Supporting the Other Decriminalization: Sex Work

New York State finally passed a bill that legalizes marijuana and justly releases people serving time for the kind of drug crimes that now are no more. The enforcement of the drug bans were always super racially skewed, primarily targeting people of color. Carl Hart’s “Drug Use for Grownups” really drives home just how misguided the war on drugs has been.

There is another less discussed area where criminalization has led to similar issues and that is sex work. In sex work too law enforcement skews heavily towards minorities and marginalized groups. And much as with drugs it is motivated by a kind of moral panic based largely on preposterous exaggeration of the actual data (such as ridiculous statistics about sex trafficking associated with the Super Bowl). Let me be clear: coercing people to do anything is a crime and should be persecuted — whether that is for farm work or sex work or anything else for that matter. And of course we have laws that make various forms of coercion, such as blackmail, illegal.

I first became interested in this issue when the state attorney generals bandied together to go after the Craigslist adult services section. I am pretty sure that there were cases of sex trafficking that involved Craigslist. Nonetheless, thinking that the way to solve that problem is by getting Craigslist to shut down that section of the site portrays either a deep misunderstanding about how the internet works or simply grandstanding on an issue perceived as a political winner.

To see just how upside down the rhetoric is compared to the reality of enforcement, one need to look no further than 2019 operation in Florida that garnered national headlines because it was geographically close to Mar-a-Lago and one of the men charged with solicitation was Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. In the early reporting this was characterized as a major human trafficking bust. Fast forward to today and the only ones actually charged with anything are the women who worked there (entirely voluntarily as it turns out).

The sex trafficking panic has also been weaponized to reshape online content and payments at scale. SESTA/FOSTA is legislation that made it illegal to host any content that might be supporting sex trafficking. While initially opposed by a broad coalition, not unlike PIPA/SOPA ,that collapsed as Facebook decided to come out in support of the legislation as a way of currying favor with regulators. As predicted by sex workers and others, this resulted in lots of useful information being removed from the internet. And of course the same panic has been used to justify payments companies shutting off services for Pornhub and is also behind the latest attack on Onlyfans. For added clarity: I am not saying that Pornhub or Onlyfans are problem free, I am simply arguing that the wholesale treatment of these in ways that overnight cut off the livelihoods of many people is the kind of intervention that does significantly more harm than good.

Much of this could be avoided by decriminalizing sex work and instead focusing on the much rarer cases of actual trafficking or coercion.  This focus would be made easier by decriminalization because now victims wouldn’t be afraid to come forward because of fear of arrest (they might still of course be afraid of a trafficker, so decriminalization is not a panacea). 

There are many good overviews of arguments for sex work decriminalization and there are organizations one can support, such as DecrimNY.