although many of these values coincide with long-standing governmental measures to control women’s sexuality and reproduction, to question them is viewed with hostility. The assumption is that national governmental status quos would be acceptable if women only had equal power within them. Gender Equality began to be measured by the UN in 1995 on the basis of indicators in three areas: reproductive health, empowerment and the labor market. Arguments are endless about all the concepts involved, many seeing them as favouring a western concept of “human development” that is tied to income. (How to define equality is also a vexed question.) Until a couple of years ago, the index was based on maternal mortality ratio and adolescent fertility rate (for health), share of parliamentary seats held by sex plus secondary/higher education attainment (for empowerment) and women’s participation in the work force (for labor). On these indicators, which focus on a narrow range of life experiences, northern European countries score highest, which leads the world to look there for progressive ideas about Gender Equality.
These countries manifest
some degree of
State Feminism
: the existence of government posts with a remit to promote Gender

Equality
. I do not know if it is inevitable, but it is certainly universal that policy promoted from such posts ends up being intolerant of diverse feminisms
.
State Feminists simplify complex issues through pronouncements represented as the final and correct feminist way to understand whatever matter is at hand
. Although those appointed to such posts must demonstrate experience and education, they must also be known to influential social networks.
Unsurprisingly, many appointed to such posts come from generations for whom feminism meant the belief that all women everywhere share an essential identity and worldview
.
Sometimes this manifests as extremist, fundamentalist or authoritarian feminism. Sweden is an example.
Sweden and prostitution The population of only nine and a half million is scattered over a large area, and even the biggest city is small. In Sweden’s history, social inequality (class differences) was early targeted for obliteration; nowadays most people look and act middle-class. The mainstream is very wide, while social margins are narrow, most everyone being employed and/or supported by various government programmes. Although the Swedish utopia of Folkhemmet – the People’s
Home – was never achieved, it survives as a powerful symbol and dream of consensus and peace. Most people believe the Swedish
state is neutral if not actually benevolent, even if they recognize its imperfections. After the demise of most class distinctions, inequality based on gender was targeted (racial/ethnic differences were a minor issue until recent migration increases).
Prostitution became a topic of research and government publications from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, eradicating prostitution came to be seen as a necessary condition for the achievement of male-female equality and feasible in a small homogeneous society. The solution
envisioned was to prohibit the purchase of sex, conceptualized as a male crime, while allowing the sale of sex
(because women, as victims, must not be penalized).
The main vehicle was not to consist of arrests and incarcerations but a simple message: In Sweden we don’t want prostitution
.
If you are involved in buying or selling sex, abandon this harmful behavior and come join us in an equitable society
. Since the idea that prostitution is harmful has infused political life for decades, to refuse to accept such an invitation can appear misguided and perverse. To end prostitution is not seen as a fiat of feminist dictators but, like the goal to end rape, an obvious necessity. To many, prostitution also seems incomprehensibly unnecessary in a state where poverty is so little known.
These are the everyday attitudes that social workers coming into contact with Eva-Maree probably shared
. We do not know the details of the custody battle she had been locked in for several years with her ex-partner. We do not know how competent either was as a parent. She recounted that social workers told her she did not understand she was harming herself by selling sex.
There are no written guidelines decreeing that prostitutes may not have custody of their children, but all parents undergo evaluations, and the whore stigma could not fail to affect their judgements. For the social workers, Eva-Maree’s identity was spoiled; she was discredited as a mother on psycho-social grounds. She had persisted in trying to gain mother’s rights and made headway with the authorities, but her ex-partner was enraged that an escort could gain any rights and did all he could to impede her seeing them. The drawn-out custody process broke down on the day she died, since standard procedures do not allow disputing parents to meet during supervised visits with children.
In a 2010 report evaluating the law criminalizing sex-purchase
, stigma is mentioned in reference to feedback they received from some sex workers:
The people who are exploited in prostitution report that criminalization has reinforced the stigma of selling sex .
They explain that they have chosen to prostitute themselves and feel they are not being involuntarily exposed to anything
.
Although it is not illegal to sell sex they perceive themselves to be hunted by the police
.
They perceive themselves to be disempowered in that their actions are tolerated but their will and choice are not respected.
[08/07/13, Laura María Agustín is an anthropologist who studies undocumented migration, informal labor markets, trafficking and the sex industry, Ph. D in sociology,, “The sex worker stigma: How the law perpetuates our hatred
(and fear) of prostitutes”, http://www.salon.com/2013/08/17/the_whore_stigma_how_the_law_perpetuates_our_hatred_and_fear_of_prostitute s_partner/]
Twenty years ago I first asked two questions that continue to unsettle me today. The first is answerable:
What does a woman who sells sex accomplish that leads to her being treated as fallen, beyond the pale, incapable of speaking for herself, discountable
if she does speak, invisible as a member of society
? The answer is she carries a stigma
. The second question is a corollary:
Why do most public conversations focus on laws and regulations aimed at controlling these stigmatized women rather than recognizing their agency
? To that the answer is not so straightforward. I am moved to make this assessment after the murder of someone I knew, Eva-Maree Kullander
Smith, known as Jasmine.
Killed in Sweden by an enraged ex-partner
, Eva
-Maree was also a victim of the social death that befalls sex workers
under any name you choose to call them. Immediately after the murder, rights activists cursed the Swedish prostitution law that is promoted everywhere as best for women
. My own reaction was a terrible sinking feeling as I realized how the notion of a Rescue Industry, coined during my research into the “saving” of women who sell sex, was more apt than even I had thought
.
Murders of sex workers are appallingly frequent
, including serial
killings. In Vancouver, Robert
Pickton killed as many as 26
between 1996 and 2001 before police cared enough to do anything about it.
Gary
Ridgeway, convicted of killing 49 women
in the 1980s-90s in the state of Washington, said
, “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught .” Infamous statements from police and prosecutors include the Attorney General’s at Peter Sutcliffe’s
1981 trial for the murder of at least 13 women in the north of England: “ Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of this case is

that some were not.” He could say this because of a ubiquitous belief that the stigma attached to women who sell sex is real – that prostitutes really are different from other women.
My focus on the female is deliberate. All who propose prostitution policy are aware that men sell sex, but they are not concerned about men, who simply do not suffer the disgrace and shame that fall on women who do it. Stigma and disqualification Many people have only a vague idea what the word stigma means. It can be a mark on a person’s body – a physical trait, or a scarlet letter. It can result from a condition like leprosy, where the person afflicted could not avoid contagion. About his selection of victims Sutcliffe said he could tell by the way women walked whether or not they were sexually “innocent”.
Stigma can
also result from behaviors seen to involve choice
, like using drugs. For Erving Goffman, individuals’ identities are “spoiled” when stigma is revealed. Society proceeds to discredit the stigmatized – by calling them deviants or abnormal
, for example. Branded with stigma, people may suffer social death
– nonexistence in the eyes of society – if not physical death in gas chambers or serial killings.
In the late 1990s I wondered why a migrant group that often appeared in media reports and was well-known to me personally was absent from scholarly migration literature. I came to understand that migrant women who sell sex were disqualified as subjects of migration
, in some perhaps unconscious process on the part of scholars and journal editors. Was the stigma attached to selling sex so serious that it was better not to mention these migrants at all? Or did people think that the selling of sex must transport anything written about it to another realm, such as feminism? When I submitted an article to a migration journal addressing this disqualification, “The Disappearing of a Migration Category: Women Who Sell Sex,” two and a half years passed before its publication, probably because the editor could locate no peer reviewers willing to deal with my ideas.
Of the many books on prostitution
I read back then, most dismissed the possibility that women who sell sex can be rational, ordinary, pragmatic and autonomous
. The excuses followed a pattern:
The women didn’t understand what they were doing because they were uneducated.
They suffered from false consciousness, the failure to recognize their own oppression
.
They were addicted to drugs that fogged their brains. They had been seduced by pimps. They were manipulated by families. They were psychologically damaged, so their judgements were fault y
. If they were migrants they belonged to unenlightened cultures that gave them no choices
.
They were coerced and/or forced by bad people to travel, so they weren’t real migrants, and their experiences didn’t count
. Because they were brainwashed by their exploiters, nothing they said could be relied on.
This series of disqualifications led to large lacunae in social-scientific literature and mainstream media, showing the power of a stigma that has its very own name – whore stigma
. Given these women’s spoiled identities, others feel called to speak for them.

[December 2005, Moni Nag is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. Born in
India, he received Master's degree in Statistics from the University of Calcutta in 1946 and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University., “Sex Workers in Sonagachi: Pioneers of a Revolution”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.
40, No. 49 (Dec. 3-9, 2005), pp. 5151-5156]
Self-Regulatory Boards According to the DMSC, since the existing legislation regarding prostitution and the relevant law-enforcement agencies have failed miserably to stop or even minimise the forcible entry of women including minors into sex trade , it is necessary to form self-regulatory boards at local levels for the purpose.
The major function of the boards would be to see that the rules and regulation of the sex trade were implemented properly at the local levels . At the same time, the DMSC proposes that a centrally constituted board be formed which would ultimately function on the lines of professional bodies like the Indian Medical
Association or the Indian Bar Association [Jana and Banerjee 1999: 20, Namaskar 1999]. The DMSC took the initiative to set up in 1999 three local self-regulatory boards in Kolkata . The local members in a few red-light areas of the city set up a system by which they could monitor the arrival of new women and counsel them before they started entertaining clients. Best possible attempts were made to ascertain whether new arrivals were below 18 and whether they came voluntarily or against their will.
By the end of 2004, over 250 of them were identified as below 18 years of age. It was found that they were mostly victims of seriously adverse circumstances and ended up in red-light areas through the widespread network of traffickers and brothel keepers. The majority of them, however, refused to return to their parental homes for fear of being tortured by parents/relatives or because of other reasons. So the self-regulatory boards made arrangements with the West Bengal state social welfare department so that they could be sent to the boarding schools sponsored by the department. Publications The Sonagachi Project and the DMSC have to their credit a good amount of published material in the form of newsletters, occasional reports and papers, brochures, booklets, training modules and leaflets. All these publications - some of them priced and some not - are distributed and exhibited at conferences, seminars and workshops organised by the DMSC or those in which their members participate, as well as at the annual Calcutta book fair. These are also available at the
DMSC headquarters at Sonagachi. Contents of many publications, authored by the project staff and DMSC members, relate to activities and achievements of the project and DMSC. Many sex workers have written their own life story in authentic simple language. The most effective and regular publication by the DMSC in both Bengali and English is the newsletter titled 'Namaskar'. One or two issues of it published every year since 1996, contain a variety of articles and reports - some related to the activities of DMSC/SHIP and others relevant to prostitution or aspects of sex workers' life. Four published books reporting the DMSC/SHIP activities and achievements at the end of three, five, seven and 12 years are well written and informative. The reports published on the occasions of conferences contain interesting articles of varied nature authored by project staff and DMSC members as well as by outsiders. Emergence of a Silent Revolution It is ironic that the fatal disease, AIDS, which poses the greatest threat sex workers have ever faced, is also responsible for an unanticipated opportunity for sex workers covered by the Sonagachi project to initiate a process of their empowerment .
Thirteen years of the project since 1992 have also demonstrated that the success of any
STD/HIV/AIDS intervention project among a poor, powerless and stigmatised group like sex workers depends heavily on how far its members actively participate in its activities and what roles they play in the project's structure, decision-making and implementation [Nag 2002]. That a sex workers' association could formally be responsible for carrying out the Sonagachi project was at one time a fond and distant dream of a few leading members of the project and DMSC.
But, today, it is no longer a dream. A significant step towards its realisation was the transfer of the project's administration in April 1999 from the government of India's All-India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health to the Usha Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society which operates under the supervision and guidance of a high-powered body representing relevant government agencies, DMSC and a few NGOs. Another simultaneous step of important symbolic value was the appointment of a member of the local community of sex workers who had been working as a project staff since its beginning, as the project director. By the end of 2004, majority of the 400 or so paid workers of the project were sex workers. Most of them were peer educators but a few held supervisory positions - a significant development in terms of the empowerment of sex workers and also of the sustainability of the project . As expected, the process of shifting the project's approach towards empowering sex workers, widely perceived as "fallen women", has encountered from time to time various obstacles both from the sex trade and, more seriously, from mainstream society. Despite all these obstacles, the
DMSC has already accomplished some significant gains in favour of sex workers' rights to selfdetermination defined by it in a conference of sex workers in West Bengal [DMSC 1996]. When I met Carol Leigh, a

