SPEAKER_00 0:57

Hello and welcome back to Behind the Pad Podcast with me, Paulson Victoria. And this Thursday we're carry on, we're going to be carrying on reading Revolting Prostitutes by Molly Smith and Juno Mack. And we are on page just really, really at the bottom of page 121. So Sex Workers with Drug Dependencies. Trying to deal with the pain of homelessness and the loss of children are seen as steering their own chaotic and downward spiral, which makes it easy to vilify them as quote deserving punitive sanctions. Prostitution policing also forcibly administrators the mantle of chronic disgrace in more direct ways, such as posting mugshots and full names from prostitution arrests on social media. In one recent case, a Florida police department outed a sex worker who tried to trade sex with an undercover officer for a fast food meal. Her legal name and photographs were reproduced widely in the press, as if this were an amusing rather than horrifying abuse of a vulnerable person. Prior to 2011, a centuries old law that criminalized crimes against nature by solicitation cans resulted in some sex workers in Louisiana being placed on a sex offender registry for fifteen years to life. The workers placed on the registry were disproportionately black or trans workers. To be placed on such a registry is in many ways to experience a profound social death. You are excluded from housing, from social security, from most jobs, and from your community. You can be barred from domestic violence shelters. You often cannot live or socialize unsupervised with children, even your own children. Your driving license, which you need to produce during your traffic stop, or to buy alcohol, or to deposit money in your local bank, reads sex offender in huge orange letters. People on the registry are assumed to be perpetrators of extreme sexual violence, and as such are often subject to vigilante violence from neighbors. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the nearby state of Florida barred registered sex offenders from public hurricane shelters, directing them to jails instead. Those prosecuted under federal law as traffickers, even those who have only trafficked themselves, like the young black woman selling sex mentioned earlier in this chapter, are still placed on sex offender registries. Anti-prostitution policing also severely obstructs sex workers from carrying and using condoms, exposing them to health risks such as unwanted pregnancies and HIV. One sex worker in New York had police officers open her condoms and quote drop them into the sewer all the time, ten times a month, end quote. Another US sex worker says quote, if I took a lot of condoms, they would arrest me. If I took a few or only one, I would run out and not be able to protect myself. How many times have I had unprotected sex because I was afraid of carrying condoms? Many times. Andrea Ritchie writes that in New York in the early 2000s, the practice was so pervasive that many believed there was a quote free condom rule. Anyone caught with three or more condoms would be charged with prostitution. In reality, there is no magic number. I have seen criminal complaints listing a single condom as evidence of intent to exchange in prostitution related offences. In a direct echo of what happened to Gloria Lockett, one transgender Latina woman told lawmakers that when she and a friend were arrested on the street, her friend was charged with loitering for the purposes of prostitution, a misdemeanor, and she was charged with promoting her friend, a felony, because she was carrying condoms. As technology and commercial sex collide, anti-prostitution policing too is increasingly present online. In America, the 2010s have seen a war of attrition against online platforms that host sex workers' ads. Sites from Craigslist to Backpage to Rent Boy and Eros shuttered their ad section in response to attempted prosecutions or have been brought down by actual arrests. Rent Boy, for example, was suddenly pulled offline in the summer of 2015 when law enforcement raided its offices, indicted its chief executives. Losing these advertising platforms pushes sex workers onto the street where their increased visibility makes them more vulnerable to arrest, or more likely to depend on managers. When San Francisco ad site and messaging board My Red Book was taken down in the summer of 2014, local sex workers lost not only the ability to post free ads and screen clients online, but a huge community resource, including harm reduction information such as quote bad date lists, which warn workers of violent clients. While we were writing this book, new laws which increase website providers, vulnerability to prosecution, over hosting sex work ads were passed in the US legislator. Cesta Foster censored a huge number of advertising platforms at once in spring 2018, rendering sex workers in the US and beyond more precarious, broke, and desperate almost overnight as their source of income vanished. Cesta Foster increased the power of clients and would-be managers as sex workers scrambled to find work in any way they could. One client