Finding common ground in a time of crisis
Every year, around this time, the airwaves in whatever city is hosting the Super Bowl are flooded with public services announcements about sex trafficking. Billboards go up. Police officers receive special training. Media asks organizations that work to reduce trafficking to comment on the “biggest sex trafficking event of the year.”
There is no evidence that the actual volume of sex trafficking increases as a result of the Super Bowl. More importantly, we collectively try to make the point that the hype often leads to a damaging response - arresting people who are directly selling sex.
Historically, the anti-trafficking and sex worker rights movements have struggled to find common ground and the disagreements have sometimes become heated. But this is one thing we passionately agree upon. We believe our time, talent, and treasure is best invested toward supporting the direct needs of those with lived experience, as opposed to coercive intervention. There are others. Our areas of agreement are based in shared deeply held values and commitments: To the dignity of each and every human being and to an end to violence, against people in the sex trades, to name a few.
With that in mind, we come together this January - Human Trafficking Awareness and Prevention Month, to offer the following shared recommendations.
DO NOT ARREST PEOPLE FOR SELLING SEXUAL SERVICES. PERIOD.
Arresting people for selling sexual services:
Increases their vulnerability to trafficking.
Burdens them with a criminal record that makes it harder for them to find safe housing and legal employment.
Adds stigma to an already-stigmatized population.
Traffickers, abusive family, and other perpetrators of harm often use threats of shame, arrest, and prosecution as weapons. Arresting and jailing people directly selling sex replicates this pattern of abuse, creating trauma for trafficking survivors and consensual workers alike.
On a very practical level, it is also a profoundly ineffective way to try to fight trafficking. Threatened with incarceration, people arrested for selling sexual services may feel coerced into saying whatever they think gets them home. For example, they may plead to crimes they did not commit. This impedes accurate investigations.
While some argue that arrests offer a gateway to people in trafficking situations to seek help, the reality is that people in trafficking situations are likely more afraid of their trafficker than of law enforcement, and many come from backgrounds where law enforcement is considered untrustworthy at best, dangerous or hostile at worst.
Bottom line: We cannot end trafficking and other forms of violence as long as vulnerable people are traumatized by the systems society relies on for safety and justice.
BAN SEXUAL CONTACT BETWEEN LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS AND PEOPLE THEY MIGHT ARREST.
We can’t believe we have to say this, but here it is.
In 2020, the public learned that Homeland Security Investigations agents engaged in sexual contact with potential trafficking survivors as part of their investigations. This is not an isolated incident. In all but four states, it is legal for law enforcement officers to engage in sexual activity with people they may arrest. When law enforcement officers coerce sexual activity from people they might or plan to arrest, it is sexual violence. When investigators are allowed to engage in sexual contact with the targets of their human trafficking operations, they re-victimize survivors already experiencing the horrors of human trafficking. When people in the sex trades are sexually assaulted by law enforcement officers under the guise of investigations, trust in law enforcement’s commitment to ending violence is damaged.
Damaged trust means that:
Investigations of violent crimes (to include human trafficking, domestic violence and sexual assault) are hindered.
Survivors of crime are less likely to seek or receive justice and/or services.
Exploiters continue to see people who sell sexual services as “fair game,” targeting them for violence and crime.
Making it illegal for police officers to have sex with people they might arrest ensures that the systems meant to protect victims do not become perpetrators of state-sanctioned sexual assault or human trafficking.
GIVE PEOPLE IN THE SEX TRADES WHO REPORT CRIMES IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION.
People in the sex trades often avoid reporting incidents to law enforcement for fear that coming forward will lead to their own arrest.
This leaves them vulnerable as targets for harassment, stalking, assault, human trafficking, and other forms of violent victimization. For trafficking survivors, fear is leveraged into exploitation.
Providing people in the sex trades immunity from prosecution when they report crimes or violence against themselves or others allows them to report sexual violence, trafficking, and other crimes to the right authorities.
Enact Laws That Provide Survivors a Pathway to Clear Criminal Records
Trafficking survivors are often arrested and prosecuted for a variety of criminal charges related to their trafficking.
With a criminal record these survivors are less able to rebuild their lives due to impacts on their ability to find safe housing, find or maintain legal employment, continue their education, or vote. Survivors with criminal records may find their families torn apart or further impoverished, as their criminal records interfere with their ability to maintain custody of the children or access government benefits that keep their families from hunger and homelessness. These harmful impacts are amplified for foreign nationals whose legal work options in the United States depend heavily on not having a criminal record, or who may be deported for falsified documents.
Many states have some form of limited, conditional criminal records relief - such as relief for people who were minors at the time of the trafficking, or for charges related only to prostitution. Additionally, many of the mechanisms for seeking relief are prohibitively complex, expensive, and potentially retraumatizing These laws must be revamped to include all charges directly connected to trafficking experience and they must offer a pathway that is actually useable. Giving survivors legal options for expungement of records related to their trafficking gives them a better chance at achieving safety and security, and reduces traffickers’ leverage over them.
Human trafficking does not happen in a vacuum. It is the direct result of societal inequity, generational poverty, the disruption of communities by violence, and criminalization of survival. All these societal shortcomings disproportionately harm people from marginalized communities and contribute to a higher statistical risk of trafficking as well as other forms of violence. We cannot arrest our way out of social problems. Attempts to do so leave vulnerable people more vulnerable, traffickers with more power, and real members of our communities struggling to maintain hope as they try to rebuild their lives. Our movements should not cause harm in the name of ending harm.
We can and must do better.
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