leading American sex worker, in San Francisco in 1999, she told me, " Sonagachi represents a model for all sex workers in the world ". She attended the first national conference of sex workers held in Kolkata in1997. Attempts to rehabilitate sex workers by government and non-government agencies during the past decades have failed miserably mainly because of the widespread social stigma against them and lack of adequate resources necessary for the purpose. So the most fruitful way to deal with problems related to prostitution is to help sex workers empower themselves so that they can lead their lives with human dignity and to ensure that none of their children or anyone else has to practice prostitution against her will. The leaders of the DMSC are aware that sex workers have a long way to go in their fight against the socially dominant ideology of sexual morality . But the struggle for empowerment by the sex workers of Sonagachi can be seen as heralding a silent revolution in Indian as well as the global social arena.
[Smarajit Jana, Chief Advisor, Bharati Dey, Secretary, Richard Steen, Technical Advisor all at the Durbar Mahila
Samanwaya Committee, Kolkata, West Bengal, India AND Sushena Reza-Paul, Assistant Professor at the
Community Health Services, University of Manitoba, Manitoba, Canada, “Combating human trafficking in the sex trade: can sex workers do it better?”]
Background
The dominant anti-trafficking paradigm conflates trafficking and sex work, denying evidence that most sex workers choose their profession and justifying police actions that disrupt communities, drive sex workers underground and increase vulnerability
. Methods
We review an alternative response to combating human trafficking and child prostitution in the sex trade, the self-regulatory board
(SRB) developed by Durbar Mahila
Samanwaya Committee (DMSC, Sonagachi). Results
DMSC
-led interventions to remove minors and unwilling women from sex work account for over 80% of successful ‘rescues’ reported in West Bengal.
From 2009 through 2011,
2195 women and girls were screened by SRBs
: 170 (7.7%) minors and 45 (2.1%) unwilling adult women were assisted and followed up. The remaining 90.2% received counselling, health care and the option to join savings schemes and other community programmes designed to reduce sex worker vulnerability. Between
1992 and 2011 the proportion of minors in sex work in Sonagachi declined from 25 to 2%. Conclusions
With its universal surveillance of sex workers entering the profession, attention to rapid and confidential intervention and case management, and primary prevention of trafficking —including microcredit and educational programmes for children of sex workers— the SRB approach stands as a new model of success in anti-trafficking work
. Key words population-based and preventative services social determinants work environment Previous Section Next Section Background Sex work, migration and human trafficking Sex work exists in some form in all societies.
The conditions surrounding sex work, the social and legal status of the profession and the position of sex workers themselves vary widely across time and place. Despite differences, sex work nearly everywhere entails risk
.1
Understanding those risks is a prerequisite for identifying opportunities to improve conditions of sex workers' lives.2
Many of the risks associated with sex work—from disease transmission to human rights violations and violence—stem from ‘ structural’ conditions of sex work, and the frequently marginalized social status of sex workers.
Migration and mobility exacerbate vulnerability and create opportunities for exploitation and abuse
.3 Migration of labour has increased rapidly over recent decades due to economic liberalization and globalization. Where male workers—including migrant labourers, transporters and uniformed services—move, there is increased demand for paid sexual services. This demand is often readily met, especially where poverty is pervasive and women have few viable economic options.4 Women also migrate for work. Some move to areas where sex work is known to be lucrative, seeking a way out of poverty. Others set out looking for other work, and may end up in sex work, either out of choice or through deception.
Sex work can thus be voluntary or involuntary —while many sex workers choose to enter the profession, others are induced under false pretences or otherwise coerced.5 The problem of human trafficking is related but much broader, involving coercion in the economic exploitation of men, women or children.5,6 Most trafficking of persons involves other sectors and types of labour, including agriculture, construction and domestic work. In these areas, differentiation is generally made between the majority of workers who migrate voluntarily and those who are trafficked. Where the sex trade is concerned, however, distinctions between consensual and coerced work are often blurred.5–7 Evidence suggests that trafficking accounts for a minority of those entering sex work—1 in 5–10 by recent estimates from Andrah Pradesh, India and Thailand8,9 Nevertheless, antitrafficking organizations frequently cast a wide net, conflating all sex work with trafficking.10,11
Seeking to ‘rescue’ trafficking ‘victims’ in sex work areas, ‘raid and rescue’ operations fail to distinguish between voluntary adult workers and those who are trafficked or underage
.
The effects of such actions have been damaging—communities disrupted, social and health services interrupted and sex workers taken into custody, abused or driven underground,

increasing rather than reducing their vulnerability
.4,12–14 Nonetheless, the methods, outcomes and impact of anti-trafficking interventions have received little critical examination in the literature.15 In this paper, we review an alternative response to human trafficking, including child prostitution, where sex workers themselves —organized collectively as Durbar Mahila Samanwaya
Committee (DMSC)— address the related problems of coerced and underaged sex work
.
DMSC and self-regulatory boards
In 1992, the World Health Organization helped local doctors to assess HIV transmission risks in the Sonagachi red light district in Kolkata (Calcutta), West
Bengal and helped design an STI and HIV Intervention Project. The success of the intervention in preventing a major HIV epidemic in West Bengal, through progressive and active involvement of sex workers themselves, is internationally recognized.16,17. The experience and confidence gained in organizing an effective
HIV prevention effort led the sex worker community to take on a range of other health and social problems affecting them, from violence and discrimination to the limited educational opportunities available to their children. In 1995, DMSC was formed as a community-based organization of Sonagachi sex workers, currently representing >65 000 members in 49 branch committees covering an estimated 85% of sex workers in West Bengal. DMSC operates 51 clinics, 33 self-regulatory boards (SRBs) and 32 educational activities including homes and schools for children of sex workers. They also have a number of community development projects, including a cooperative saving scheme, to reduce dependence on sex work and create security for those who choose to practice the profession.
There have been significant changes in STI/HIV risk among sex workers and their clients in DMSC project areas since
1992
.
Reported condom use has increased from <3% in 1992 to 87%
in 2007.
Syphilis prevalence has declined from 25–30% to <1% during the same period.
HIV prevalence remains stable at 5% among Kolkata sex workers, compared with rates surpassing 50% in other major Indian cities.18 In 1997,
DMSC decided to address the problems of underaged and coerced women in sex work settings
. Community members who had themselves been trafficked at some point in time proposed policies and strategies that were discussed among DMSC members.
A multi-stage response based on the concept of SRBs and community vigilance (see
Fig. 1) was developed to regulate entry into sex work, identify abuses and respond comprehensively where coercion or underaged sex work was suspected
.
Each SRB is composed of 10 members, including 6 from the sex worker community, a local ward counsellor and representatives from health, social welfare and labour sectors
. More detail on SRB operations is provided in Supplementary data. Fig. 1 View larger version: In this page In a new window Download as PowerPoint
Slide Fig. 1
Overview of steps of SRB review
(DMSC). (1)
The first step—identification and review—is made possible by promoting a high level of community vigilan ce. Each day, peer educators, who have responsibility for 60 sex workers, visit houses in the red light areas where newcomers are easily identified
. During the day, the peer educator or malkin accompanies the new girl or woman to the clinic or drop-in centre where a space is available for SRB meetings
. At night, identified newcomers are brought to a short-stay home where they can safely spend the night prior to SRB review the next day.
To begin the review, a clinic counsellor explains the process and completes an
SRB intake form that becomes the official record of the process. Within one to several hours, an SRB meeting is convened to review the case and develop a plan of action to help the girl or woman choose from among several options.
The SRB secretary takes detailed notes in a register while other SRB members ask probing questions to determine the girl's circumstances and motivation for entering the profession. If answers are not consistent and credible, additional information or verification is sought. (2)
The goal of the review —decision and management— is to determine whether the girl is a minor, or if an adult, whether she is informed and willing to enter the profession.
Where the age of a girl is in question, an appointment for bone X-ray is made. Once the SRB has decided on a course of action with the girl, steps are taken to facilitate the process and ensure optimal outcomes
. By taking care to ensure privacy and confidentiality, Durbar has recorded better outcomes and fewer outright rejections when returning girls and women to their families and communities. Reintegration involves a number of steps designed to facilitate return of the girl or woman to her family and community. One or more community members will accompany minors or adult women who choose to return home. The community members assess the family and community circumstances and take steps to facilitate the girl's return. When circumstances at home are deemed to be abusive or otherwise not conducive for the woman or girl to return, placement is arranged at a government or government-supported private home
.
For a woman over 18 years of age who convinces the SRB that she is making her own decision to enter the profession willingly, advice and assistance are offered
. For women entering the profession, regular follow-up is ensured through DMSC's network of peer educators
. (3)
SRB members conduct follow-up visits 3 months after return or placement to verify the person's security, to assess conditions and to intervene if needed to improve arrangements
. In conducting regular follow-up visits,
SRBs have developed an informed view of the situations facing women and girls on return or placement, and use that information to conduct advocacy at multiple levels to ameliorate conditions
.
A more detailed description of SRB composition and operation is provided in Supplementary data. SRB operate in 8 sex work communities in Kolkata and 25 other communities in West Bengal. The concept of SRB was developed based on the understanding that sex workers themselves can take charge of their living and working conditions in partnership with other civil society members. As a professional group they aspire to live and work in dignified and violence-free environments, where sex workers exercise autonomy over their lives and manage systems of their own to prevent entry of minors and trafficked women into the sex trade. To this end, DMSC systematically documents each aspect and stage of SRB work. Careful documentation provides a record of all identified entrants into the area and the decisions, management and follow-up of all cases. These records are used to monitor and improve outcomes, from identification and case management to career building, reintegration and follow-up. Previous Section Next Section Methods A review of 15 years of SRB project data was conducted, supplemented by interviews with SRB members, police, anti-trafficking units, other government officials and civil society groups involved in anti-trafficking and women's rights. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 women and girls screened by SRBs. We also reviewed over 5 years of project data of Ashodaya Samithi, a sex worker organization in another state of India, which adapted the SRB approach to different conditions. We use DMSC's working definition of trafficking within the sex trade, which includes (i) minors <18 years of age and (ii) adult women in sex work against their will. These are consistent with Indian laws, including the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA), which address sex work and trafficking, and the recently amended Indian Penal Code (IPC 370, 370A) on violence against women, including sexual assault and trafficking. While a signatory to UN anti-trafficking conventions, India has not revised its legislation to include broad and controversial definitions of human trafficking.6,7 Previous Section Next Section Results Short-term progamme outcomes From 1996 through 2011, the number of SRBs run by DMSC in West Bengal increased from 3 to 33. During that time, a total of 828 cases reviewed by SRBs were found to be either minors, or adult women who were unwillingly brought to sex work. Figure 2 shows the number of minors and unwilling women identified by year. Of those screened between 2001 and 2011, 668 were judged to be minors and 151 were adults unwilling to join the profession. Each of these girls and women received assistance with reintegration—to return home or find alternative placement. Fig. 2 View larger version: In this page In a new window Download as PowerPoint Slide Fig. 2 Number of minors and unwilling adults identified by SRBs, 2001–11. These ‘cases’—the minors and unwilling women who are assisted to leave sex work areas—are clear direct beneficiaries of DMSC's anti-trafficking work. They are only part of the story, however. A much larger number of women willingly enter the red light areas to seek work in the profession. Through daily ‘surveillance’ of the red light areas by peer educators and other community members, DMSC does not haphazardly identify isolated ‘trafficked cases’ but systematically screens all newcomers to red light areas, reporting both the numerators (minors and unwilling adults) and denominators (all newcomers) in the trafficking equation. It thus gives a more complete picture of the extent of trafficking in sex work and of SRB outcomes. From 2009 through 2011, 2195 women and girls were seen by SRBs across West Bengal (Fig. 3).
Of these, 215 (9.8%) were judged to be either minors (170 girls, 7.7%) or unwilling adults (45 women, 2.1%) The remaining 90.2% were women documented to be at least 18 years old who, following counselling and SRB review, convinced the SRB that they were willingly choosing to enter the profession. Since these women receive counselling and are offered advice, health care and the option to join saving schemes and other community programmes, they can easily avoid many of the initial risks and harms faced by voluntary entrants to sex work in other settings. These women can thus be seen as indirect beneficiaries of the anti-trafficking work carried out by SRBs. Fig. 3 View larger version: In this page In a new window Download as PowerPoint Slide Fig. 3
SRB screening, 2009–11: minors, unwilling adults and willing adults. Vulnerability reduction and primary prevention Knowing well that conditions of poverty and lack of economic options for women facilitate the work of trafficking networks, DMSC also runs a number of programmes that can be considered primary prevention of trafficking. By increasing educational and economic options for sex workers and their children, such programmes reduce vulnerability and increase choices. DMSC works on several levels against debt bondage and unfair interest rates. Most importantly, the community promotes savings among its members and offers credit on fair terms. Usha Multipurpose Co-operative Society Ltd. (USHA) is a self-banking initiative of and by the sex workers community in Kolkata, set up in 1995 in response to the difficulties sex workers were facing in trying to open individual savings accounts at local banks. With 16 400 members, USHA now has an annual turnover of over $2.5 million USD and invests capital in community projects.19 To encourage sex workers to save, a convenient collection system was established. A team of community members with training in basic accounting makes daily rounds to collect deposits. Each member carries a savings book in which deposits are recorded by the collector. From the beginning when sex workers in Sonagachi began organizing for their rights and better working conditions, the health and welfare of their children were priorities. DMSC now actively promotes and facilitates school attendance through its educational programmes. USHA cooperative bought land and constructed a boarding school in the country where sex workers can send their children. As a result of these initiatives, school attendance and literacy among the children has increased markedly. Long-term outcomes Long-term outcomes are monitored project wide using survey data to capture population changes in DMSC areas. For the Sonagachi area since 1992, these include a decline of over 90% in the proportion of minors (age <18 years) and an increase in the median age of sex workers from 22 to 28 years (Fig. 4). Fig. 4 View larger version: In this page In a new window Download as PowerPoint Slide Fig. 4 Proportion of minor girls and median age of sex workers in Sonagachi. Replicability DMSC's response to trafficking has been shown to be replicable in diverse settings, from urban red light areas to rural and border districts of West Bengal and rural districts of South India. The experience of Ashodaya Samithi in Mysore and surrounding districts of Karnataka to prevent HIV transmission, violence and trafficking has been described.20,21 The SRB approach has been adapted to Mysore conditions where 89% of sex workers solicit in public places and entertain clients at nearby hotels or lodges, rather than working from brothels. Through community vigilance and peer educators, ∼ 2–300 new entrants to sex work are identified each year. Since 2004, <4% of these newcomers have been found to be either minors or adults coerced into sex work. Ashodaya's SRB collaborates actively with local protection agencies to facilitate reintegration of these women and girls. Previous Section Next Section Discussion
Main findings of this study
Through mobilization of community and extensive coverage,
DMSC has achieved notable successes in preventing human trafficking and child prostitution in sex work areas
. Initial successes in addressing HIV and other STIs increased community participation and confidence to take on other problems that contributed to high vulnerability.16–18
Savings and credit schemes have reduced dependency on sex work, and
SRBs effectively address a range of abuses from trafficking to child prostitution
. Building on strong peer interventions and

