Loophole decriminalizing indoor sex work in RI was closed 16 years ago. What was learned
Nish Kohli, Providence Journal
* Decriminalization led to a decrease in reported rapes and gonorrhea cases, but was overturned in 2009.
* Sex worker advocates argue that criminalization endangers sex workers and disproportionately affects marginalized communities.
* Efforts to decriminalize sex work face opposition, while some laws offer limited protections for sex workers.
The Rhode Island law that makes it a crime to engage in sex work is on par with the legal framework that bans the trade throughout most of the United States.
However, for 30 years between 1980 and 2009, a policy change in the state decriminalized indoor prostitution, bringing with it an opportunity to study the public health and safety benefits of a system that doesn’t restrict people from accepting money for sex.
Since the indoor prostitution loophole was overturned, many sex worker advocates have lamented Rhode Island’s regression, criticizing newer laws, increased social stigma and a lack of protections they say impede sex workers’ safety. Although some state lawmakers have introduced bills to decriminalize sex work, fierce opposition from “abolitionists” continues to curb their efforts.
“What a lot of people don’t understand is that when you have a customer who could be dangerous or even somebody who is trying to extort you, like a pimp, the legality of sex work is something that gets held over sex workers’ heads,” said Ashley Perry, who co-leads a sex worker support group at Project Weber/RENEW. “We want full decriminalization. We don’t want decriminalization just for some community members and not others.”
The 30-year experiment
In the 1970s, amid a new era of feminism, the nation was divided over its attitudes about sexuality and pornography. Margo St. James — a former sex worker living in San Francisco — launched a group in 1973 to educate the public and advocate for sex workers’ rights. Dubbed COYOTE, short for “Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics,” the group called for the acknowledgment of sex work as legitimate work, women’s bodily autonomy and decriminalization of the profession.
Within a few years, the group had gained a national profile. In 1976, COYOTE filed a class action lawsuit in Rhode Island, alleging that the state's anti-prostitution laws were too broad and discriminatory against women, since female sex workers were arrested at far higher rates than male customers. Alongside prostitution, the state also banned any “lewd or indecent act,” which included extramarital sex. COYOTE’s lawsuit insisted that sexual activity taking place in private was shielded by constitutional protections.
“One, they were only arresting women, and two, what right did the state have to do arrests in private?” said Bella Robinson, a sex worker rights activist. “Basically, if you had sex with anyone besides your partner, you could be convicted of prostitution. It was so overly broad.”
Before the court could deliver a verdict, the General Assembly intervened, revising the law in 1980. Public outcry over a hub of street-based sex workers in Providence encouraged politicians to focus on targeting the trade’s outdoor presence. They changed the felony charge to a misdemeanor to speed up the conviction process and rewrote the law so that it only banned loitering outdoors for prostitution, rather than the act of prostitution itself.
“I think they wanted to streamline the approach to criminalizing prostitution by addressing the problem people really saw, which was solicitation occurring in public,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island.
Although that distinction was made intentionally, it took years for the policy's effects to become widely visible.
Unintended consequences
The early 2000s saw the rise of sex workers operating out of massage parlors. Despite police raids of such indoor venues in and around Providence, there were no grounds to convict sex workers, since indoor prostitution wasn’t a crime anymore. A commercial sex boom took off in Rhode Island, drawing workers and clients alike to the Ocean State.
“I worked under decriminalization for a few months,” said Robinson. “I had just gotten here in March of 2009 and it was great. People couldn’t threaten you because you could go to the police and report something. It was a whole different life.”
Robinson had engaged in sex work in other states before she relocated to Rhode Island, and she explained how much safer it felt to work legally. For the first time in many of their lives, sex workers could access resources such as health care without the fear of being turned in.
From 2004 to 2009, the state saw a 31% decrease in reported rapes and a 39% drop in female gonorrhea cases, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Oftentimes, when we talk about sex work, we are only talking about people out on the street. We are not talking about people who are doing it inside their homes, people who are engaging in things like escorting or cam work, even stripping for that matter,” said Perry, who also engaged in sex work while it was decriminalized indoors. “It really provided a safety net for me.”
Perry believes it opened doors for a lot of people, and it wasn’t until she started her current role working with people who engage in street-based sex work that she truly understood the inequities between different forms of sex work.
