Tag: sex trafficking

City Council, Courts, King County

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

 

Amber, from Green Light Project, and Emi Koyoma, from the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, testify at City Council Tuesday.

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.

legislature, Women

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

But an attempt to decriminalize sex work—another component of the “Nordic model”—failed.

By Erica C. Barnett

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex or “sexual contact” has gone through several revisions since late January, when King County prosecutors gave a lurid, exploitative presentation to the Seattle City Council in an effort to drum up support for the bill. Last week, the proposal passed out of a House committee on a contentious 5-4 vote; from there, it faces an uphill battle in its current form.

In its original iteration, the legislation—sponsored by Democrats Chris Stearns (D-47, Auburn) and Lauren Davis (D-32, North Seattle)—would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex. The bill would have also changed the term “patronizing a prostitute” to “commercial sexual exploitation”—the same term used, incidentally, in Seattle’s anti-prostitution laws.

However, after blowback from the county prosecutors’ presentation drew new attention to the bill, the proposal underwent a transformation, including a proposal from Rep. Tarra Simmons (D-23, Bremerton) that would have decriminalized sex work statewide.

Simmons called decriminalization a necessary component of the so-called “Nordic model,” a widely adopted approach that criminalizes sex buyers in an attempt to eliminate demand.

“I was trafficked as a young girl,” Simmons said. “If you want to get to exploitation and get to trafficking and to solve the issue and to protect the victims, you have to do both—not just increase penalties, but allow the victims to be victims and not be criminalized.”

Decriminalization went a step too far for other House Democrats, but the version that passed out of the House Community Safety Committee last week does include some significant changes from the original proposal.

First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version. The amended bill also replaces the phrase “commercial sexual exploitation” with the more neutral term “patronizing a person for prostitution.”

Under the bill, sex work would remain illegal, but sex workers would get two shots at “services”—which Simmons said might include job training, treatment, and counseling—before they’re prosecuted for prostitution, a misdemeanor.

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During last week’s committee meeting, Rep. Davis argued that by not raising the crime of paying for sex to a first-strike felony (that is, by increasing it from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses) will only result in more women being exploited and trafficked.

“These women are not entrepreneurs. The term ‘sex work’ implies volition,” Davis said.

“Representing North Aurora. I’ve learned some things,” Davis continued. “There’s a kind of pimp called a gorilla pimp. Gorilla pimps dominate their victims by force and violence. I know of a gorilla pimp who took razor blades to his victim’s back, and another who had his victim mauled by dogs.” In her district, which includes Shoreline, street sex work starts at the Seattle city line, she said, because “there’s no enforcement” of anti-prostitution laws in Seattle. (Other theories include a relative lack of cheap motels and significantly better street design north of 145th.)

Charging sex buyers with a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, would “also make it easier for pimps to recruit, because there’s no legal liability, there’s no downside,” Davis said. This is a confusing claim: Promoting prostitution—being a pimp—is a Class B felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison, which seems like a pretty big potential downside. Building a case against a trafficker or pimp is harder and more time-consuming than doing the kind of quick-hit sting operations favored by police departments, however.

Davis pointed out that there’s actually a third part of the Nordic model—ample, freely available services, including treatment and housing, none of which are funded through the amended bill. Simmons agreed that the state should fund more services for trafficking victims, and said she’d like to start with more funding for peer support—people with direct experience in the sex trade who can talk to people who are being exploited and “hold their hand and take them to safety” away from their traffickers and pimps.

“I’ve never seen problems solved through increasing penalties,” Simmons said. “I don’t think johns are going to stop and think, ‘This is gonna be two days in jail [versus] a month in jail.’ They’re not thinking about that.”

Rep. Brian Burnett (R-12, Wenatchee) said his own daughter was trafficked and “raped literally thousands of times over the course of eight or nine years.” As the only trafficking survivor on the panel, though, Simmons said she “felt invisible a lot of times.”