wrote, I definitely think this will end up being a win for hobbyists, habitual clients. Prices will drop because providers, sex workers, will not be able to pull in new customers and have to take whoever they can. Specials, such as sex without a condom, will become more prevalent. They will have to act friendlier and not have the luxury of turning away clients any longer. Sex workers come across the US reported that in the immediate aftermath of Sesta Foster, they started getting a flood of texts, calls, and other come ons from wannabe managers, looking to lure newbie desperate workers into potentially exploitative arrangements. As one sex worker said, there's always something in the message alluding to these bills that have just passed. Quote, now you need me. It's really creepy because that exact thing is what the people who passed the bill thought they were fighting. And they've brought it into my life. Another sex worker wrote, quote, Once Backpage was seized, I saw workers in my area who'd only recently clawed their way back up from street-based work and homelessness into the lowest rung of indoor work, get flung back into what they'd just escaped. St. James Infirmary reported four times as many street-based workers as before in the mission district. The sex worker community online start to hear about workers going back out on the street and missing their check-in calls as of April 14, just based on anecdotal data passed between us. 13 workers have gone missing and two have been confirmed dead. It could seem paradoxical that these laws, which ostensibly aim to fight exploitation, instead make exploitation easier and more prevalent. But ultimately it is not a paradox. Reducing sex workers' ability to connect with clients always increases scarcity and makes workers more vulnerable. What is new about Cesta Foster is the way in which, in an increasingly interconnected world, the effects of criminalization in the US hit sex workers all over the world. Sex workers in the UK also had to scramble to move adverts onto different sites and servers, losing work in the meantime. The law thereby making these workers more precarious. Our community had to pool money and energy to help those who struggled as a result. Criminalization forces workers to compromise on some or all of their safety strategies in the hope of avoiding the police. At the same time, it signals to violent people that sex workers are in the same sense, quote, legitimate targets at periphery of society. One sex worker in South Africa says that it used to be very good doing sex work because police officers were not on our case. I don't know what triggered it, but they started being on our case. So we needed to move to darker and shadier places to avoid the police who were abusing us. And that's when we started being prey to our clients. Simply being a police officer opens up opportunities for perpetrator harassment, abuse, extortion, and rape. One young woman in Chicago reports, quote, I was solicited by a police officer who said that if I had sex with him, he wouldn't arrest me. So I did. Then afterwards he cuffed me and pressed charges anyway. Another says, quote, I was going to meet a new John. It turned out to be a sting set up by the cops. He got violent with me, handcuffed me, then raped me. He cleaned me up for the police station, and I got sentenced to four months in jail for prostitution. Besides those illegal abuses of power, police having sex with prostitutes is formally endorsed by the state. Across the US, police officers routinely have sex during prostitution stings, conveniently arresting the worker only after the officer has ejaculated. In Alaska, a proposed legislative measure to ban undercover cops from sexual contact with sex workers has met with resistance from Anchorage Police Department, who have argued that abstaining from sexual contact makes it harder to prove prostitution is happening. Would any sex worker consent to sex if they knew it was a prelude to being arrested? Can anti-prostitution law be progressive? In Henricoe County, Virginia, the women's jail is overflowing. They have had to order 200 rollout beds. Women sleep on the floor in corridors, in communal areas, and between bunks in packed cells. Driving this spike in incarceration is the county's recent aggressive approach to prostitution and human trafficking, which has led to more women with lengthy arrest records in jail. As we have noted, much anti-prostitution policing now comes with a progressive gloss. Sometimes arrest is spoken of as quote needed to fulfil other goals. One policymaker, for instance, told a journalist that arresting prostitutes is necessary because if the police did not have the quote leverage of arrest and prosecution, they could not coerce people into testifying against those the police deemed to be traffickers. Lauren Hirsch, the New York director of feminist organization Equality Now, writes that although arresting sellers of sex can be quote fraught with ethical dilemmas and possible human rights violations, it is nonetheless useful in a number of ways. For example, she writes, quote, prosecutors