Each year, sex workers, advocates, and allied communities celebrate International Sex Worker Rights Day, recognizing a movement that upholds the principles of harm reduction to support the rights and dignity of those who are most vulnerable. International Sex Worker Rights Day was first organized in 2001 by Durbar Mahila Samanwaya, a Kolkata-based sex worker rights group whose name translates to “The Unstoppable Women’s Synthesis Committee.” It has since been adopted as a universal day of celebration, recognized around the world.

Sex workers face criminalization, stigmatization, and discrimination in all forms across the globe. March 3 provides an opportunity for groups to raise their voices in unison and recognize how far we have come and how far we still have to go. In 2022 alone, the movement has had several significant achievements:

* Sex work was decriminalized in Victoria, Australia;

* Amnesty International released a report reviewing the impact of “End Demand Policies in Ireland” and advocating for decriminalization;

* The United States Federal Court ruled that Title XI protects sex workers from being discriminated against based on their work history;

* Last Week Tonight with John Oliver featured the decriminalization of sex work on a segment;

* Burlington, Vermont voted overwhelmingly to strike language discriminating against sex workers from its city charter;

* An article in the Boston Review reignited the debate over whether there is a constitutional right to sex work; and

* Belgium decriminalized prostitution.

Many states have proposed bills that would provide immunity from arrests for sex workers who witness or are the victim of a crime, ensure sex workers have access to health care and vacate the convictions of trafficking survivors. This year, members of Congress proposed legislation to study the ways in which SESTA/FOSTA has impacted sex workers and survivors of human trafficking.

This year, DSW had the honor of hosting an event held by the New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG) in honor of the holiday. NYTAG invited sex workers to participate in a focus group in partnership with the Mayor’s Office’s Task Force on Health and Safety Needs of Sex Workers. Filmmaker Tavleen Tarrant attended and shot footage for her upcoming documentary on sex work and related issues in New York State.

Leading up to International Sex Worker Rights Day, DSW’s Melissa Broudo participated in a symposium on the national movement to decriminalize sex work. The symposium, entitled “Decrimpact,” was hosted by the Getting to Zero Activist Academy, a Massachusetts-based organization fighting the HIV/AIDS crisis by bridging intersectional divides. The event debuted Out of the Shadows: The Movement to Decriminalize Sex Work, a short documentary filmed and produced by participants in the Activist Academy and Dawson Hill. The film captures the voices of local sex worker rights activists, researchers, and Representative Lindsay Sabadosa (D-Northampton), a Massachusetts state representative who recently proposed H. 1867, a bill to fully decriminalize consensual adults sex work in Massachusetts. It explores how decriminalizing sex work would help the fight against HIV, reduce commercial sex trafficking, and promote the safety of sex workers.

As a society, we’ve never been very good at talking about sex, John Oliver points out in the February 27th episode of Last Week Tonight. If we want to craft legislation and policies that protect human rights, public health, and the safety of all communities equally, we need to do better. The show’s recent segment dives headfirst into the issue of sex work decriminalization. “Everything about the way we regulate sex work in this country is confusing and counter-productive,” says Oliver. It’s either “demonizing, patronizing, or just plain wrong.” He goes on to analyze the convoluted contradictions inherent in criminalizing sex workers in order to “save” them. Central to Oliver’s argument: instead of trying to project a discriminatory and misogynistic moral framework onto those engaging in commercial sex, “we need to be talking constructively about how to make [sex work] safer in every possible way.”

DSW staff attorney and legal director, Rebecca Cleary and Melissa Broudo provided background research to the producers of the show, resulting in a poignant and hilarious analysis that unflinchingly addresses the stigma and misconceptions around sexual labor. Many members of law enforcement and lawmakers oppose decriminalization because they believe that sex work is inherently exploitative and that decriminalization will allow trafficking in commercial sex to proliferate. But sex workers are not a monolith — many different kinds of people engage in commercial sex for a variety of reasons. To enact the most effective, impactful policies for a deeply diverse population, we must consult with and listen to impacted communities. Sex work is work; it’s how people support themselves and their families, the same as any other job. And sex workers are people with thoughts and opinions on their own situations and they overwhelmingly support the decriminalization of sex work because it makes their work safe.