The era came to an end in November 2009 when the legislature passed a law prohibiting any commercial sex in Rhode Island, regardless of where it takes place. Providence authorities had campaigned vigorously to bar all prostitution, with the police department arguing that it was a necessary measure to catch sex traffickers.
“When sex work became criminalized again, it was really never translated to the sex work community until people started getting arrested again,” said Perry, pointing out the disconnect between government and the people affected by policy.
“Prostitution, outdoors or indoors, is a bad thing,” said then-Gov. Don Carcieri upon signing the bill. “I think it’s been a black eye, frankly, in our state that we’ve allowed this to go on, whatever the reason is, for far too long.”
Current landscape
The 2009 law stated that an offender guilty of selling or soliciting sex can be fined up to $1,000 and receive a prison sentence of up to six months. Additional offenses can trigger a maximum of 10 years of incarceration and an added fine reaching up to $10,000.
“We see people all the time who are in and out of the carceral systems here,” explained Perry. “What do you think they’re going to go do to pay those fines and fees? They’re going to go make money the only way they know how.”
The ACLU of RI analyzed arrest data in Providence, finding that 94% of people arrested on prostitution-related charges between 2016 and 2019 were women. The city made 79 arrests during that time period, only two of which were for solicitation, while the rest were for engaging in prostitution.
The modern data closely mirrored what was going on before the indoor loophole was introduced in 1980, said Brown.
“COYOTE gathered a lot of statistical information that documented something that everybody knew anyway,” he said. “Men were virtually never convicted. The men were used to accuse the women of engaging in prostitution, but they were let off free.”
The ACLU of RI also had concerns about entrapment techniques used by police. It obtained prostitution arrest reports from Woonsocket for the same period between 2016 and 2019, finding that most of the arrests occurred through sting operations. The documents included narrative reports from police officers who described agreeing to sexually touch women whom they later arrested, in an effort to convince the women they weren't really police officers.
“We’ve been trying to pass a law since 2018 that says if you are a police officer and you engage in [sexual] penetration with someone detained in custody under your supervision, you go to prison for three years. Sounds totally reasonable, right? It didn’t even get out of committee,” said Robinson, who founded COYOTE's Rhode Island chapter after the law changed in 2009.
In one of its research reports, COYOTE RI concluded that Asian migrant workers have been particularly affected by the state's criminalization of sex work, and in 2021, Asian women made up 81% of those arrested for prostitution or massaging without a license.
The series of shootings that killed eight people – including six women of Asian descent – at spas and a massage parlor in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2021 was one of the most notable incidents to bolster the Stop Asian Hate movement. Robinson noted that as regulators crack down on Asian-owned spas with the purported mission to end sex trafficking, acting on unsubstantiated claims has fueled job loss for spa employees who work legally and don’t engage in sex work.
At the national level, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals are disproportionately represented in prostitution arrests. Transgender women in particular are more vulnerable to police incorrectly profiling them as sex workers.
Reforming policy
Lawmakers have made some progress to reverse punitive policy that targets sex workers, but there’s still a lot of opportunity for improvement, said Brown.
“The number of prostitution arrests has decreased over the years as police have focused on more serious types of criminal offenses,” he added.
One of the bills that passed in Rhode Island this year was designed to provide sex workers with immunity from prosecution if they report witnessing certain crimes, but various groups criticized its lack of clarity and potential exploitation by traffickers. Also, this year, the General Assembly repealed a law that required anyone convicted of a prostitution charge to undergo mandatory HIV testing.
The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act went into effect across the United States in 2018, allowing the prosecution of any website involved in the “promotion or facilitation of prostitution." Although proponents of the act argued that it would help fight sex trafficking, critics contended that there needs to be more differentiation between consensual sex work and trafficking, while also offering stronger avenues to support victims. One of the largest platforms that shut down as a result was the adult advertising website Backpage.
“A lot of people thought of Backpage as this way to traffic women, when in fact many sex workers use Backpage as a safety net for themselves. It wasn’t just to post ads, but also to post things around safety if they had bad clientele and all of these other things," said Perry. “In their own minds, they’re doing this for justice for people who have been sex trafficked, but again, by continuing to criminalize us, they are actually opening up the door for more sex trafficking.”