“I also felt like they were missing the point of helping the victims and survivors,” Simmons said. “They’re not going to accept help from law enforcement, because they’re going to run.”

This story originally misattributed Rep. Burnett’s comment to Rep. Stearns. We regret the error.

 

City Council, Courts, criminal justice, King County, Women

County Prosecutors Give Lurid Presentation on Sex Work Featuring Unredacted Images of Brutalized Women to Seattle Council Committee

The point of the prurient presentation: “You can’t make sex work safe,” one senior deputy prosecutor said.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County prosecutors gave an astonishingly graphic presentation about sex work and human trafficking to Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle’s public safety committee on Tuesday, showing unredacted images of brutalized women with bloodied and battered faces and bleeding bodies. (Content warning: Although I’ve redacted all identifiable images from the presentation as it appeared yesterday, the graphic language remains).

The carousel of images included a photo of a identifiable weeping, partly nude woman in a bathtub who, according to prosecutors, had been urinated on by her pimp after her he bashed in her eye.

Prosecutors accompanied the images with pornographic commentary copy-pasted from online review sites that dehumanized and belittled sex workers. Reading out loud from one of the slides displayed in council chambers, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Alexandra Voorhees intoned, “Find them, fuck them, forget them. … Stupid fucking whore. Spread your legs, and that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you’re worth. A cum dumpster.'”

Later in the presentation, Voorhees read a list of objects a victim of sex trafficking said men had inserted into her by force, and read quotes from women who described vomiting and bleeding from forcible sex acts. Sex work, Voorhees claimed, often leads to dangerous physical conditions such as “vaginal prolapse, anal prolapse… fecal incontinence, forced abortion.” The presentation continued in pornographic detail: “Girls in dog cages, girls being waterboarded… stunned with stun guns… burned and strangled.”

During public comment, Emi Koyama—a longtime advocate for sex workers and founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led community space for women working along the Pac Highway in South King County—said the prosecutors “selectively quote and weaponize survivor testimonies that are useful in ceding further power to the law enforcement, while neglecting how the law enforcement itself is also a source of violence in the lives of many women.”

“Policy making should not be adversarial, and efforts should be made together with those who are impacted by any given issue, whether they align with law enforcement or not,” Koyama said.

UPDATE: Kettle apologized for the presentation the day after the committee meeting. On Thursday, he told PubliCola he had “contacted the KCPAO late last week to express my own concern regarding the explicit nature and privacy implications of the presentation.  While I advocated for a different approach, the timing of the response, me seeing it, and the pending committee meeting led me to proceed with the KCPAO approach.

“The goal of my committee is to support survivors of sex trafficking – particularly minors and young adults – who are forced into these situations,” Kettle said. “We are careful to distinguish this work from those who choose sex work as a profession, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to clarify that.

The two prosecutors argued repeatedly that the public is misinformed about the inherently exploitative nature of all sex work—”this is not ‘Pretty Woman,'” Voorhees said—and said the graphic, exploitative images were necessary for people to understand that pimps and sex buyers need to be punished.

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After other council members, including Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Eddie Lin, expressed concerns about the lurid presentation, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion sent a letter to the council saying that although “the goal of the presentation was to make clear to Council the violence that survivors experience at the hands of buyers and traffickers,” the prosecutor’s office will “do a better job of protecting victim’s [sic] privacy” in the future.”

The presentation has been removed from the committee agenda but is still available in the full agenda packet and viewable on the Seattle Channel recording of the meeting. UPDATE: As of noon on Jan. 28, he agenda packet has been removed as well.

Douglas Wagoner, the public affairs director for Manion’s office, stood by the intent of the presentation when he spoke with PubliCola on Tuesday evening. “The goal of the presentation was to make clear to City Councilmembers the violence that survivors experience in the hands of buyers and traffickers,” Wagoner said. “Their trauma is incredibly difficult to watch and learn about, but it’s also real and most people don’t know how bad the experiences are of the survivors who are going through it every day in King County.”

