The Problem

What does justice look like when talking about prostitution? In the United States, prostitution is highly criminalized under a range of laws, not just one law. Both the sale of sex and the purchase of sex are illegal, as is the solicitation of prostitution (before sex ever takes place). Furthermore, laws such as loitering for the purposes of committing prostitution are based on arbitrary factors that can include a person’s location, dress, and possession of more than two condoms. People of color, trans-women, and women living in poverty are often the targets of these laws.

Additionally, since the institutionalization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the early 2000s, the U.S. federal government, with the help of immigration opponents, conservative Christians, and radical (sex worker exclusionary) feminists, has laid the framework for states and municipalities to create new anti-trafficking laws. These laws often revolve around sex trafficking, rather than other forms of labor trafficking. As such, people often assume that prostitution and human trafficking are the same thing – a universal experience of some level of coercion, violence, and/or involving minors – and call to abolish both. In reality, prostitution is paid consensual sex acts between adults. Sex work including prostitution is a complex issue impacted by intersecting inequalities of race, class, and gender.

When so much misinformation guides our students, our policy makers, and our communities, it is essential that the violence and civil rights offenses experienced by those who engage in sex work and the sex trade in the United States be brought to light. Sex work is enmeshed in our understandings of gender and sexual rights, from state-level End Demand campaigns that aim to criminalize those who purchase sex, to high school youth putting on anti-trafficking plays, to recent revelations that Margaret Cho, Laverne Cox, and Maya Angelou, to name a few famous people, have engaged in sex work in the past.

Is the scope and scale of prostitution best understood through the lens of criminal justice? How do we make sense of high levels of police violence and harassment against sex workers (e.g., see Bass 2015), especially trans-women and poor women of color? How does law enforcement determine who should be arrested for prostitution and who should be saved as a victim of sex trafficking?