involving women who had themselves been trafficked,
SRBs developed effective solutions to tenacious problems confronting anti-trafficking groups —how to identify trafficked women and girls in the first place, then how to intervene, manage cases and conduct follow-up to ensure optimal outcomes. By the late 1990s, DMSC was replicating similar interventions across the state of West Bengal, subsequently extending coverage to an estimated 85% of sex workers. What is already known on this topic
Organizations that work against human trafficking face a daunting array of challenges
. Figure 5 depicts a common cycle of trafficking in the sex trade and identifies key constraints facing interventions (outside circle).
While these multiple constraints—from underlying poverty in source communities through anonymity and insecurity in transit, difficult detection in destination areas and a paucity of reintegration or alternative placement options—have been reported in the literature, few effective solutions have been described
. Fig. 5 View larger version: In this page In a new window Download as PowerPoint Slide Fig. 5 A cycle of trafficking. What this study adds
DMSC's collaborative intervention approach systematically addresses these constraints
, also illustrated in Fig. 5 (inside circle). Despite similar challenges and ongoing collaboration with other agencies,
DMSC's approach to preventing human trafficking in the sex trade differs fundamentally from others in several ways: As a community-led strategy compared with top-down law enforcement approaches . In clearly separating ‘trafficking’ from consensual adult participation in sex work. In its universal
‘surveillance’ and rapid response to identifying newcomers to sex work areas, intended to reduce harms early. In its attention to holistic responses to trafficking, from source and destination communities to reintegration
.
In safeguarding the confidentiality of individuals during all phases of the response. DMSC's
SRB interventions assist almost three times as many women and girls than other anti-trafficking efforts combined
.
During the 3 years from 2007 to 2009, DMSC reported 259 cases of underaged girls and unwilling women removed from sex work settings (Fig. 2). Police reports for West Bengal for the same period include 90 women and girls rescued under the ITPA and related statutes. This difference is not surprising. According to local, municipal and state police and anti-trafficking units, police respond to complaints or information volunteered by informants. Few cases are lodged compared with the estimated size of the problem, however. In contrast, SRBs actively screen every newcomer to the profession in red light areas. Despite differences in approach, DMSC makes every effort to work with law enforcement and social welfare agencies to promote more comprehensive approaches to human trafficking in the sex trade and to strengthen the combined response. Interviews with a range of public and private sector officials with experience in anti-trafficking work put high value on existing collaboration. While some of those interviewed were not in full agreement with all of DMSC's positions—regarding sex work as legitimate work, for example—such differences have not prevented their working together. All recognized the positive contribution of DMSC to overall anti-trafficking efforts, and most were actively collaborating in at least some areas. Strong collaboration was most evident on common platforms of human rights and the rights of children. Case management continues to present challenges. Once a girl or woman has been removed from sex work, DMSC and other anti-trafficking groups face similar obstacles—rejection by families, limited and often inadequate options for reintegration or alternative placement, cross-border repatriation. DMSC thus collaborates actively with police, social welfare and NGOS in managing cases and in advocating for better services.
One important aspect of DMSC's work is its insistence on the need to preserve the girl/woman's confidentiality. This is frequently not the case during rescue missions organized by police and others, where publicity exposes those ‘rescued’, further undermining chances for reintegration into their communities.
DMSC's efforts to reduce vulnerability for particularly marginalized populations can also be considered effective primary prevention of human trafficking
. By increasing awareness and options for women and girls living in extreme poverty, it is reasoned, they will be less susceptible to traffickers.

[2013, Lynice Pinkard, “Revolutionary Suicide: Risking Everything to Transform Society and Live Fully”, Tikkun
2013 Volume 28, Number 4: 31-41, http://tikkun.dukejournals.org/content/28/4/31.full]
I’d like to present an alternative to conventional identity politics, one that requires that we understand the way that capitalism itself has grown out of a very particular kind of identity politics — white supremacy — aimed at securing “special benefits” for one group of people. It is not sufficient to speak only of identities of race, class, and gender. I believe we must also speak of identities in relation to domination.
To what extent does any one of us identify with the forces of domination and participate in relations that reinforce that domination and the exploitation that goes with it
? In what ways and to what extent are we wedded to our own upward mobility, financial security, good reputation, and ability to “win friends and influence people” in positions of power? Or conversely, do we identify
(not wish to identify or pretend to identify but actually identify by putting our lives on the line
) with efforts to reverse patterns of domination, empower people on the margins (even when we are not on the margins ourselves), and seek healthy, sustainable relations
?
When we consider our identities in relation to domination
, we realize the manifold ways in which we have structured our lives and desires in support of the very economic and social system that is dominating us
.
To shake free of this cycle
, we need to embrace a radical break from business as usual.
We need to commit revolutionary suicide. By this I mean not the killing of our bodies but the destruction of our attachments to security, status, wealth, and power.
These attachments prevent us from becoming spiritually and politically alive. They prevent us from changing the violent structure of the society in which we live. Revolutionary suicide means living out our commitments, even when that means risking death
. When Huey Percy Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party, called us to
“revolutionary suicide,” it appears that he was making the same appeal as Jesus of Nazareth, who admonished,
“Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for the sake of [the planet] will save them .” Essentially, both movement founders are saying the same thing.
Salvation is not an individual matter. It entails saving, delivering, rescuing an entire civilization
. This cannot be just another day at the bargain counter.
The salvation of an entire planet requires a total risk of everything
— of you, of me, of unyielding people everywhere, for all time
. This is what revolutionary suicide is.
The cost of revolutionary change is people’s willingness to pay with their own lives
.
This is what Rachel Corrie knew when she, determined to prevent a Palestinian home in Rafah from being demolished , refused to move and was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip . This is what Daniel Ellsberg knew when he made public the Pentagon Papers.
It’s what Oscar Schindler knew when he rescued over 1,100 Jews from Nazi concentration camps, what subversive Hutus knew when they risked their lives to rescue Tutsis in the
Rwandan genocide
.
This call may sound extreme at first, but an unflinching look at the structure of our society reveals why nothing less is enough
.
B efore returning to the question of revolutionary suicide and what it might mean in each of our lives, let’s look at what we’re up against.

[2013, Lynice Pinkard, “Revolutionary Suicide: Risking Everything to Transform Society and Live Fully”, Tikkun
2013 Volume 28, Number 4: 31-41, http://tikkun.dukejournals.org/content/28/4/31.full]
I call this set of spiritual beliefs and practices “ revolutionary suicide .” This is resistance with meaning: creation and action emerging out of the struggle for life . It is not the supplication of protest, the futile hope for a better day
, the search for love and self in the faces of children, the self-indulgent staking out of a political position, or the reckless descent into disorder.
It is self-determination with integrity. It is the assertion of life without apology
.
It is the creation that is disturbing by its nature. It is the willingness to defend what we love — life itself — with our lives.
Mikhail Bakunin, in his Revolutionary Catechism, reminds us that “ the first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that [she] is a doomed
[woman].” Until a revolutionary understands this
, she does not grasp the essential meaning of her life
. Once a revolutionary has reckoned with the fact that she is a dead person, she can get on with the business of asking who she is going to be now and how she will live out her new life
. In effect, this recognition, acceptance, and engagement of death enables us collectively to move away from personal suicide
— the taking of our own lives in reaction to social, political, and economic conditions that leech the meaning from life, devastate relationships, and lead us to despair
.
We move away from apathy, fear, despair, and inertia, and we move away from their resultant practices of addiction, consumption, violence, greed, and self-murder to revolutionary suicide . When we have truly reckoned with the cost of being fully alive
— deciding to love life no matter what — and we are willing to pay that cost , then and only then can we, intrepid and relentless, refuse to be props for the systems of exploitation, refuse to live extravagantly on the backs of poor people everywhere, refuse to be employed by death-dealing institutions , refuse to be “good insurance risks,” refuse to be saddled with credit worthiness that enables us to accumulate debt that fuels an economic death system, and refuse to pay war taxes.
Then we will refuse a living death
,
even if this means being killed by the forces we are opposing because we deem it better to oppose deathly forces than to endure them
. And then, even if we must die, in Alice Walker’s words, we will be “qualified to live among [our] dead.” I do not have a death wish. I am not defeatist or fatalistic
. I must point out, though, that it is way past time for us, all of us who are long on criticism but short on commitment, to ante up and kick in. The Good News is that this work is not new. We are part of a long tradition of revolutionary struggle that is often paid for with one’s own life. This is the essence of revolutionary suicide. Any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force risk death in order to reach for a more liberated life . “Revolutionary suicide” is what Jesus meant when he said,
“No one takes my life; I lay it down.” This is what
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer meant when he decided to resist the Nazis, confront the state church with its hypocrisy, complicity, and complacency, establish an underground resistance movement, and plot to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer made those choices even though he knew they would cost him his life, and even though he believed that any violence against another person is a sin.
He was plotting about revolutionary suicide when he became willing to lose even his own “identity” as a righteous man
. He was talking about revolutionary suicide when he coined the term “costly grace.” This is what
Fannie Lou
Hamer meant when she pushed past fire hoses, attack dogs, kidnappings, beatings, and jail sentences to demand a social revolution at the cost of her own life. This is what
Oscar
Romero meant when he said, “You may take my life, but I will rise again in my people.” This is what
Mamie
Bradley meant when she said , “They killed my son [Emmett Till], but
I don’t have a minute to hate; I will work for justice for the rest of my life
.” This is what Martin Luther King meant when he spoke out boldly against the three evils of American society, “racism, economic exploitation, and militarism,” and then, fully counting the cost, said: I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter to me now. . . . I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live — a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I’m not fearing any man. I just want to do God’s will. . . .
I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I know that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. This is what Malcolm X meant when he said, “If you’re not ready to die for freedom, take the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”
This is what he meant when he returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca and embraced a universal humanism, renouncing separatist theology even though he knew that in the Nation of Islam that made him “a marked man.”
This is the courage, the integrity of revolutionary suicide
.
So What Do We Do? We
stand on the shoulders of those living and dead who committed revolutionary suicide, and the late June Jordan calls us to action, saying, “
Some of us have not died; what will we do, those of us who remain?”
There are no blueprints.
And there is no space of purity from which to act. We must begin imperfectly from within the messiness , in ways that respond to and engage with our concrete and particular contexts and circumstances
. So I cannot offer prescriptions, but I can offer a reflection on how I have been attempting to grapple with some of these issues in my own life. I engage in a spiritual/pedagogical practice and community of accountability and support called Recovery from the Dominant Culture, which is based on a twelve-step model. This practice helps me and other participants recognize our addictions to the dominant culture and dominant ways of being and work on getting free from them. Crucially,
Recovery from the