may have an easier time maintaining reliable contact with an arrested victim. Anti-trafficking work done by the state invariably starts with an arrest. The US media generally reports such arrests as quote rescues, thus framing the arrest of people in the sex trade, not just somewhat progressive, but actively humanitarian. Few could object to fighting trafficking, for those caught up in them. However, these arrests are profoundly traumatic. Celia, who has been arrested seven times, told researchers, these raids are ugly and horrible. They break the door, they come in with the guns out. In the beginning it's frightening and upsetting. Law enforcement could do anything. You don't know what they're going to do. It's really horrible. Sometimes they are very angry, and they don't let you get dressed. They take you out in your work clothes. One never lets go of the fear. Being afraid never goes away. They provoke that. Lily arrested five times says. They were wearing guns and uniforms. And it made me very scared. They didn't tell us anything. They treated us like criminals during the arrest and it was scary. Aya Grubba, Amy Cohen, and Kate Mogulescu wrote that the US criminal justice system has recently undergo a shift towards what they term penal welfare. This, they write, is the quote growing practice of using criminal courts to provide social services and benefits, adding, in an era in which mass incarceration is a familiar term, tough on crime and broken windows ideologies are falling into disfavor. Penal welfare enables entrenched institutions of criminal law to continue to function despite a growing crisis in public confidence. One example is safe harbour laws, which entail putting underage youth who sell sex through a system of mandatory services, by arresting them and funneling them through the criminal justice system. Researchers have found that these frequent arrests create instability and perpetuate youths, need to engage in survival sex, magnifying the very harm the system is ostensibly attempting to remedy. New York's human trafficking courts are another example of penal welfare. Their adherents argue that they are a progressive shift towards services, premised on the idea that people arrested for prostitution should be treated as trafficking victims. Yet they are nonetheless involve arresting a woman. Red Umbrella Project reports that over 98% of the defendants are women, whether trans or cis. She is then prosecuted for prostitution but can be sentenced to services instead of a criminal conviction. Black women are charged with 94% of the loitering offences and 70% of the prostitution offences that go through the Brooklyn trafficking courts. And while there is outrage when immigration officials appear at these human trafficking courts looking for people to deport, it is standard practice throughout the US that a prostitution conviction renders an immigrant immediately deportable, making the court's humanitarian rationale for ongoing prostitution arrests ever hard to sustain. If the defendant has previous drug charges on her record, she may spend several weeks in jail awaiting evaluation before being sentenced to months in an inpatient drug treatment program that differs little from prison. Those with complex cases may be subject to pretrial detention. Many cannot afford to bail themselves out, meaning that they are confined to New York's notorious Rikers Island jail where they will wait for their case to be heard. The ostensible victim status of the defendant inevitably comes into conflict with the fact that what the court exists to do is impose judgment, control, and punishment. One prosecutor declining to offer services to a young woman explained. To have been arrested so many times for prostitution in so many different states, obviously she's a victim. But still, she just has so many arrests. So I said that I will give her a disorderly conduct and time served, and she can go back to California. And it better be the last arrest because I didn't want people coming into Queens thinking oh you get a good disposition in Queens. Defendants can be evicted or jailed for their own good, one prosecutor argued, upon successfully sending a woman to jail. I do not want to see Mrs. F go back to her ex-boyfriend, whatever she thinks he is. In my eyes, that's the person that's exploiting her. And that's just not a good situation, Judge. I am going to ask that she be remanded to jail. Even for women who do get services, the services available through the court are not necessarily those the defendants need. Defendants often Assigned activities of uncertain immediate value, like yoga, art therapy, or counselling, with the threat of rearrest if they fail to attend. Jenna Torres, a mother arrested while under the age of 18 for prostitution in New York, writes. The treatment programme the courts provided was not a good fit for me. I didn't need to be treated for sex work. That isn't an illness. I really needed that time for more important tasks. The sessions hampered my ability to create a better environment for myself and my children so I wouldn't have to