Coyote Blog

Prostitution is a person selling sexual services of their own free will.  Trafficking is a form of kidnapping and slavery, when someone is forced to provide sexual services by someone with power over them.

All or even most prostitution is not trafficking, but many in the media and political sphere use these two a synonyms.  I have seen it all week surround the Robert Kraft bust for seeking a private happy ending even before his team played in the Superbowl.   I see this as a victory of traditionally anti-prostitution folks on the Right who have found a way to take advantage of a division on the Left, and specifically a division within feminism, to rebrand prostitution and bring some folks on the Left over to their side.

I am not an expert on feminist politics, but what I do know is the prostitution has created a divide among feminists.  You remember the old abortion chant that feminists wanted the government to keep its laws off their body?  That what a woman did with her body was an eminently private affair and should not be subject to government regulations?  Well, feminists who followed up on this thought in a consistent manner generally supported legalization of prostitution.  Bans on prostitution were seen by these folks as just another example of the male-dominated system limiting women's choices and ability to make money the way they choose.

On the other side more modern feminists see everything through the prism of male power over women.  This is the "all sex is rape" group and for them prostitution has nothing to do with women's free will and everything to do with yet another channel through which men objectify and dehumanize women.  From here it's only a small step to thinking that all prostitution is slavery.  And thus by attempting to rebrand prostitution as trafficking, the Right found new allies on the Left in their campaign against sex work.

Those who read me a lot know I come down on the side of women being able to exercise choice, and I think the only real dehumanizing going on is the denial by modern feminists of any agency among most women.

But real abusive trafficking certainly exists.  How much of prostitution fits this category is impossible to really know as a layman because the media and activists do so much to blur the line in their reporting.  But I will say this:  To the extent trafficking exists, it is not enabled by society somehow being soft on prostitution, in fact it is enabled by the opposite.  By making prostitution illegal, we give unscrupulous people leverage to abuse those in sex work.  Women being abused by men at, say, Wal-Mart have many legal outlets to air their grievances and seek change or compensation -- no one talks about trafficking in Wal-Mart greeters.  But abused sex workers cannot go to the legal system for redress of abuse because they themselves are treated as criminals in the system.  Contributing to this is our restrictionism on immigration.  This is why many real trafficking cases revolve around the abuse of immigrant women, because abusers know these victims have not one but two impediments to seeking legal help.

For a short time 5-10 years ago I thought we might be near a breakthrough in softening the penalties on women voluntarily seeking to make a living through sex work.  Now, my optimism has dimmed.  The success the Right has had in enlisting parts of the Left in rebranding all prostitution as slavery has polluted discourse on this issue and means a lot of women will still be left outside the law.

Folks often use the abuses in the prostitution industry as evidence of why it should be illegal.  But these abuses are actually a result of the illegality.  Sex workers in illicit industries cannot use the police and legal system to address abuses without risking arrest.  Essentially, they are cut off from access to the legal system and its protections that we take for granted.

People act like the abuses are inherent to the fact that prostitution is a sex work industry, but here is an example of (legal) sex workers protecting themselves and addressing abuses through the legal system, just like all the rest of us do.  If prostitution were legal, then prostitutes could do the same.

Three Valley strip clubs are being sued by exotic dancers with the help of a Texas law firm over alleged unpaid tips and wages....

Hodges' firm and the strippers are suing to make the strippers official employees. Their new system would be similar to that of restaurant wait staff, who typically earn a sub-minimum salary (Arizona allows as low as $3 an hour for tipped employees) while pooling tips among their fellow workers. If no customers come in, the staff is still guaranteed to make at least minimum wage, plus time-and-a-half for any overtime worked.

I'm not a big fan of the premise of the lawsuit (trying to force businesses to change their employment model from dancers as independent contractors to dancers as employees) but it is their free access to the legal system that is the point here.  One could never imagine such a lawsuit with a group of prostitutes arguing that the people they worked for were not paying them fairly.

A while back I criticized the notion that Backpage was somehow responsible for murders because one guy in Detroit identified his victims from Backpage ads.  I argued that Conservatives trying to take down Backpage adult ads ostensibly to make sex workers safer should look in the mirror, given that most of the reason sex workers are at risk is because Conservatives have driven their profession underground.

Jacob Sollum at Reason had a similar take the other day

Far from helping victims like Baby Face, prohibition forces the entire market underground, making it harder to enforce the distinction between minors and adults or between willing and coerced participants. Prohibition forces prostitutes to work in dangerous conditions, picking up customers on the street or covertly connecting with them online, and makes it harder for them to seek legal remedies when they are cheated or abused. These hazards, similar to those seen in black markets for drugs and gambling, are not inherent to the business of selling sex; they are inherent to the policy of using force to suppress peaceful commerce. Since these dangers are entirely predictable, prohibitionists like Kristof should be reflecting on their role in perpetuating them, instead of making scapegoats out of businesses that run classified ads.