Dominant Culture emphasizes the recursive relationship between our individual lives and the institutions that structure them
. Hence
, the work is not only about personal transformation but also about the transformation of society
, i.e., healing the culture that makes us sick by contributing our efforts to projects that embody an alternative to the addictive processes of the dominant culture. My Recovery from the Dominant Culture program has enabled me to understand more fully how I, like all of us, have been shaped by the values, beliefs, habits, and desires that make up the culture in which we live. I recognize that
I have paid a high price for the privileges that I enjoy as a citizen of this superpower. That price is my full capacity for aliveness and humanity. I am no longer willing to pay that price. I am staking my life on the promise that more aliveness is possible
. As a result of my recovery work, I have had to accept and come to appreciate the fact that I am an outsider within my own home, in conflict with the institutional church and, indeed, the society at large.
I have had to release many of the benefits and protections that come with “playing by the rules” and remaining non-threatening. This is not something I just willed one morning. Rather this has been an ongoing process connected to a search for meaning, connection, and freedom that insists on an unflinching commitment to integrity, i.e., radical attempts to align my life and my actions with what I value and believe. For example, I left my job as a senior pastor of a mainline church and, along with that, I left a secure salary, health benefits, public recognition and acclaim, and a respected platform from which to speak. My role as a “professional holy person” was in conflict with my soul — indeed, my yearning for an authentic, prophetic, transgressive, and free life. My search for deeper spiritual liberation has led me, over and over, through what Jesus calls finding life, losing life, and finding life again. This has not been easy. Some days it feels like I am breaking. The challenge is to remember that I am being broken into newness and freedom. This recovery process actually brings relief. I do not have to secure sufficient income or property; in fact, the acquisition of property and money restrict my freedom and mobility and disturb my peace of mind. I do not have to secure status, influence, and control over my life or over others’ lives. I do not have to secure my own self-interests through personal power and lack of vulnerability. In reality, recovery reveals that autonomy, though prized by the dominant culture, often forces me to bow down before the idol of my own will, keeping me enslaved to the human tendency to dominate others in order to get my own way.
Healthy, sustainable relationships rooted in a shared commitment to grappling with our identities in relation to domination are the bedrock of principled coalitions and mass solidarity movements.
These coalitions and movements enable us to cultivate an alternative consciousness, and that new consciousness leads to a radically alternative world community: No more us and them. No more save us by abandoning them. No more heal us by injuring them. No more free us by binding them. No more enliven us by killing them . No more! Human life lived in God’s image, lived fully, is found in the crossing over from ourselves to the well-being of others — that is what love is. When we cross over from power to weakness, from strength to vulnerability, from inside to outside, from up to down, we rise above ourselves, we transcend ourselves. In other words, the descent into death of our own self-interest — this revolutionary suicide — is actually a rising, a resurrection . If we are truly to embody revolutionary suicide, we must recognize and embrace the fact that there is more than one way to “lose our lives .” While it is radical to die for the cause of freedom, it is also radical to live for the cause of freedom
— to live in such a way that we die to the destructive lives we have been living; we die to our lives as we know them. Whether one feels this tearing and release
— a crucifixion and resurrection of the self — as the work of demons or of angels depends on one’s openness and commitment to transformation and revolution.
[2011, Paul Williams Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds, Pg. 168]
At the aforementioned 1982 ’Anti-Nuke Rally’, Alice Walker offered a personal dilemma she faced in relation to her involvement with antinuclear activism. Walker began her address by articulating her reluctance to endorse antinuclear politics .
Walker's ’problem’ with supporting nuclear disarmament is the ’hope for revenge' that she believed to be ‘at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement'.
She suggests that the idea of nuclear apocalypse as a just consequence of white racial chauvinism might seduce the peoples of the African diaspora into renouncing opposition to nuclear weapons .
Considering ‘the enormity of the white man’s crimes against humanity’, including contemporary racist discourse arguing 'Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized', Walker wonders whether extinction alone will stop the white man's destructive course : 'Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything .’ Would extinction now not be preferable to a future of exponential white domination ?
‘[ It] would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it’.
The white men's rapacious course has designs on the universe and Walker believes ‘Fatally irradiating ourselves to save others from what Earth has already become' requires our serious thought’ .°'

This opening rhetoric is clearly intended to shock her audience in order to impress upon them how deeply felt
Walker’s indignation at white supremacism is. Her speech concludes with renewed support for the antinuclear cause . Walker seeks to retain the anger at racial injustice that fuelled her entertainment of the desirability of nuclear extinction, allying that emotion to hope for change in the future . As her home, Walker pledges to protect the Earth, and she affirms the desirability of life . Linking nuclear genocide with racial oppression, the Earth will only be spared and humankind saved on the precondition of justice for ‘every living thing'.
"2 Extinction can only be averted if humankind manages to think outside of modernity‘s division of peoples into hierarchies of race.

[March 2010, Maggie O'Neill, School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Durham, "Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR)”
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2010]
I propose that cultural criminological analysis using participatory methods could move us beyond binaries and help us to access a richer understanding of the complexities of sex work
, developing inter-sectional knowledge and analysis that might foster a more radically democratic governance of sex work
. Such knowledge would include recognition claims as well as redistribution claims
± addressing both the materiality of women and men's live s and the need for recognition as full, not partial, subjects
.46 Participatory action research could demonstrate a politics of inclusion and representation by facilitating recognition. For example, in collaborative research,
Pitcher, Campbell, Hubbard, Scoular, and myself addressed the concept of community conferencing
in the Home Office strategy47 and suggested that through participatory and cultural methodologies we might bring together `all stakeholders who can make a difference to problems identified by communities, including communities themselves'48 and that it is vital that we engage in processes of recognition through the inclusion of sex workers in research, debates, and dialogue .
However, in our search for social justice
, do we not
also need to address the issue of redistribution, the materiality of sex work
that includes poverty and economic routes in, as identified through the narratives presented in this chapter? Yet, in current discourses, the issue of redistribution is largely hidden or silenced by claims for recognition
.49 A recent article by Nancy Fraser throws some light (and hope) on this issue.
Fraser argues that currently we are faced with new dynamics centered on the discourse of social justice
. On the one hand, social justice concerns focus upon redistribution
(class politics and materialism) and on the other, the focus is squarely upon recognition
(identity politics); and often, `the two discourses are dissociated from one another. The cultural politics of difference is decoupled from the social politics of equality'.50 Fraser argues that the emancipatory aspects of the two paradigms need to be integrated into a single comprehensive framework by devising an expanded concept of social justice. In previous work I suggested that the polarization amounted to, on the one hand, too great a focus upon claims to recognition at the expense of claims for redistribution and that redistribution (the economic basis for sex work) is displaced by identity politics (recognition claims).51 I further argued that feminists need to work across this divide and challenge sexual and social inequalities with respect to both redistribution/materiality and recognition/ ideology
(identity politics). We need to acknowledge that structural inequalities form the entry point for many women's routes in to sex work and sustain involvement.
Poverty, the need for money, or more lucrative earning potential is evident in the available research.
Struggles for recognition that transgress cultural value patterns (sex worker as deviant/diseased/victim/Other) need to be integrated with struggles for redistribution
that also `examine the structure of capitalism'52 and critically explore the marketization of sex. Put simply, Fraser argues that we need to integrate `recognition' and `materiality' and replace the identity politics model of recognition with what she calls `status misrecognition'. Hence, identity politics misrecognition involves the deprecation by the dominant culture and damage to group members' sense of self ± the sex worker labelled as abject
Other
.
Redressing this means demanding recognition through
, for example, collective identity as identity politics, unionization
, solidarity, and sex-worker organization
. Fraser also argues that identity politics misrecognition reifies group identity and has the tendency to pressure individuals to: conform to group culture while masking the power of dominant factions and reinforcing intra-group domination
. In general then, the identity model lends itself all too easily to separatism and political correctness.53 Fraser goes on to suggest that instead of treating (mis)recognition through group identity we should treat recognition as an issue of social status
not group-specific identify. Misrecognition in this sense means social subordination ± being prevented from participating as a peer in social life, and much research with sex workers evidences this point. When asked `do you feel part of the community?' in research led by Jane Pitcher for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, one sex worker answered as follows. `I didn't feel part of anything, I was just there'.54
Overcoming status recognitions
(as opposed to identity politics) means establishing the group member ± sex worker ±

as a full member of society capable of participating on a par with other members
.55 So the focus of analysis is on the institutionalized patterns of cultural value for their effects on the relative standing of social actors and moving beyond status misrecognition by establishing the misrecognized party as a full member of society through reciprocal recognition and status equality.
An example of status misrecognition is the institutionalized structuring of sex workers as absent presence, an Other
, in the Home Office strategy, and the way that women who sell sex/sex workers are represented as partial citizens.
Supported by the mainstream media and agencies of social control, the `cultural value' assigned to sex workers is non-normative, deficient, inferior : therefore, claims to recognition are needed.
Fraser cautions against recognition `based on valorizing group identity, but rather at overcoming subordination', for the aim is `to deinstitutionalize patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and to replace them with patterns that foster it'.56
Moreover, for Fraser, treating recognition as a matter of justice and `construing recognition on the model of status permits us to treat it as a matter of justice'57 ± that is to say, social justice, not criminal justice. Yet, for
Fraser
, a theory of justice must `reach beyond cultural value patterns' to also `examine the structure of capitalism'.58 For this, she develops an expanded concept of justice to include both recognition and redistribution .
Justice requires parity of participation and for this to happen, material resources must be such as to enable
`participants' independence and a voice' through both `objective' and `inter-subjective' conditions
.59 The objective condition relates to distributive justice, the economic structure, and class differentials and the inter-subjective relates to recognition linked to status order, associations, and culturally defined hierarchies, ` thus an expanded conception of justice oriented to the norm of participatory parity encompasses both redistribution and recognition
, without reducing either one to the other'
.60 Fraser concludes her paper by arguing that if we cling to false antithesis and misleading dichotomies we will
: miss the chance to envision social arrangements that can redress both economic and cultural injustices
.
Only by looking to integrative approaches that unite redistribution and recognition can we meet the requirements of justice for all
.61 In supporting Fraser's approach we can draw upon Lister's body of work on citizenship. Lister argues that whilst ` the redistribution paradigm is concerned with economic injustice; the recognition paradigm addresses cultural or symbolic injustice'
.62
Hence, rights, recognition, and redistribution are inter-connected
. What is clear is that any strategic response should focus upon the complexity of sex work
in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century and that understanding complexity in order to improve the situation of women and men involved in selling sex should be based upon an integrated approach to recognition and redistribution that involves developing patterns of participation to support processes and practices of parity
. To progress this vision, it is important to make use of cultural analysis
and inclusive research methodologies such as participatory action research that might overcome subordination and progress parity of participation, by creating safe spaces for dialogue with sex workers, as well as organizations supporting sex workers, criminal justice agencies, and residents and businesses in communities affected by on- and offstreet sex work
. I suggest that we might move forward on this, using cultural criminology.
[Spring 2012, Crystal Faye Sheets, "STATE INJUSTICE: TRAPPING BLACK WOMEN AS “SEX OFFENDERS”
FOR PROSTITUTION IN “THE BIG EASY”", digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZ
WRpYS8xNjQ5MDE=.pdf]
Gendered Morality and Race/Class-specific Criminalization This statute labels certain people as criminal and sexually deviant for an act which occurs across all races and generally consists of a male solicitor or pursuer of oral sex . However, Black women disproportionately endure this criminal label . The criminalization of prostitution contributes to the stigma these women endure . Stigma and social condemnation are enforced through the criminalization process . The severity of being labeled with a Crime Against Nature complicates the stigma associated with prostitution because the crime is not clear to the general public, and women become associated with animalistic sexuality or that which is “unnatural.” The labeling of Black women’s sexuality as deviant has been used throughout history to isolate them and justify atrocities against them (Collins, 2005; James, 1996). These stereotypes were used to distinguish Black women from
“the cult of true womanhood”, white womanhood, and justified the wrongful treatment of Black wome n (e.g.

Collins, 2005). Therefore, the impacts of this charge today may trigger the historical trauma of being associated with such stereotypes as descendants of enslaved Black women . The social condemnation may be likened to that endured by enslaved Black women, complete with clemency for the perpetrators of rape and violence against them. The gendered intersection of being Black women on the street associates them with social condemnation which labels them as deviant and worthy of punishment as women . The Crime Against Nature charge increases stigma and social condemnation, resulting in increased assaults to the self-esteem and a likely increase in the level of violence and abuse against their bodies . Social exclusion is increased and solidified with the repercussions of being a criminal, a felon, a sex offender.
While there is gendered morality which says prostitution is a sin and a crime, men have clemency to solicit women, to purchase sex, to perform violent acts with clemency, and to continue to point the finger at “the whore.” Women most punished in the sex economy are the most marginalized and oppressed in their social situation. These are most often Black women in New Orleans, descendants of a long history of the oppression of Black people. White women and women of color who have a higher economic and social standing most often service tourists and elite clientele in the French Quarter and are not targeted by the Crime Against Nature charge, thus they are not marked with a felony and sex offense to trap them for the rest of their lives.

2AC

Adrienne D.
, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law,
“REGULATING POLYGAMY:
INTIMACY, DEFAULT RULES, AND BARGAINING FOR EQUALITY” December, 2010 Columbia Law Review, 110
Colum. L. Rev. 1955
Several legal theorists recently re-clarified the crucial distinction between decriminalization and legalization.
Discussing sex work, they say, "Legalization involves complete decriminalization coupled with positive legal provisions regulating one or more aspect of sex work businesses.
" Janet Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in
Contemporary Governance Feminism, 29 Harv. J.L. & Gender 335, 339 (2006). Decriminalization may be partial, i.e., decriminalizing the activities of sex workers alone, or complete, eliminating all criminal legislation.