In the segment, one law enforcement officer said that sex workers often describe being arrested as having “saved [their] life.” Oliver makes the perhaps obvious point that if the best option we have to help someone is to arrest them, that poses a system-wide problem. No one should be forced to participate in sex work against their will, just as no one should be forced to do any form of labor against their will. But saddling someone with a criminal record is a far cry from help, particularly when repeated arrests can result in felony convictions in certain states.

Many of these arrests occur during prostitution stings in which police pose as clients and then arrest  people who agree to have sex with them. “It’s no wonder many sex workers have trouble regarding the police as their saviors especially as cops have a reputation for acting violently or inappropriately during stings,” said Oliver. “A couple of years ago in Arizona, a federal agency engaged in 17 sexual encounters with women working in massage parlors as part of an investigation, disgustingly code-named ‘Operation Asian Touch’. And that’s not uncommon. Because in many states it is not specifically illegal for police officers to have sex with sex workers during a sting operation. And in some cases, police have protested efforts to ban the practice. This is both grotesque and also a bit ironic because what they’re fundamentally arguing there is that they should be able to have sex for their jobs legally in order to stop people having sex for their jobs.”

Even without these abhorrent policies, the way that sex work is policed in this U.S. is incredibly discriminatory, particularly along the lines of race, gender, and gender expression. The recently repealed loitering for the purpose of prostitution offense in New York State was used to target, arrest, and harass individuals for legal activities like talking to passersby or wearing certain clothing or the basis of “looking like” a sex worker. The law was colloquially termed “the ban on Walking While Trans” because of the disproportionate number of trans women targeted for the crime. 88% of people arrested under this statute from 2009-2019 were women of color. From 2016 to 2020, almost everyone arrested for prostitution-related crimes in NY was non-white. In other cities, workers are arrested for carrying condoms, leading many sex workers to go without, putting their lives at risk.

The episode digs into many more examples of the irony and, in some cases, the idiocy of the laws that govern sex work in the U.S. Having conversations about making sex work safer is almost impossible when it is continually conflated with human trafficking. Human trafficking is an egregious offense where “any number north of zero is clearly terrible,” but reports of millions of people allegedly trafficked into commercial sex each year are consistently debunked by experts. 80% of trafficking cases occur in sectors outside of commercial sex. However, because of conflation and a disproportionate focus on prostitution as trafficking, advocates and service providers report that non-sexual labor trafficking cases often go unreported and unprosecuted. Some states have even codified this harmful conflation into law, replacing the word prostitution with trafficking. Alaska used this provision to prosecute a woman for trafficking herself.

While the segment engages audience members because of its witty pointedness, the reality of these policies for impacted communities is much less amusing. Reducing all sex work to exploitation removes the voices, agency, and humanity of the individuals who engage in it, which lawmakers use as an excuse to ignore sex workers in crafting policies.

An outlier in this is New Zealand, which decriminalized consensual adult, sex work in 2013. Under the 2013 Prostitution Reform Act, commercial sex is no longer a crime, so long as it is consensual. This allows sex workers access to unemployment benefits, healthcare, and other fundamental rights. Under the law, sex workers have successfully sued for sexual harassment and assault they experienced while working. “It is a human rights-centered approach,” says Oliver, “that seems to be working.”

The episode acknowledges that we don’t have all the answers yet. “There are good-faith disagreements to be had over the finer points of decriminalization policy,” Oliver notes. “But if we basically agree, as I hope we do, that making sex work safer is a priority, it is the direction to strive toward.”

DSW was honored to be included in the research of this episode and encouraged to have this issue discussed on such a well-known platform. If you haven’t yet viewed the episode, we highly recommend it for some heavy-hitting truth bombs and belly-laughs.