By Erica C. Barnett
Advocates for sex workers, activated by a brutal, dehumanizing presentation the King County Prosecutor’s Office delivered to the city council’s public safety committee about sex trafficking, are demanding action from the city and county to rectify the harm done by past actions and statements about sex work and trafficking.
As PubliCola reported, the prosecutors, who were trying to drum up support for a proposed state law that would make it a felony to pay another person for sex. The presentation included identifiable photos of tortured, brutalized women; a lurid recitation of the objects an anonymous victim said had been inserted into her by force; misogynistic quotes about sex workers from an unidentified online forum; and graphic descriptions of rape and violence against women.
The prosecutors also claimed that every sex worker who opposed further criminalizing sex work had been a victim of childhood abuse, and was therefore speaking against their own true interests because of trauma.
In a letter to the council, which three advocates read aloud at Tuesday’s council meeting, a group of advocates for sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade made five demands:
• An acknowledgement from the city of the “selective and exploitative uses of survivor stories, voices, and images” by the committee and the prosecutor’s office.
• An examination of the city and county’s policies and trainings, if any, on “trauma-informed, and non-exploitative uses of survivor voices and stories.”
• An analysis by the city’s Office of Civil Rights on “existing and potential policy approaches to reducing violence and exploitation in the sex trade as well as a review of best practices for incorporating diverse voices of survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade while minimizing re-traumatization.”
• Strategies to include more perspectives from people with lived experience of sex work in future policy conversations, and to fund peer-led groups that provide services to survivors and sex workers without requiring that they collaborate with law enforcement
• A public safety committee meeting “dedicated to a presentation about human rights-based, noncarceral, pro-sex worker approach to empower survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade and combat violence, abuse, and exploitation within the sex trade.”
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The organization also provide a list of several quotes from council members during the presentation along with the derogatory messages they communicated. One was a comment from committee chair Bob Kettle aimed at people who criticize the city’s purely punitive response to the sex trade.
Kettle said that “so many women in our city,” as well as “the chattering classes,” are hypocrites because they criticize Jeffrey Epstein but don’t support carceral strategies like sending sex buyers to prison. “These people, the people come in here and yell at us because when we’re trying to go in after the men, but we’re the target. We as a city need to stop, take a deep breath, and think about that,” Kettle said.
On Monday, the Seattle Women’s Commission sent a letter to the city’s Office of Civil Rights with a list of their own requests, including a public statement from OCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith calling on the city to “honor and include diverse perspectives in all Civil Rights Work,” including work on behalf of sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade.
As we reported on Monday, the prosecutors’ presentation contributed to efforts in the state legislature to roll back the legislation the two county prosecutors were advocating for, removing the first-strike felony provision and incorporating more humanizing language into the proposal. The changes led supporters of the original bill to mutiny, calling the new version—which still increases paying for sex to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, and a felony for the third—inadequate to deter people from paying for sex.
Finally, some voices from those directly affected in the policy realm! Incredible that the City Council of Seattle ignored these voices in recent meetings concerning further criminalization of the customers of these workers. That top-down approach was soundly rejected in the last election, and bottom-up policy making is what most Seattle voters want. We also want DATA to support any important shift in public policy, not hyperbole and anecdotal evidence designed to get an emotional response not well thought out policy. The data shows that further criminalization entrenches the sex trade in the hands of traffickers and middlemen by taking unmet demand underground even further. Empowering women to report abuse and become independent of traffickers and middlemen, improving public health, and providing robust alternative career pathways at living wages should be at the center of any public policy in this area.
If anyone is interested in a thorough examination of the worldwide data concerning criminalization vs decriminalization/legalization of the sex trade, here is a brilliant article by a George Washington University professor:
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/21/07/2021/legalizing-prostitution-does-it-increase-or-decrease-sex-trafficking
An informal Reddit poll (wish we had more scientific polling) of Seattle opinion overwhelmingly (4:1) supports legalization: https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/114s91v/do_you_support_prostitute_legalization_in_seattle/