[Jane, “What’s Law Got To Do
With it? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work,” Journal of Law and Society, Vol 37, No. 1,
March 2010]
Bio-power thus explains the position and indeed fate for many of those who exist outside law’s formal terms yet remain subject to its disciplining power. In previous work with Hubbard et al., we used Agamben’s111 term ‘homo sacer’ to describe these marginalized figures excluded from the law’s protection yet subject to its power,112 existing on the threshold of the sovereign state, in a state of liminal drift:113 Stripped of workers’ rights, dignity and adequate protection
, those prostitute women excluded from political life and state recognition appear vulnerable to exploitation and are inevitably reduced to a form of ‘ bare life’
.114 Such exclusion , refigured to match the contemporary situation, has always been the destiny of those deemed prostitutes , whose identity , reductive as it is, exists to maintain the citizenship of others , and to preserve the boundaries between the economy and sexuality, work and affective labour. Thus, the neo-liberal techniques of control outlined above operate to augment an on¬going hegemonic moral and political regulation of sex workers .115 Yet, ironically, insights from governmentality may also offer some hope for law’s limited potential to challenge these injustices. A further benefit of Foucault’s work is his insights into resistance. As power is immanent in our social practices and conduct, so too is resistance , albeit circumscribed by the context within which it operates. As law does not operate ideologically (as there is always resistance) or directly via consciousness (as it is more than simply what people think and do) but through its increased governmentality in shaping the subjects, spaces, and forms of power, it is within these spaces that some leverage could be applied to loosen the legal complex from being welded to the power of the norm.
Given there is no outside of law to effect such challenge , we must work within its structures . Foucault’s genealogical approach shows us that while law has become increasingly governmentalized, it has not been fully colonized ; it still operates according to a sovereign model, albeit to a much more limited extent which could be utilized as part of a strategy of resistance. As Rose and Valverde note, ‘Not all legal power is juridical and not all non-legal power is non-juridical, thus it can be deployed both to extend and to contest normalized political strategies.’ Thus, the radical democratic agenda outlined by O’Neill in this collection could feature a modest role for law . T recent renaissance in human rights ideals and their embedding in international and domestic systems may offer a useful vehicle for her calls for recognition, redistribution, and rights , yet they may also provide a foil for increased normalization. In the context of neo-liberalism, the legal complex tends to form a key part of wider processes that constitute social life
(in normalized societies) rather than working to alter or change it, and sadly in many recent reform attempts, feminists have colluded with this wider normalizing agenda. The balance, as ever, depends on who utilizes law, how they do so, and in what context : whether, for example, the terms ‘sex worker’ or ‘exploitation’ are used to reify exclusionary forms of identity, and essentialist forms of citizenship while obscuring material conditions (thus supporting law’s normalizing power) or whether these terms can transcend binaries and give way to wider politics of resistance.
[03/29/10, Helen Ward, a PR supporter, is a public health doctor and researcher who has worked with sex workers in London and Europe for over 20 years. Together with anthropologist Sophie Day she has researched HIV and other health risks, occupational mobility and life course in sex work, and established one of the largest projects for sex workers in the UK. She is a supporter of the International Union of Sex Workers, “'Marxism versus moralism': a Marxist analysis of prostitution”, http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/03/29/marxism-versus-moralism-marxist-analysis-prostitution]
This Marxist analysis demonstrates that prostitution developed as the other side of the coin of monogamy which exists to defend private property
, and that sexual relations cannot be fully separated from economic relationships in class society . Women’s oppression is rooted in the separation of private domestic toil and reproduction from social production and social life. Prostitution poses a threat to society because it threatens to blur this sharp distinction – taking sex out of the home and into the market
. Secondly it shows that under capitalism prostitutes are not a single class. Our programme on prostitution should reflect this understanding, and be based neither on our own romantic ideas about what sex should represent, nor on our horrors at the most extreme exploitation of sex workers
. Sex workers organise Over recent years there has been a huge growth in organisations of sex workers.
In North America and Europe many of these organisations grew out of women’s groups and other social movements, but have had to break with feminist positions on sex work in order to campaign for their rights. Many feminists want to abolish prostitution, regarding it simply as violence against women. They argue that it must be eliminated through sanctions against managers and clients and rescue missions to save prostitutes. Indeed many will not talk of prostitutes, let alone sex workers, but use the term “prostituted women”. This particular form of patronising language reveals their attitude – they regard sex workers as dupes, and accord them no role in liberating themselves from any oppression or exploitation they endure. So sharp is this dispute between the feminist saviours and the sex workers’ rights groups that they will rarely share a platform.
The
Women’s Library in London recently organised an exhibition on prostitution, and did not allow any representations from sex workers’ organisations, leading to protests outside from the International Union of

Sex Workers
(IUSW).(18) The most extreme position is taken by the writer Julie Burchill, who wrote, “
Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping
ground.”(19) Sex workers’ organisations have been criticised for romanticising prostitution, and representing only the middle class “professionals
”. But in India, a mass organisation of sex workers exists and takes exactly the same positions
.
The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya
Committee
(or “Durbar”, which in Bengali means unstoppable or indomitable) is based in West Bengal, India,
and grew out of the Sonagachi
AIDS prevention initiative.
Durbar has 65,000 members, working in some of the poorest areas of the country: “Durbar is explicit about its political objective of fighting for recognition of sex work as work and, of sex workers as workers and for a secure social existence of sex workers and their children
.
Durbar demands decriminalisation of adult sex work and seeks to reform laws that restrict the human rights of sex workers, that tend to criminalise them and limit their enfranchisement as full citizens .”(20) Their 1997 manifesto
, cited earlier, reveals an understanding of sexual oppression that would put many ­socialists to shame
: “ Ownership of private property and maintenance of patriarchy necessitates a control over women’s reproduction
. Since property lines are maintained through legitimate heirs, and sexual intercourse between men and women alone carry the potential for procreation, capitalist patriarchy sanctions only such couplings.
Sex is seen primarily, and almost exclusively, as an instrument for reproduction, negating all aspects of pleasure and desire intrinsic to it . . . The young men who look for sexual initiation, the married men who seek the company of ‘other’ women, the migrant labourers separated from their wives who try to find warmth and companionship in the red light area, cannot all be dismissed as wicked and perverted. To do that will amount to dismissing a whole history of human search for desire, intimacy and need .” Organisations of sex workers are a key to fighting exploitation and oppression
.
Given the class divisions within prostitution these organisations need to be run for and by those sex workers who are employed or who work for themselves, and not be left to be recruiting grounds for those who want to employ and exploit others
. The unions and community organisations of sex workers need to have strong links with other workers’ organisations – as part of a united and strong workers’ movement they will be better able to fight against widespread prejudice.
Over the past decade several unions have agreed to organise and represent sex workers
. In the UK, the International Union of Sex Workers (IUSW) persuaded the general union the GMB to form a sex industry branch in Soho, and it has successfully unionised a brothel and negotiated recognition agreements in lap dancing clubs. Sex workers are also included in general unions in German (Verdi) and the Netherlands (FNV).(21) Prostitution and socialism
The life of sex workers is often hard and dangerous, not least because it is criminalised and repressed exposing sex workers to abuse from pimps and clients. Many sex workers are unhappy with their work and would like to leave if there were realistic alternatives
. Bu t is a form of alienated labour like others under capitalism. Prostitution, in this form, would not exist in a socialist society, neither would the family nor work in their current form
.
There may well be specialist sexual entertainers and experts, but freed from the links with private property and state sanctified or enforced monogamy, sexual relations will evolve in ways that we can only speculate about. The key thing is that the distinction between public and private, in the sense of public social work and private reproduction, will have to dissolve and in that process women will be truly liberated.

[Laurie, “Moral
Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion” pg 82-84]
There is a surprising twist, though, in feminist debates over prostitution that is absent from debates over pornography or abortion, and which may account for its lack of attention from feminists. Those who hold opposing moral views on pornography or abortion typically hold opposing views on whether and to what degree
، he government should regulate these customs, though as some have pointed out this need not be the case.9 Yet feminists who hold vastly divergent views on the morality and meaning of prostitution do not typically hold opposing views about the government’s regulation and prohibition of prostitution . More specifically, while feminists disagree over what prostitution symbolizes, feminists on both sides of this debate for the most part agree that the legal and political instruments available to control prostitution are problematic . In general, feminists who entertain the hope of eliminating sex commerce, and those who do not, all favor removing existing legal prohibitions against it. Feminists generally agree on policy questions regarding prostitution because laws that prohibit or regulate prostitution generally place the burden of responsibility for prostitution on women . Thus their enforcement usually enhances rather than reduces the oppressive aspects of prostitution for women.
Though the laws regulating or criminalizing prostitution could conceivably be reformed to redistribute blame, many feminists believe that solutions to prostitution should not involve punitive state power, but a redistribution of social and economic opportunities.10 For the criminal prohibition or regulation of prostitution does little to change the conditions of women’s lives that lead them to prostitution. In addition, prostitution, unlike abortion and pornography, does not appear to involve significant harm to innocent third parties, though it may be a social nuisance. Without denying the nuisance factor, most feminists also oppose less punitive systems of social regulation that have been designed to minimize the potential public annoyances created by prostitution. Feminists who oppose prostitution on moral grounds, and who oppose socially regulated prostitution, claim that social regulation institutionalizes inequality.” Those who see prostitution as legitimate but stigmatizing work tend to oppose nonpunitive legal systems of social regulation, because such systems are primarily used not to pro- tect the prostitute, but to limit her rights. Thus, though these sys- terns are not generally punitive toward the clients of prostitutes, they are punitive in more subtle ways toward prostitutes. In accepting neither the legal prohibition nor the social regulation of prostitution, feminists implicitly give support to a policy of com- plete decriminalization. This policy has been explicitly endorsed by some mainstream feminist political organizations and some less con- ventional feminist organizations, such as prostitute advocate groups.^ While the policy of decriminalization tolerates some regulation of sex commerce , the regulations usually proposed are limited to the mini - mum necessary to prevent business fraud or coercion.
Thus, those who support decriminalization are ultimately proposing the sort of minimal regulation on industry that even Milton Friedman would approve. Feminists who support decriminalization typically hold that the state should not treat commerce in sex as a special sort of industry requiring a special regulatory apparatus to protect consumers, work- ers, or state and community interests. These liberal to libertarian feminist demands for decriminalized prostitution are motivated by concerns similar to those underlying calls for decriminalized gambling. Liberals argue that while we may disagree about the harmfulness of gambling or prostitution to those who engage in it, we agree that they are only an annoyance to every-one else. They are, so to speak, “victimless crimes.” Moreover, liber- als contend that, while using punitive or regulatory state power may abate the annoyances gambling and prostitution create for others, the use of such power can intensify the self-harms inflicted from gambling and prostitution, or create imbalances in their distribution. Nevertheless, the policy of decriminalization has some significant pit- falls for feminists, ?or, as we have seen in regard to numerous indus- tries, decriminalization with minimal regulation can lead to the creation of large-scale, nongovernmental, profitoriented enterprises that have a power of their own to inflict harm on and manipulate human beings. Because of this danger, as Roger Matthews has argued, “ decriminaliza- tion is not as radical as it might first appear.” Acknowledging the gen- eral ineffectiveness of, and pernicious practices created by, liberal regulationism in Britain, Matthews contends nevertheless that decriminalization
؛ة
unlikely to reduce the overall level of exploits- tion of prostitutes but rather to increase it . ?or as Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out ‘ wholesale decriminalization would simply mean a free for all for men’ . . . and would undoubtedly encourage large financial and business interests pursuing the vast profits potential)
، available through the extensive commercialization of prostitution. In this passage Matthews argues that a policy of decriminalization— meaning the absence of any special regulatory apparatus — would create a laissez-faire climate for capitalist sex commerce. In such a climate there would be few legal guidelines to curtail how profits are drawn from this trade . Since access to the bodies and sexual services of women would be the primary “merchandise ” traded, such a climate would leave women vulnerable to extreme capitalist exploitation . Given the dangers inherent in decriminalization, especially for female laborers,
Matthews argues that we need to develop a policy of socialist or “ radical regulationism ” that differs from the traditional liberal and conservative policies that have been tried.16 Such regula- tionism would differ from previous ones, Matthews states, in that it would necessarily be preoccupied with the public and visible aspects of female prostitution , nor with the elevation of expediency over justice, nor with denying that the mobilization of legal sanc- tions is based on moral concerns. And in opposition to the brand of regulationism currently being developed by the New Right it is not based exclusively upon traditional religious moralities which object to prostitution on the grounds that it is ‘dirty’, that it is a nuisance which interferes with the ‘ normal’ processes of reproduc- tion ... Left regulationism would also, unlike other variations, see prostitution as a social and historical , and therefore, transformable product, rather than a ‘natural’
or trans-historical entity .*^ In short, such regulationism would not be concerned with making prostitution safe for men and society at the expense of some women. It would also not

essentialize the women who work as prostitutes or the activity in which they are engaged, and thus it avoids one of the problems that
Rubin notes in some radical and feminist critiques of prostitution.

