Sex Workers Say Decriminalization Makes Them Safer. It's Time to Listen to Them.
“As a former sex worker, I have suffered so much for the criminalization of the work I had to do to survive,” Cecilia Gentili told a crowd gathered at New York City’s Foley Square in early March. Today, Gentili is an HIV activist, but when she first immigrated to America from Argentina, she worked in the sex industry.
Behind her in the square were Jessica Ramos and Julia Salazar, two recently-elected New York state senators, who plan to introduce a bill that would decriminalize sex work. Criminalization “does not address why people trade sex, because most people trade sex out of economic need,” the pair wrote in a recent New York Daily News op-ed, adding that it encourages abuses by law enforcement, and makes vulnerable populations more susceptible to violence and exploitation.
If it passes, New York would be the first state in America to completely decriminalize sex work. (Nevada has partially legalized it.) But it won’t be an easy ride for DecrimNY, a coalition of sex workers and non-profits campaigning to both destigmatize and decriminalize the trade in New York. A week after the pro-decriminalization rally, a different group of demonstrators assembled at New York’s City Hall. “Everyone agrees it’s time to stop arresting sex workers,” Sonia Ossorio, the president of New York City’s National Organization for Women, told those gathered. “But we don’t agree that buyers and pimps should get free reign.”
The legislative approach Ossorio is advocating—where it’s illegal to buy, but not to sell, sex—is called the Nordic model. It’s a popular alternative to full decriminalization advanced by those who see sex work as inherently exploitative. Since the Swedish Social Democratic Party introduced it 20 years ago, it has been adopted in other countries like Norway, Ireland, and Canada. But according to those actually working in the sex industry, it’s about as effective as a condom with holes poked in it.
“The Nordic model isolates sex workers,” explains Catherine Healy, who worked in a Wellington, New Zealand brothel in the 1980s before spearheading an ultimately successful national campaign in 2003 to legalize prostitution there. “You’re unlikely to report violent incidents because it means having to give your address, and then the police will stake out your apartment and arrest your clients.” What does work, Healy says, is when prostitutes are free to ply their trade without fear of harsh legal repercussions. “In my country, sex workers say that if they have a problem, they can call the police. That gives them a lot more control over what they do and with whom they do it.”
Sex workers have been making this argument for a long time. More than a decade ago, a coalition of prostitutes and human rights advocates in San Francisco launched an unsuccessful campaign to decriminalize the sex industry there. So far, though, they’ve been either ignored or dismissed by well-intentioned but often ill-informed do-gooders with little understanding of the real-world consequences of the policies they promote. More recently, for example, the decision to shut down Backpage—against the protests of the sex workers who used the website to advertise their services—has left the industry less safe, according to those working in it.
If sex workers themselves can’t convince legislators and feminist groups that decriminalization is the best way forward, could academics have more luck? “I would love it if we took a data-driven approach to policy decisions,” Manisha Shah, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells me. In 2014, she and Scott Cunningham of Baylor University did groundbreaking research that suggests the pro-decriminalization lobby might be onto something.
“We lucked out with what happened in Rhode Island,” Shah says, referring to a legal loophole that accidentally and temporarily decriminalized indoor prostitution in the state. “A lot of people make very big assertions about this topic, but most of the time there just isn’t any data to back them up, or the methodological constraints mean they’re not able to make causal claims.”
For example, one of the most widely cited studies on the supposed link between legalized prostitution and human trafficking has been criticized for its serious flaws and lack of reliable data. Baylor and Shah’s research managed to overcome the limitations that other studies have ran into. “Because none of the neighboring states changed their laws related to prostitution, we had this natural control group, so any broader economic or social changes could be controlled for,” Shah explains.
So what were their findings? Some of the results weren’t especially surprising. They observed a 45 percent decrease in arrests of prostitutes from 2004 to 2009, and with fewer barriers to entry, the size of the market grew. But others left them floored: a 31 percent reduction in rape offenses and a 39 percent reduction in female gonorrhea cases in the broader population.
“We weren’t expecting these results, but there have been a few other studies since ours that found something similar,” Shah notes. For example, a 2015 study of 25 Dutch cities found that opening a legal street prostitution zone decreased sexual abuse and rape by as much as 40 percent. Another study from researchers at Columbia University and the European University Institute found similar results. “Except for the growth of the market, everything else that we worry about from a policy perspective—like public health and violence against women—gets better when sex work is decriminalized,” Shah says.
If research suggests decriminalization benefits not just prostitutes but society more broadly, why haven’t lawmakers followed the recommendations of groups like Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations, and stopped policing the sex industry? “Many people see sex work as morally repugnant, so public policy around it is very rarely based on the actual evidence,” laments Shah.
That was exactly the struggle Healy and other sex workers in New Zealand faced when they started their fight for legalization. “People get a bit icky about sex in general, so there was a stigma around the work we did that we had to overcome.” For pro-decriminalization advocates in New York, Healy has one important piece of advice from her own successful campaign: “Don’t let others speak on your behalf. Often, sex workers are parented, because people feel like they can’t be trusted. We made sure we had a direct line to government.”
It’s a strategy that paid off. While the bill to legalize sex work in New Zealand was hugely contentious and passed by just one vote, 15 years later, most people have come round to the idea. “Today, it’s generally accepted among most of the population,” Healy says—to the point that there’s talk of creating a ministry for prostitution. “Even those who didn’t think it could work have had a change of heart.”
Despite what some moralizing groups might hope for, the world’s oldest profession isn’t going to disappear any time soon. But New Zealand is proof that by listening to the people working in it, we can go a long way to making it safer for them.
