Last month, The New York Times published a piece on trafficking along Los Angeles’ Figueroa corridor and suggested that California's repeal of its “loitering for the purpose of prostitution” statute (SB 357) hindered police efforts to “rescue” minors being exploited. According to the article, the only way to make this rescue is to arrest women and girls on suspicion alone, a harmful tactic that not only ensnares consensual adult sex workers but is inhumane and ineffective at reducing exploitation.
This article’s pro-carceral framing is misleading and deeply harmful. Loitering laws have never been a meaningful anti-trafficking strategy. They have, however, been a proven vehicle for profiling, harassing, and criminalizing Black, brown, trans, and low-income women for who they are — not for what they are doing. These laws operated as a form of “stop-and-frisk for trans women and women of color,” allowing officers to arrest people based on clothing, location, or perceived “intent.” For decades, these laws funneled survivors and consensual adult sex workers alike into the criminal legal system while doing nothing to address trafficking’s root causes.
The repeal of SB 357 in 2023 did not eliminate law enforcement’s ability to identify or support minors. It simply ended a practice that relied on sweeping arrests, vague suspicion, and racialized assumptions. Suggesting that arresting children, or anyone, is an acceptable “rescue” strategy ignores what survivors and service providers have said for years: criminalization makes people more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, homelessness, and police abuse.
Anti-trafficking organizations agree. Freedom Network USA, the largest national coalition of anti-trafficking service providers, criticized the NYT article’s reliance on arrest-based intervention, noting that “[arresting people], especially survivors, sets them up for a lifetime of hardships” and fails to meet their actual needs like stable housing, food security, community support, and long-term economic options. Survivors themselves echoed this truth in the NYT piece: “If I had housing, I wouldn’t be out here.”
Experts and evidence clearly state that meaningful anti-trafficking strategies do not depend on giving police more power to arrest marginalized people. Instead, they rely on investments in housing, youth services, community-based outreach, and the implementation of legislation like Good Samaritan laws and decriminalization to protect workers and survivors.
The repeal of loitering statutes in California and New York was a necessary correction to a century-long pattern of policing rooted in racism, misogyny, and the criminalization of poverty. Protecting young people from exploitation requires confronting these systems at their roots, not putting children in handcuffs.
Read DSW’s briefing paper on Loitering for the Purpose of Prostitution here.