[02/02/15, Petra Östergren is a Swedish researcher and writer. As a renowned author and social commentator, she has published well-cited research and commentary on a variety of social, cultural and political topics, currently completing her PhD research in Social Anthropology at Lund University. Her research topic discusses the unique history and the socio-political functions of the Swedish social system which criminalises the purchase of sexual services. She is also the project leder of the Swedish part of the multidisciplinary EU research project Addressing
Demand in Anti-Trafficking Efforts and Policies (DemandAT)., “Sexworkers Critique of Swedish Prostitution policy”, http://www.petraostergren.com/pages.aspx?r_id=40716]
The new law
which prohibits the act of buying sexual services is severely criticized by sexworkers
. They find the law paradoxical, illogical and discriminatory.
It further obstructs their work and exposes them to stress and danger .
The women I have spoken to say that the reasoning behind the law does not makes sense to them. How can the politicians claim that only the clients are being punished and that they are being protected?
The effect of the law is mostly negative for the sexworker
. Some point out that even if a few men might get fined
, the majority will continue buying sexual services as usual
- and as usual it is women and sexworkers who will be the most adversely affected .
As a result of the new legislation, the sexworkers say it is now harder for them to assess the clients
.
The clients are more stressed and scared and negotiation outdoors must be done in a more rapid manner.
The likelihood of ending up with a dangerous client is thereby greater.
Due to the law, sexworkers feel hunted by the police, social workers, media and sometimes even anti-prostitution activists on the streets
. They find this unacceptable. One sexworker commented that no other vocational group would accept that the police
"patrolled their workplace".
Another consequence is that the sexworkers are now more apprehensive about seeking help from the police when they have had problems with an abusive customer
.
They do not want to be forced to report the client. Since the number of sexworkers on the streets has decreased and they are more scared, previous informal networks amongst the sexworkers have weakened.
The result is that they are no longer able to warn each other about dangerous clients or give each other the same support
. Women also report that another consequence of the law is lower prices on the streets since there are less customers and more competition.
This means that women in more desperate need of money will engage in unsafe sex and sexual activity they usually would not perform
.
This in turn leads to poorer self-esteem and exposure to infection
. Other women who have turned to the Internet to advertise claim a positive effect insofar as they have been able to raise their prices. But note that this only benefits some sexworkers.
The more vulnerable sexworkers seem to be the ones most negatively affected by the law . Women working on the streets in some bigger cities claim that there is now a greater percentage of "perverted" customers and that the "nice and kind" customers have disappeared
. A "perverted" customer is someone who demands more violent forms of sex, sex with faeces and urine and who is more prone to humiliate, degrade and violate the sexworker. He also more often refuses to use condoms. Since there are fewer customers on the streets many women who sell sex in order to finance a drug habit can no longer refuse these customers, as they were previously able to.
These women say the "kind" customers have either turned to the Internet to find sexual services or have been arrested by the police
. On the contrary, the "perverted" customers know what to do to not be arrested and fined - they just have to deny it since there is rarely hard evidence.
[12/14/11, Jay Levy, University of Cambridge, “Impacts of the Swedish Criminalisation of the Purchase of Sex on
Service Provision for Sex Workers”, http://correlationnet.org/correlation_conference/images/Presentations/MS4_Levy.pdf]

Conditionality Selective Service Provision
In addition to
such limited harm reduction initiatives
, services at Prostitution Units may be actively withheld from those who fail to comply with normative models of behaviour or identity
. Firstly, with sex work constructed as a form of violence perpetrated by men against women
, few tailored services are provided
by the Stockholm Prostitution Unit for non-female and LGBT sex workers
. Radical feminist ideology seems to serve to exclude nonheteronormative sex workers from service provision here. Additionally, sex workers who are not experiencing difficulties or do not wish to cease sex selling are excluded from services
at the Stockholm Unit, not seen to be the Unit’s responsibility or an area of concern
.
They are considered to be an overrepresented minority
, not deserving of the ‘energy’ of targeted authoritative attention.
Services are available only for women who want to leave sex work , or for whom sex work is or has become problematic.
“We are not here for people who feel good. We’re here for the people who experience problems with (prostitution)”. (Interview,
2009, Social Worker, Stockholm Prostitution Unit) “I think these people are very few… as far as they feel well, and like to be in this situation, fine with me, I mean, the day when they don’t like it anymore, they can come to me. So I don’t spend my energy on this group of people”. (Interview, 2009, National Coordinator Against Trafficking and Prostitution) Sex workers whose narratives diverge from a radical feminist construction of prostitution as a form of abusive violence will either assumedly be turned away, or would not feel welcome at an organisation that does not cater for their needs
. Conditionality – Stop Selling Sex Furthermore, there appear to be instances where specific conditions have been imposed by the Unit in exchange for assistance
.
Lisa
, for example, was told by social services at the Unit that they would not correspond with her doctor in helping her get a sick note unless she ceased her sex selling
for three months.
Klara had also experienced judgemental response from the Unit when seeking assistance . “I was going to talk to them for some months, and she (Stockholm Prostitution Unit Social Worker) also told me that if she was going to help me, to write a paper, that I needed to sjukskrivning (sick note)… because I have been waiting for three years… so she said ‘if you are stopping prostitution for three months… then I will write that paper’… So I was angry, because if you are not working in sex work, what (how) am I going to
(do to) get the money?”. (Lisa, Interview, 2009, Sex Worker [Street, Escort, Internet]) “they were very judging (of) me… I was very young, and they were all the time pushing me. ‘You have so much to give, you should do something else. Go study’. And I was studying… And they were not talking about the good things, they were only doing (making) things worse. So when I go home from them, I was crying, and I was feeling like, ‘oh my god, what a bad dirty people (person) I am’… I’m not a bad person, I just needed some help”. (Klara, Interview, 2010, Sex Worker
[Internet Escort])
Lisa was additionally threatened with compulsory treatment for addiction by staff at the Unit
, where tiredness during a consultation was mistaken for
nonmedical drug intoxication . Lisa eventually resorted to calling the Malmö Unit for assistance.
Conditionality of service provision for sex workers does not appear to be limited to Prostitution
Units
.
One respondent was told she would be eligible for social welfare only on condition that she ceased her work as a stripper
. Having refused to do so, she was refused assistance, and as a result had to give up custody of her son who
she could no longer afford to support: “They always want to save girls from the business. Now they saw the chance… ‘you have to quit first. If you don’t quit they’re not gunna help you at all’”. (Selina, Interview, 2009, Sex Worker [Stripping]) Do Sex Workers Seek Assistance and Service Provision? The
Stockholm
Unit’s reputation results in some sex workers being reluctant to visit the Unit in the first place, and indeed may act as deterrent to seek any form of service provision or assistance
. Two respondents were disinclined to discuss their sex work with any authoritative groups, having heard that the Stockholm
Unit had problematic attitudes towards sex workers. “I’m scared of talking too much to people, because I don’t want them to know that I’m a prostitute and then just going to come after me and say that I have to quit… I’m scared that they’re going to tell me that what I’m doing is wrong, and going to tell me that ‘you really are a victim, you don’t know it, but it’s like this’, because I read in the papers how they talk to girls”. (Anna, Interview, 2010, Sex Worker [Internet Escort; Previously Stripping & Phone Sex]) The Authorities and Police With abolitionist narrative informing service provision and ideology, sex workers report harassment and difficulties with the police and other state authorities.
Legislation and surrounding discourse may well have the purported ambition of shielding sex workers from negative authoritative attention and criminalisation. Seemingly, however, those charged with enforcing legislation and protecting said sex workers from apparent abuse are at times the perpetrators themselves.
As with conditionality surrounding service provision and healthcare, sex workers may have to conform to a model of exploitation and victimisation, thus placing themselves within a Swedish understanding of prostitution as a form of patriarchal abuse , in order to be tolerated and respected during interactions with the police
. “ there’s less tolerance… if you working consensually
, I mean (it is thought) you’re involved in a moral bad thing. Whereas if you are a victim of trafficking, you are a victim”. (Interview, 2010, Gender Consultant; Previously Kvinnoforum) Reports of police harassment of sex workers or of unprofessional police conduct were fairly commonplace during fieldwork
.
These included stories of harassment of sex workers in the street, the police announcing a sex worker’s name from a patrol car, and a sex worker being raped in a police van
. “she was moving then (away from the street), and then they were following her. They just did it (announced her name from the patrol van) because they wanted to be bad. And then I heard about another girl who was raped really terrible, about many guys in a piketbuss (police patrol van)… she had problems with her body after that”. (Annabel, Interview, 2010, Sex Worker [Internet; Escort; Street]) Sex workers additionally experience difficulties when attempting to report violent crime and rape
, in the context of their sex work, to the police.
An idea held
by some police officers, that sex workers cannot be raped, was mentioned by several respondents as being the justification for such difficulties
.
“one police (officer) wouldn’t take my anmälan (statement / report) because he said ‘you’re a prostitute, and a prostitute can’t be raped, because you get money’”. (Lisa, Interview, 2009, Sex
Worker [Street, Escort, Internet]) “we hear horrible stories all the time… they (the police) still have this old thing like you know ‘whores can’t be raped’”. (Interview, 2011, Pye Jakobsson,
Founder of Rose Alliance; Sex Worker)
In spite of the apparent immunity of sex workers from authoritative harassment
in the context of the sexköpslagen, the law has been used to directly destabilise some sex work
.
Police have been noted to report

sex workers to hotels or venues, with the sex worker then barred from returning.
Police have additionally been noted to inform sex workers’ landlords that their tenant sells sex
, thus forcing the landlord to evict the sex worker
. In spite of some instances of formal complaints being lodged, and disciplinary proceedings being taken, the national rapporteur for trafficking and prostitution of the National
Police was surprisingly unaware of any harassment of sex workers in Stockholm or Sweden: “No. Definitely not. No. Actually this is the first time I have ever heard that it could be actually a problem… but of course there is always, you know, could be police officers behaving badly from time to time, but it could be very much an exception”. (Interview, 2010, Police [National
Rapporteur for Prostitution and Trafficking]) Conclusions
It seems that where laws have been introduced as part of an effort to create a sex work-free Sweden
, there has not been evidence demonstrating that levels have declined
since the introduction of the sexköpslagen in 1999. In spite of the fact that sex work cannot be said to have decreased, laws are advocated as successes to be exported to other states. “this is the one purpose of the law that the government has fulfilled… that the law should be exported to other countries… irrespective of the fact that the knowledge base was so poor… on the actual sex trade in Sweden”. (Interview,
2010, Senior Advisor Regarding Prostitution - National Board of Health and Welfare) “I’ve had contacts with the UK government too, and I think that sooner or later they will get a Swedish legislation… when I’m meeting people from all over the world, I’m saying ‘this is how we solved it’” (Interview, 2010, Inger Segelström, Politician – Social Democrats) Legislation simplistically being touted as having “solved” the constructed problem of prostitution is disconcerting given that measurable outcomes of laws and discourse seem disruptive, feeding detrimentally into service provision and authoritative attention.
Those that diverge from normative social constructions are simply excluded from debate and indeed from access to services, resources, and healthcare provisio n. “you cannot take away someone’s right to information or right to health. But that’s what is done in Sweden”. (Interview, 2010, RFSL LBGT organisation [II]) Inclusion of such marginalised groups in evaluation and political process seems to be of great importance where the very groups legislation and policy pertains to continue to experience authoritative abuses and denial of services.

[2010, Ronald Weitzer, "The Mythology of Prostitution: Advocacy Research and Public Policy", Sex Res Soc
Policy (2010) 7:15–29, chezstella.org/docs/The-mythology-of-prostitution.pdf]
Claim 3
Legalization facilitates and increases sex trafficking
into the jurisdiction where prostitution is legal. Legalized prostitution is “one of the root causes of sex trafficking”
(Raymond 2003, p. 317), and “wherever prostitution is legal, sex trafficking from other countries is significantly increased into both legal and illegal sex businesses in the region” (Farley 2007, p. 118). Farley's
(2007) report on legal prostitution in
Nevada relies on hearsay to support this claim : Women are trafficked from other countries into Nevada’s legal brothels....In Nevada, 27 percent of our 45 interviewees in the Nevada legal brothels believed that there were undocumented immigrants in the legal brothels. Another 11 percent said they were uncertain, thus as many as 38 percent of the women we interviewed may have known of internationally trafficked women in Nevada legal brothel prostitution. (pp.
118, 119, emphasis added)
Another way of reporting this so-called finding is that as many as 62% believed that women were not trafficked into the brothels, whereas the remainder either did not have an opinion or believed that brothels had undocumented immigrants, women who were not necessarily trafficked
. Elsewhere in the report,
Farley
(2007) stated that some women in one brothel told her that women in another brothel had been trafficked from
China
. Instead of treating this information as hearsay,
Farley presented it as factual and called the women who told her this story “witnesses,”
lending their statements an aura of credibility.
Prostitution has been legal in Victoria, Australia since 1984.
In their critique of the Victorian situation,
Sullivan and Jeffreys
(2002) have asserted that trafficking “appears to have exploded”
(p. 1145), but then stated that this is purely anecdotal.
There is no evidence to support the claim that legalization increases trafficking in Victoria or elsewhere in Australia
. Furthermore, recent assessments by the Australian government
(Parliamentary Joint Committee 2004) and by independent organizations have concluded that trafficking was not a significant problem in Australia.
As one assessment reported, Trafficking numbers are low primarily due to the geographical isolation of the country, combined with a very strict immigration and border control.
There are legal channels for migration into the sex industry, which reduces the need for migrants to depend on organized crime syndicates or traffickers
(Global Alliance Against
Traffic in Women 2007, p. 29). For those who do migrate to Australia in search of work, the majority of women know they will be working in the sex industry and often decide to come to Australia in the belief that they will be able to make a substantial amount of money
....
Few of the women would ever consider themselves sex slaves
(Meaker 2002, pp. 61,
63). Similarly, the New Zealand government's recent investigation (PLRC 2008) has reported that “ no situations involving trafficking in the sex industry have been identified”
(p. 167) by the immigration service, and that “ there is no link between the sex industry and human trafficking”
(p. 167) in the country. Prostitution is legal in New Zealand. In fact, increased government regulation can diminish trafficking due to enhanced oversight of and transparency of the legal sex industry
. In the Netherlands, a
Ministry of Justice report (Daalder 2007) concluded that, since legalization
in 2000,
“it is likely trafficking in human beings has become more difficult , because the enforcement of the regulations has increased”
(p. 84). Where prostitution is illegal, the obverse appears to be true:
Traffickers take advantage of the illegality of commercial sex work and migration, and are able to exert an undue amount of power and control over [migrants]....
In such cases, it is the laws that prevent legal commercial sex work and immigration that form the major obstacles
(Kempadoo 1998, p. 17). Related to the trafficking claim is the argument that legalization increases organized crime involvement:
“Organized crime is inherent across the industry” (Sullivan
2005, p. 4).
Although organized crime can be a problem in any industry, the chances that organized crime will be screened out increases as a result of enhanced governmental oversight
, such as criminal record checks of owners, periodic certification of businesses, and regular site visits by officials. In Queensland, Australia, a government evaluation
(CMC 2004) concluded that organized crime had been largely eliminated in the legal brothels
; in New Zealand, a government study
(PLRC 2008) found no evidence of criminal involvement in prostitution . As Murray (1998) has pointed out, “ It is the prohibition of prostitution and restrictions on travel which attract organized crime and create the possibilities for large profits, as well as creating the prostitutes’ need for protection and assistance ” (p. 60). Organized crime thrives