rely on sex work. They gave me options that didn't fit my situation, suggesting that I just stop sex work and my life would be magically improved. Stopping sex work for me means not being able to make money. The court mandated therapy forced Torres to drop out of college, as there wasn't time in her schedule to attend both. As the sex worker-led project Red Up, New York City writes This cycle of criminalization, especially for those who do not complete the mandated services, can make exit from the sex trade more difficult for those who want to. This is no progressive version of full criminalization. Abuses such as racist policing, corruption, and sexual assault are fundamentally bound with the vulnerability of the sex worker who, when defined as criminal, has little recourse to justice or protection. Across nations where sex workers are criminalized, stories emerge of police officers capitalizing on the weakness of their victims in order to inflict beatings, rape, and extortion to an extent where sex workers fear police more than clients, managers, or the public. Police are our biggest problem, more than anyone Comments a sex worker in Lagos, Nigeria. When he put on the uniform, he thinks he can do whatever he wants. Criminalization dehumanitizes people in sex work to the extent that members of the public often don't notice or care about their mistreatment. Russian murderer and police officer Mikhail Popkov managed to get away with killing 82 women over 18 years as part of a crusade to quote cleanse the streets of prostitution. He sometimes found victims by offering them a ride in his police car, and was twice called in his official capacity to investigate murders he himself had committed. Kaya Adana Mabako writes of a police officer in Uganda who has made grotesque sport of tormenting street-based workers, stripping them naked and parading them through town. Despite such public and visible abuse, when his victims filed complaints, he was merely transferred to another unit where sex workers report. He has continued to force his way into the homes of pregnant and nursing women, quote, dragging them out by the hair to dump them in the police station. McBarker recounts the story of a group of sex workers attacked by police officers in full view of a crowd of spectators who goaded the officers to arrest the women and remove them, shouting, quote, take them, take them, this is our rubbish. In South Africa, the brutal institutional legacy of legacy of apartheid combines with full criminalization to produce particularly horrific abuse. In Johannesburg, for example, the police habitually pepper spray the genitals of work Wow Pepper spray the genitals of sex workers. Male sex workers and trans women are particularly targeted for violence. In one case, police in Cape Town are reported to have arrested a young male sex worker and then encouraged the men in his cell to sexually abuse him. A court in Cape Town ruled that the police were arresting sex workers arbitually without intent to charge them, simply to abuse or harass them in the police van or the cells. Individual perpetrators, even the most terrifying and sadistic ones, are not freakish anomalies. They are a recurring symptom of any legal system that frames prostitutes as worthless and disposable criminals. In 2015, police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted by an Oklahoma jury of eighteen counts of rape. His victims were low-income black women who either had criminal records or were engaging in criminalized behavior, particularly drug use and sex work. Holtzclaw was emboldened to target these women because he knew that the huge power disparity between him and them meant he was unlikely to be held accountable. In the end, he was only caught because he assaulted Janie Liggins, a woman without a criminal record. A woman who was not afraid to report him and whose report was taken seriously. This bare minimum of respect in the justice system was all that set her apart from the other victims. Hotzclaw himself was very explicitly named this logic when, after his conviction, he complained to an interviewer that Liggins was, quote, not innocent the way people think she is. She had a bust in the 80s, but couldn't present that to the jury. This is not a woman that, you know, is a soccer mom or someone that's credible in society. Clearly, Holt's claw, like other abusers and killers of prostitutes, subscribed to an idea that is corroborated by the law he enforced. That the criminal body is a vulnerable one. The criminalized woman is easy pickings. Disorderly bodies. Cintoya Brown's case briefly became headline news in 2017 when celebrities such as Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West drew attention to the horrific way she had been treated by the criminal justice system. At 16 years old, Cintoya had been in an abusive relationship with a man who forced her to sell sex. She picked up a client, but once she was at the client's house, he threatened and assaulted her. She shot him in self-defense, but rather than being recognized as a traumatized young woman defending her own life, she