Pressure Grows In NY To Take Sex Work Out Of The Shadows

By Emma Cueto | March 3, 2019, 8:02 PM EST

Advocates and lawmakers in New York are gearing up to make the Empire State the first in the country to decriminalize sex work, hoping for a package of changes that they say should include wiping away past criminal convictions on prostitution and related charges.

Decrim NY, a coalition of organizations and current and former sex workers, officially launched on Feb. 25, and several committee chairs in the state Legislature used the rollout to announce plans for legislation this session that would decriminalize sex work in an effort to make sex workers safer.

"We must repeal New York's anti-prostitution criminal laws that harm people who trade sex by choice, circumstance, or coercion," said Aya Tasaki of the gender based violence nonprofit Womankind, who also serves on the Decrim NY steering committee.

"But in order to protect people who are exploited in the sex trades, we also need human rights laws that support sex workers in claiming their rights in the workplace, and we need to vacate criminal records related to prostitution convictions so people can end their ongoing entanglement with the criminal legal system and move on with their lives," Tasaki said.

Decriminalization refers to making the entire adult commercial sex industry — which includes all consensual means of exchanging sex for goods or services —legal, while keeping laws against sexual assault, statutory rape, human trafficking and other forms of sexual violence.

Sex work has not been decriminalized anywhere in the United States, although some counties in Nevada have licensed several regulated brothels to operate legally. Globally, although some countries have opted for partial decriminalization or a highly regulated legal sex industry, the only country to have fully decriminalized sex work is New Zealand, which did so in 2003.

Although decriminalization has been embraced by some major advocacy groups, many are also wary of the prospect.

"I never thought I would see this happen in my city and in my state," said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, which is based in New York City. "It's just beyond devastating."

Bien-Aimé said that she viewed the proposal as a "declaration of war" on women and girls in New York, and that her organization would oppose it strongly. She also said she does not use the term "sex work," as she doesn't like the implication that it can be a safe or fun job.

She said decriminalization would create "gender apartheid" where only some women would have opportunity and rights while more vulnerable women would be allowed to be exploited.

She said her organization supports a legal model first adopted in Sweden in 1999 which decriminalizes selling sex but keeps criminal penalties for buying or facilitating the sale of sex.

"The members [of Decrim NY] are groups that otherwise do good work," she said. "I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they are confused on the issue, because I think we all recognize that people in prostitution, people who fell, are highly vulnerable, and we all want them to no longer be arrested, to no longer be criminalized, to be offered services ... but you cannot decriminalize the entire sex trade."

In contrast, advocates for decriminalization, including local groups such as Decrim NY and international organizations such as Amnesty International, generally say that allowing sex workers to operate legally makes it easier for them to protect themselves, access health care and other services, report abuse and violence, and organize for better working conditions.

Nina Luo, a member of the steering committee for Decrim NY, said that decriminalization became more of a priority for advocates in the U.S. last year after the bipartisan passage of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, collectively known as SESTA-FOSTA, at the national level.

The federal laws had the stated goal of cracking down on human trafficking, especially sex trafficking, but Luo said they also shut down online venues that provided safer avenues for sex workers to seek out and screen potential clients.

"We saw an increase in violence against people trading sex and people being made more vulnerable as well, because they no longer had their sources of income and their usual ways of finding clients and screening clients," she said. "That made [decriminalization] more pressing."

The fact that the Democratic Party regained control of the state Senate in 2018 also made advocates think the time might be right to move forward.

Currently, several sex work-related bills are pending in the Legislature, including a proposal to eliminate loitering for the purpose of prostitution as a criminal offense and to expand the possibility for people to vacate sex work-related criminal offenses from their record. And legislators also say they are drafting legislation that would decriminalize all adult, consensual sex work.

State Sens. Jessica Ramos, who chairs the Senate Labor Committee, and Julia Salazar, who chairs the Senate Women's Health Committee, also wrote a piece for the New York Daily News to coincide with the launch of Decrim NY, supporting full decriminalization.

"Criminalization does not address why people trade sex, because most people trade sex out of economic need: to pay bills, make rent, and put food on the table," they said.

The senators also highlighted racial disparities in prostitution-related arrests, disproportionate impacts on undocumented people, and problems with New York's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts.

The courts were created in 2013 as a way to connect people who were victims of sex trafficking with resources and services and to target human traffickers for criminal prosecution. A 2015 report, however, found that the court's ability to ensure services was inconsistent and that the public nature of court records could still interfere with sex workers' ability to find other jobs.

Tiffany Cabán, a public defender running for district attorney in Queens, said that she considers the courts to be "an utter failure."

Cabán has pledged that if elected she would no longer prosecute sex work in Queens and said that in her experience, New York's current approach to sex work and human trafficking is not working.

"We have all of these policies that come out and sometimes they sound great, but what I see on the ground in court everyday is that they don't have the intended impact," she said.

Luo said that she wasn't sure decriminalization would be able to pass in New York this session, but that she hoped at least some of the proposals would make it through, especially legislation to offer those with prostitution convictions a clean slate. She compared the issue to the legalization of marijuana, noting that even in most states that have legalized, marijuana convictions stay on residents' records.

"The marijuana movement has done so much and at the same time failed so many people, and we don't want to do that," she said.

At the very least, she said, she hoped that by introducing the policy proposal, legislators and advocates would raise awareness.

"At the end of the day we're not having a moral debate or a feminist debate about whether you want to do sex work," she said. "It's really about understanding the harm that criminalization causes people who trade sex, who are primarily trading sex out of need."

--Editing by Brian Baresch.

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