(and other harms are amplified) under conditions where vice is illegal and unregulated, such as drug and alcohol prohibition, gambling, and so forth.
[2010, Janie A. Chuang is the Assistant Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law,
“RESCUING TRAFFICKING FROM IDEOLOGICAL CAPTURE: PROSTITUTION REFORM AND ANTI-
TRAFFICKING LAW AND POLICY”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 158: 1655, 2010, http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1161&context=penn_law_review]
There is no doubt that neo-abolitionists have made significant contributions to the anti-trafficking movement. In no small part due to neo-abolitionist advocacy efforts, trafficking quickly became a national and foreign policy priority for the Bush Administration.
The standards applied in the sanctions regime, which reflect the neoabolitionists’ influence, have motivated other countries to take seriously the problem of sex-sector trafficking
. That neo-abolitionists’ focus on prostitution has drawn attention to sex-sector trafficking arguably has also indirectly created space for concerns regarding nonsex-sector trafficking to be raised and potentially addressed. The incentivizing effect of neo-abolitionism aside, whether neoabolitionism has served the trafficking cause—or even that of abolition of prostitution— requires close scrutiny of the impacts of neoabolitionist law and policy reforms
. This Part undertakes such an analysis, assessing (1) their impact on the development and implementation of anti-trafficking legal frameworks, and (2) their impact on their target populations and other vulnerable populations collaterally affected. As with any policymaking, neo-abolitionist reforms have yielded a set of unintended consequences that should caution against embracing them as wholesale solutions to the problem of human trafficking
.
Critical self-assessment is necessary to avoid offering ideology based rather than evidence-based policymaking
. A. The
Impact on U.S. and International Anti-trafficking Laws
Neo-abolitionist advocacy has affected the ability of U.S. and international anti-trafficking laws to serve the populations they were designed to protect in two critical respects
: (1) by drawing attention away from those trafficked into non-sex sectors
, and (2) by confusing legal standards by strategically equating trafficking with slavery.
Both effects perpetuate inconsistency and confusion regarding the legal definitions of trafficking and thus undermine the central goal of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol —that is, to foster international cooperation among states to combat this crime and human rights violation
.
U.S. and international anti-trafficking laws were designed to address both sex- and non-sex-sector trafficking
of men, women, and children. As discussed above,210 expanding the definition of trafficking to include non-sex-sector forms was a significant—and necessary
, given the arguably greater number of non-sex-sector victims— improvement on the prior legal regime
.
Neo-abolitionist pressure has resulted in uneven domestic enforcement of these law s, however, with the emphasis on law enforcement activity, resource allocation, and service provision targeted at sex-sector trafficking and prostitution
.
Other countries have followed suit, more likely to adopt domestic laws on sexsector trafficking than on non-sex-sector trafficking, and often passing anti-prostitution laws under the guise of “trafficking” laws
. Until recently, neo-abolitionist pressure led the U.S. sanctions regime to condone—if not encourage—such uneven legislative responses to the different forms of trafficking.211
The focus on sex-sector trafficking undermines the U.S. and international legal definitions of trafficking and the U.N. Trafficking Protocol’s goal of ensuring a consistent legal definition of trafficking from country to country in order to facilitate more effective international cooperation
. For example, a uniform definition of trafficking is necessary to foster coordinated transnational responses to trafficking cases and to facilitate data collection regarding this underresearched phenomenon
.
Statistics in the trafficking field are notoriously unreliable
, unsubstantiated figures often recycled and accepted as true, as if sheer repetition guarantees veracity.212
One of the key obstacles to data collection has been the fact that countries and organizations define trafficking differently, some conflating trafficking with other phenomena, including smuggling, illegal migration, and prostitution.
213 Additionally, neo-abolitionist pressure on states to conflate sex trafficking and prostitution perpetuates this confusion and inconsistency.

(Obama scrambles to save Asia ‘pivot’ as crises shift U.S. leader’s focus toward Middle
East,” http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/05/asia-pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/obama-scramblessave-asia-pivot-crises-shift-u-s-leaders-focus-toward-middle-east/, JMP)
WASHINGTON – A military agreement with the Philippines and easing an arms embargo against Vietnam show the Obama administration wants deeper security ties with Asia, even as turmoil in the Mideast has undermined its hope of making Asia the heart of its foreign policy .
The “pivot” was intended to be President
Barack Obama’s signature push in foreign affairs . As the U.S. disentangled from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would devote more military and diplomatic attention to the Asia-Pacific and American economic interests in the region. The world hasn’t turned out as planned. Washington is grappling with the chaotic fallout of the Arab
Spring, a growing rivalry with Russia and the alarming rise of the Islamic State group that is prompting the
U.S. to launch airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
Against this chaotic backdrop, the growing tensions in the South and
East China Seas and U.S. efforts to counter the rise of an increasingly assertive China appear peripheral concerns.
The pivot gets few people excited in Washington these days.
Obama didn’t even mention it in a sweeping foreign policy speech in May, and negotiations on a trans-Pacific trade pact, the main economic prong in the pivot, have been mired by differences between the U.S. and Japan over agriculture and auto market access and by opposition to the pact among many of Obama’s fellow Democrats. But the Obama administration is still chipping away at its grand plan for a re-balance to Asia that began within months of Obama taking office in 2009, with the inking of a cooperation treaty between the U.S. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The U.S.
has since ended its decades-long isolation of Myanmar in response to democratic reforms there. It has taken a more strident diplomatic stance against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and some concrete steps to shore up its allies’ ability to respond. In April the U.S. signed a 10-year agreement to allow thousands of U.S. troops to be temporarily based in Philippines , 20 years after U.S. bases there were closed. Like the Philippines,
Vietnam has been engaged in standoffs with China over disputed reefs and islands. Tensions spiked between May and July after China deployed a deep-sea oil rig near the Paracel Islands. The vessels of the two sides rammed each other near the rig, and there were deadly anti-China riots in several industrial parks in Vietnam. On Thursday, the
U.S. State Department announced it would allow sales, on a case-by-case basis, of lethal equipment to help the maritime security of Vietnam , easing a ban that has been in place since communists took power at the end of the
Vietnam War in 1975. The U.S. won’t be rushing to Vietnam’s defense, nor does it want to be directly involved in negotiating the territorial disputes themselves, that also involve Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan. But Washington says it has an interest in the maintenance of peace and stability and equipping nations to defend themselves and deter aggression. Hanoi welcomed the step, saying it would promote the U.S.-Vietnam partnership.
—Adam, “Trade bill timeline could push Senate to act,” http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/trade-promotion-authority-tpa-bill-timeline-could-push-senate-to-act-
116640.html
Senate aides have circulated a tentative date of mid-April for advancing “fast-track” trade legislation in the recognition that Sens. Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden have to move quickly to finalize a deal on the bill or risk losing their chance to get it passed by the end of the spring session, several lobbyists and congressional sources have told POLITICO.
Under the proposed schedule, the senators would introduce the trade promotion authority bill on April 13, the day lawmakers return from their two-week recess, followed by a Senate Finance Committee hearing April 15 and a markup on April 21
, the sources said.
Negotiations between Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the committee, its ranking member Wyden (D-Ore.) and
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) are taking place at the staff level over the spring congressional break and “continue to make progress,” Hatch spokesman Julia Lawless said, confirming only that the senator hopes to move legislation “this spring.” Wyden has sought to include provisions to give Congress more power and oversight over the fast-tracking of trade deals.
Quick movement on the bill, which the White House is seeking to expedite congressional consideration of a sprawling Asia-Pacific trade deal, could send Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell the
signal to carve out floor time in the upcoming six-week legislative period — a session that will be jammed with major issues ranging from the budget reconciliation process to political fallout over the nuclear energy deal with Iran, and from cybersecurity legislation — a priority of the Kentucky Republican — to the highway funding bill.
Meanwhile, the fate of Trans-Pacific Partnership with Japan and 10 other Asia-Pacific countries hangs in the balance. The legislation is considered vital for easing congressional passage of the deal, which would be the biggest in world history, because it would shield it from amendments and put it to a simple up-or-down vote.
Before countries put their final offers on the table, they’ve said they want assurance through the legislation that lawmakers won’t be able to tear the agreement apart during congressional debate — and their trade ministers have been growing more vocal about the need for the bill as a TPP gathering meant to wrap up the deal

approaches in late-May. Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, in particular has been at an impasse with the United States over agricultural and auto tariff cuts. Its economic minister, Akira Amari, told the Financial Times this week that President Barack Obama needs to step up his efforts to win support for fast track legislation from fellow Democrats. Chile’s deputy trade minister, Andres Rebolledo, echoed the point in an interview with POLITICO, saying that negotiations could continue in parallel, “But of course we are aware that it’s important to have TPA before the last minute of the negotiation.” The tentative dates for introducing and marking up the bill could be an effort to create some momentum for its consideration, a trade lobbyist who is following the issue closely said. And, because Hatch scheduled and then postponed a hearing on the bill in late February, he won’t have to comply with the seven-day notification requirement for hearings. But “that doesn’t solve your issue of floor time,” the lobbyist said. Since negotiations began after the midterm elections, Hatch and Wyden have winnowed down their differences to a handful of issues, including a provision Wyden is pushing that would make it easier to remove trade deals from fast-track procedures if lawmakers’ negotiating priorities aren’t met. The two sides are also discussing the content of and process for amendments, with Hatch seeking to make the bill’s path to passage as smooth as possible, congressional aides said. The Utah Republican wants not only to protect the bill, but also to give certain vulnerable Republican committee members, such as Rob Portman of
Ohio, opportunities for political cover as they go into elections in 2016 where trade could be a sensitive issue, lobbyists and aides said.
At least one opponent, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, is expected to attack Portman for his pro-trade stance, which could resonate in the manufacturing state. Giving Portman, a former U.S. trade representative under George W. Bush, an opportunity to offer an amendment on currency manipulation or another worker-friendly issue — without substantively changing what Hatch wants in a final bill — could provide the Ohio Republican with some political cover. Wyden, too, wants to reach an agreement by the end of this recess, a Democratic aide said. But if the two sides can’t reach one then or fairly soon after, observers say the window for passing a bill in the six-week legislative period could close. McConnell initially promised floor time for the measure in the last legislative session, but took it away when it became clear Hatch and the Oregon Democrat couldn’t reach a deal, trade lobbyists said. “[T]hat floor time was pretty much given away,” one of the lobbyists said. On the House side, Ryan was undeterred as recently as last week by the Senate Finance panel leaders’ delay in reaching an agreement on the fast-track bill, telling reporters at a pen-and-pad briefing that he planned to move it and other trade legislation in the upcoming session. “My goal is to mark up as many trade bills as I can in the spring,” the Wisconsin Republican said, ticking off bills to renew tariff-cuts under the Generalized System of
Preferences program, which expired in July 2013, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which expires in September.
Right now, several
Republicans — some of whom are high-ranking — say they have been left out of the substance of the fasttrack talks and are leaning against voting for the legislation, another trade lobbyist said
. That means the House
Republican leadership will need to do some legwork to bring the conference in line once a bill is introduced, the lobbyist said, adding that intense, coordinated lobbying would have to happen to get sufficient votes in just a few weeks. But a Republican aide said the votes will be there when the bill comes to the floor. “A lot of members
— on both sides of the aisle — are hesitant to throw their support behind something right now because legislation doesn’t exist ye t ,” the aide said, noting that outside lobbying groups have made a significant push in favor of the bill theory. “I expect that it
[a vote] will be close but will feel much more confident once language actually exists and is introduced,” the aide said. Still, Hatch expressed worry as late as last week that if he and Wyden couldn’t strike a deal in April the fast-track bill might not get passed at all this year
. When asked this week how quickly the bill could move, McConnell’s spokesman Don Stewart said, “It’s a priority for the leader, but I don’t have timing yet.”
, Daniel Pearson joins the Cato Institute after serving for 10 years on the U.S. International Trade
Commission, the federal agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the U.S. trade remedy laws. Pearson was nominated to the USITC by President George W. Bush and began his term as a commissioner on October 8,
2003. He served as Chairman for the two-year term beginning June 17, 2006 and as Vice Chairman for the two-year term beginning June 17, 2008. Prior to joining the USITC, Pearson served as assistant vice president of Public
Affairs and as a policy analyst for Cargill from 1987-2003. He was agricultural legislative assistant to Sen. Rudy
Boschwitz of Minnesota from 1981-1987, Don’t Envy Senator Wyden, http://www.cato.org/blog/dont-envy-senatorwyden
On the other hand, President Obama wants TPA–at least officially–but it’s not entirely clear how hard he’s willing to fight for it. There is no precedent in which President Obama has made a concerted effort to pass legislation that was opposed by such important Democratic Party constituencies . Why would he be willing to do so now, especially when liberal supporters like Paul Krugman , the well-known political columnist, has come out against the TPP (which is the proximate reason for needing TPA), writing, “ Why , exactly, should the Obama administration spend any political capital– alienating labor, disillusioning progressive activists –over such a deal?”
—Victoria, POLITICO Morning Trade, “WikiLeaks reveals TPP investment chapter — Admin briefs
Dems on pact’s ISDS and food safety text — Biz groups argue COOL repeal at hearing,” http://www.politico.com/morningtrade/0315/morningtrade17633.html
HOUSE DEMS HEAR FROM ADMIN ON ISDS, FOOD SAFETY IN TPP: Earlier in the day, at least 30 House
Democrats huddled with U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman , Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and
FDA Administrator Margaret Hamburg for a confidential briefing on ISDS and food safety provisions in the TPP.
The lawmakers, who were a mix of TPP opponents, proponents and undecideds, offered a range of reviews on