“Maybe in the future, we’d make a different choice in terms of the exact images and language in the presentation,” Wagoner added.

Whatever their intent, the images and words had the effect of re-brutalizing the women on the screen, who did not consent to be used as examples by prosecutors pushing further criminalization of sex work. Although the prosecutor’s office denied any political agenda, they noted during the presentation that they’re hoping to drum up support for state legislation that would elevate paying for sex, currently a misdemeanor, to a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000.

The bill would take the question of whether to prosecute sex buyers out of the City Attorney’s Office, where progressive Erika Evans just took over from Republican Ann Davison, and put it into the county prosecutors’ hands. Sex trafficking is already a felony.

Kettle, along with his fellow committee members Maritza Rivera and Debora Juarez, used the presentation as an opportunity to express disbelief that people in Seattle, including advocates for sex workers and sex workers, have the gall to oppose the city’s recent crackdowns on sex buyers, including a law reinstating “SOAP” banishment zones and “john letters” sent to the homes of men identified as possible sex buyers through their license plates.

“There’s so many women in our city who make two points that really not should be made together— ‘Oh, Epstein, this, that whatever,’ but then… they decry the letters by SPD to those johns or potential johns,” Kettle said.

“These people come in here and yell at us when we’re trying to go after the men. … We as a city, need to stop, take a deep breath and think about that. When I read something online by the chattering classes in the city that talk about these pieces, they need to stop and look at themselves.”

Rivera, too, said she couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in “this whole movement of defunding things and ‘We’re not going about it the right way’—No.” The solutions—SOAP zones, “john letters,” and imprisoning sex buyers—”are so clear,” Rivera continued, and the fact “that people can’t see that you all really are helping victims is beyond me.”

Later, Voorhees yes-anded Rivera’s outrage that anyone would question the decisions the council has made in recent years to further criminalize sex work. “You were asking some questions about people who are who are opposed or somehow think that this is consensual, so it’s okay,” Voorhees said. “The problem is, you can’t make sex work safe. It is inherently dangerous. It is inherently a power imbalance.”

The idea that sex work is inherently so dangerous that it must be abolished is far from a consensus view in Seattle or the United States. Juries don’t tend to buy the notion that men who pay for sex are inherently abusive or dangerous, which is one reason they rarely go to trial—it’s harder for prosecutors to sustain a prurient image of monster predators when faced with a real man (in Seattle, typically an immigrant) who got caught trying to pay for sex.

While no one would express sympathy or support for men who beat, rape, or kidnap and traffic women, those crimes are separate from patronizing a sex worker (formally “commercial sexual exploitation” in Seattle law), and can be prosecuted on their own. Treating all men who pay for sex as monolithically evil does not stand up to reality as sex workers themselves describe it. No sex workers were invited to attend the presentation, which allowed prosecutors to paint them as childlike, helpless victims with no agency in their own lives.

Also, the approaches the two prosecutors described as “innovative” — increased penalties, “john letters,” and banishment zones—aren’t new, don’t work, and can put women at risk.

Near the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Saka asked the prosecutors what warning signs parents should watch out for to make sure their daughters aren’t being recruited by pimps..

“When I was a kid, it used to be called ‘fast’— don’t be a ‘fast little girl,’ ‘she’s a fast girl,’ whatever,” deputy prosecutor Braelah McGinnis said. “Kids who come home and have unaccounted-for money. They have their nails done all of a sudden, and things like that. And so, you know, those can be red flags of, like, ‘Well, who took you to get your nails done?’ …We also find kids, lots of times, may have a second phone, and it’s because it’s used to communicate with their pimp or their trafficker. Those are some of my tips.”

I called Kettle to find out why he approved the prurient presentation and whether he would invite advocates and sex workers who disagree with the prosecutor’s approach to present their own views and experiences in his committee. I hadn’t heard back by press time, but will update this post if I do.