was portrayed as a murderer and sentenced to half a century in jail. By the time Rihanna and Kim Kardashian publicized her case, Cintoya was already 29. She has so far spent nearly 15 years of her life incarcerated. Cintoya's case is unusual in that her youth at the time of her quote offence made it easier for the public to sympathize with her. Indeed, prison abolitionist organizer Mariam Koba and sex workers' rights organizer Brit Schultz picked up on this, noting that the explosion of interest in Centoya was accompanied by images of her as a 16-year-old. Koba and Schultz write Is an adult twenty nine-year-old black woman an unsympathetic victim? If so, why? Acknowledging trauma and resilience are often ignored in favour of the driving desire by the media and public to support only a perfect victim. Perfect victims are submissive, not aggressive. They don't have histories of drug use or prior contact with the criminal legal system. And they are, quote, innocent and responsible. Right, so that is where we're gonna end today. We have ended on page 131. And yeah, uh again, it's always like it's not depressive, but it is depressive whenever I read Revolt and Prostitutes because it is just so shocking everything that's in the book and everything that is actually happening every day in our lives. So right now in Scotland, Ash Regan of the ALBA Party is trying to get her bill through, which is called the unbuyable bill, and there is so much wrong with it, it is so horrific. And she has supplied no exit strategies, and she has came out publicly and stated she will not help exit strategies, she will not help in any way, shape, or form. And even charities have moved away from sex workers because previously there has been funding pulled on certain charities because they have supported sex workers, and it is it's really horrific the world we live in currently, especially in the UK, where we are going really backwards, and there needs to be definitely more people listening that we do need decriminalization everywhere. It is very much proven to actually work and help. Like right now, me personally, I would say I I am afraid to actually talk to the police about anything, and I know there's a lot of sex workers the same out there. Absolutely, and so yeah, what you can do right now, you can go on the ECP website, which is the English Collective of Prostitutes website, and there's actually another bill that they're trying to get through right now, which is the Crime and Policing Bill of 2025, and in that bill, they want to stop advertising sex work um on online platforms. So, say for example, Viva Street um in the UK, Viva Street or adult work, they do not want those to be here at all, and they would um I'm assuming either shut them down or stop them being able to um advertise in the UK. So that that majorly impacts a lot of sex workers if that would all of us really, if that was to happen, because I would assume that would actually include Cam Girls if they were to use the same website that um escorts used, which with I think um only that I can think of would be like adult work because you can do webcam and phone chat through there. Um, but I I don't know if there's any other sites where you can do multiple things on one platform, but yeah, it's not good at all, and I am absolutely terrified if either of these come through. But yeah, if you go on the ECP website, through there you should be able to find um you can email your MP, and once you put in your postcode, it will automatically make a default letter to send to them. You do not need to put your real name or real email address or anything like that. All you need to do is hit send. You can edit the default letter if you want. This letter will be talking about how we don't need it. We need full decriminalization, we need protection, we need safety services, and we absolutely need safety exit strategies if there are people who do want to exit the sex industry. Because I feel like, especially reading revolt and prostitutes, you do get to understand that it isn't always peachy in the sex work industry. There are people who are being mistreated, exploited, and they do need help. We don't sex workers, we don't want and like grassroots and things like that, but we do not want to just throw people back onto the streets into poverty after they have been convicted or um had a warning from the police. We don't want them back in poverty, um, and we don't want social services taking their children away just because of the work that they do. So yeah, you should be able to find it also if you type in the crime and policing bill ECP into Google. Um, yeah, that should work. But yeah, today has been um revolting prostitutes. I really, really hope you've enjoyed this episode. Thank you for anybody uh well everybody who has been listening. I think this is part 13. And yeah, we are halfway through. Nearly. But yeah, thank you very thank you very, very much for listening. And please just do whatever you can to support sex workers because we definitely need to protest and be loud and proud. Now is the time we need to do this. So yeah. Bye.