the usefulness of the meeting. Rep. Alan Grayson told reporters after the briefing that fellow representatives who are on the fence have told him they’ve become disenchanted by the lack of answers provided by the administration in the various briefings held for the House Democratic Caucus so far.
“ What we’re hearing is one-sided propaganda, and, as I said, they’re turning people off ,” the Florida Democrat said. “ They’re actually losing votes at this point ."

1AR

[Ronald, “The Social
Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade” Politics & Society Vol. 35
No. 3, September 2007 447-475]
Claim 4: Sex workers lack agency . The denial of agency is evident in the very framing of the problem as one involving “prostituted women,” “trafficking,” and “sexual slavery.” The central claim is that workers do not actively make choices to enter or remain in prostitution , and there is no such thing as voluntary migration for the purpose of sex work. The notion of consent is deemed irrelevant , and activists have pressed governments to criminalize all such migration , whether consensual or not : “ Legislation must not allow traffickers to use the consent of the victim as a defense against trafficking ,” argue Raymond and Hughes.41 This crusade rejects the very concept of benign migration for the purpose of sex work , since prostitution is defined as inherently exploitative and oppressive . Instead, the more nefarious term “sex trafficking”
(borrowed from the equally insidious “drug trafficking”) is applied to every instance of relocation to a destination where the individual sells sex . The issue of worker agency is central to the research literature on the sex industry, and the evidence shows variation, rather than uniformity, in the degree to which workers feel exploited versus empowered and in control of their working conditions .42 Workers do not necessarily see themselves as victims lacking agency. Instead of viewing themselves as “prostituted,” they may embrace more neutral work identities, such as “working women” or “sex workers .”43 Some prostitutes make conscious decisions to enter the trade and do not feel that their work is degrading or oppressive . Many independent call girls and employees of escort agencies, massage parlors, and brothels fall into this category.44 These workers are invisible in the discourse of the anti-prostitution crusade precisely because their accounts clash with abolitionist goals.
Regarding sex trafficking, it is impossible to measure the ratio of agency to victimization—i.e., voluntary versus involuntary migration. But several studies suggest that a significant number of migrants have made conscious and informed decisions to relocate. A study of
Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia, who had been assisted by intermediaries, reported that out of 100 women studied, only six had been duped, and the rest knew prior to leaving Vietnam that they would work in a brothel in Cambodia .
Their motivations consisted of “economic incentives, desire for an independent lifestyle, and dissatisfaction with rural life and agricultural labor.
” After raids on the brothels by “rescue” organizations, the women
“usually returned to their brothel as quickly as possible.”
45 The researchers argue that criminalizing the sex industry “ forces [the workers] underground, making them more difficult to reach with appropriate services and increasing the likelihood of exploitation .” Similar findings have been reported in Europe, where the women are “often aware of the sexual nature of the work. . . . Many migrants do know what is ahead of them, do earn a large amount of money in a short time selling sex, and do have control over their working conditions.
”46 One investigation of trafficking from Eastern Europe to Holland, based on interviews with seventy-two women, found that few of the women were coercively trafficked, and that a “large number” had previously worked as prostitutes : For most of the women, economic motives were decisive . The opportunity to earn a considerable amount of money in a short period of time was found to be irresistible . . . . In most cases recruiting was done by friends, acquaintances, or even family members.47 The facilitators made travel arrangements, obtained necessary documents, and provided money to the women. In Australia “ the majority of women know they will be working in the sex industry and often decide to come to Australia in the belief that they will be able to make a substantial amount of money . . . . Few of the women would ever consider themselves sex slaves.
”48 These are not isolated studies; others have shown that a proportion of migrants sold sex prior to relocating or were well aware that they would be working in the sex industry in their new home.
One analyst concludes that, “
The majority of ‘trafficking victims’ are aware that the jobs offered them are in the sex industry .”49 Whether this is indeed true for the majority (or instead applies to a minority) of women who have relocated to another locale and end up selling sex, it is clear that traffickers do not necessarily fit the “folk devil” stereotype popularized by the anti-trafficking movement . Some facilitators are relatives, friends, or associates who recruit workers and assist with migration , and these individuals have a qualitatively different relationship with workers than do predators who use force or deception to lure victims into the trade .

[07/15/10, Laura María Agustín is an anthropologist who studies undocumented migration, informal labor markets, trafficking and the sex industry, Ph. D in sociology and Louise Persson, “Doubtful report on sex-purchase law”,
Svenska Dagbladet, http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/theotherswedishmodel/]
Sex crimes go down in Sweden
:
The new evaluation of the law against buying sex is spreading the message round the world
, but the report suffers from too many scientific errors to justify any such claim.
The report was delayed. It is hard to find evidence to explain why one can’t see sex workers where one saw them before: Have they stopped selling sex, or are they doing it somewhere else?
Stigmatised and criminalised people avoid contact with police, social workers and researchers
.
Street prostitution receives exaggerated attention in the inquiry
, despite the fact that it represents a small, diminishing type of commercial sex that cannot be extrapolated to all
.
The inquiry mentions the difficulty of researching ‘prostitution on the internet’ but appears not to know that the sex industry comes in many different shapes being researched in depth elsewhere
(escorts without websites, sex parties, strip clubs, massage parlours, students who sell sex, among others).
The report’s conclusion that the law has decreased prostitution is based on police reports, government-funded groups working on prostitution
in three cities, a few small academic studies and comparisons with other Nordic countries. But police only encounter sex workers in the context of criminal inquiries , the funded groups mostly meet sex workers seeking help
, small studies can only indicate possible trends and the Danish statistics on the number of ‘active’ street workers
– used to show that Sweden’s prostitution is less – were publicly shown to be very wrong eight months ago
.
The law is claimed to have a dampening effect on sex trafficking
, but no proof is offered.
Trafficking statistics have long been disputed
outside Sweden, because of definitional confusion and refusals to accept the UN Convention on Organised Crime’s distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling linked to informal labour migration. The report claims the law diminishes ‘organised crime’ without analysing how crimes were identified and resolved or how they are related
to the sex-purchase law.
All social research must explain its methodology
.
An evaluation like this one needs to provide details on the sample of people consulted , since even in a field as small as Sweden’s no study can pretend to speak to everyone. Methodological research norms require explaining how informants were consulted, under what conditions, what questions they were asked and how, what ethical apparatus was in place to help guarantee they gave their true opinions, how a balance of different stakeholders was achieved, how many people refused to participate, and so on. In this report, however, the methodology section is practically non-existent
.
We know nothing about how it the evaluation was actually carried out
. On the other hand, the report brims with irrelevant material: background on how the law came about, Sweden’s history with gender equality, why prostitution is bad, why international audiences are interested in the evaluation and how many Swedes are said to currently support the law. One single sex worker’s sad personal story takes up three pages, while the account of sex workers’ opinions is limited to the results of a survey of only 14 people of which only seven were current sex workers.
Research must try for some kind of objectivity, but the government’s remit to the evaluation team said that ‘the buying of sexual services shall continue to be criminalised’ no matter what the evaluators found
.
The bias was inherent.
The Swedish government understands that the law is of interest internationally as a form of crime prevention. What they don’t realise is how, when the report is translated and reviewed, the methodological errors and crude bias will cause researchers in the field to dismiss this evaluation. The international trafficking debate has moved beyond the simplistic position presented in this report. More humility is needed from a small country with little experience of, and research about, undocumented migration and the sex industry. If one wants to present oneself as occupying a higher moral ground than other countries, one needs to do better work to understand complex questions.
This evalution tells us nothing about the effects of the sex-purchase law.
[Summer, 2012, Stephanie M. Berger is a J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School, Class of 2013, “No End in Sight: Why the "End Demand"
Movement is the Wrong Focus for Efforts to Eliminate Human Trafficking,” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, 35 Harv. J.L. & Gender 523, http://bayswan.org/enddemand/End%20Demand-Berger.pdf]
At the very least, the variety in outcomes of studies of sex buyers demonstrates that no accurate profile of a typical john exists . Efforts to end the harms of prostitution by shaming and punishing men who buy sex therefore suffer from their reliance on the faulty premise that all —or at least the majority—of johns are deviants who either are complicit in or derive pleasure from the exploitation of women . 2. Do Sex Buyers Drive Sex

Trafficking ? Many abolitionists discuss End Demand efforts as obvious, logical outgrowths of efforts to end human trafficking . In their view, sex trafficking specifically —and therefore the majority of human trafficking— could not exist without a market for sex work, which in turn could not exist without male demand for sex with prostitutes .124
These advocates make simplistic statements about supply and demand to support their claims : Without the demand for commercial sex , there would be no market forces producing and sustaining the roles of pimps and traffickers as ‘distributors
,
’ nor would there be a force driving the production of a ‘supply’ of people to be sexually exploited . Supply and distribution are symptoms; demand is the cause.125 Those who advocate for the End Demand strategy see increased law enforcement and rehabilitation programs for johns as the most effective method to stop both prostitution and sex trafficking .126 A more nuanced view of trafficking rejects the economic supply and demand model as applying to this complex problem . Human rights advocates find that a complex set of factors, not just male demand for sex, drives sex trafficking .127 In the trafficking context,
“demand and supply factors are closely intertwined,”128 with strong supply-side factors playing a role
.
Demand may be fueled by “an abundant supply of vulnerable women and girls whose services and labour can be exploited.” 129 Due to poverty, chronic unemployment, discrimination and inequality, these women may migrate voluntarily, be trafficked involuntarily, or experience a combination of both voluntary decisions and coercive circumstances that lead them to work in abusive situations.130 Ignoring supply-side factors commodifies workers and “ignores the very real fact that trafficked persons, migrants and workers are people who are trying to access labour and migration opportunities for themselves and their families, and who often try to resist or escape exploitative situations .” 131 Demand-side factors are also more complex than just desire of the men who buy sex.
“‘Demand’ in the context of trafficking is an ideologically loaded term for which there is no precise agreed upon definition and understanding .”132 Traffickers’ and some pimps’ desire for women who they can exploit—victims who do not require wages, safe working conditions, or the ability to choose their clients—may more significantly contribute to the demand for trafficked women.133 Criminalization of sex work, as opposed to decreasing demand, may create a stronger underground market that enables trafficking : The highly organized institutional structures, the networks of dependencies, the widespread linkages with many other types of le-gitimate economic activities, [and] the many vested interests . . . are not easy to dismantle . The powerful commercial and sometimes political as well as criminal elements will not willingly give up this lucrative line of business. Clamping down on some segments of the sex market may only lead to less visible and harderto-regulate activities . Research has shown that the market can adapt and adjust and that it is increasingly varied and sophisticated.134 Despite this lack of certainty that ending demand for sex work is possible, desirable, or effective in reducing trafficking , an increasingly strong movement to utilize End
Demand strategies is mobilizing, especially in the United States.