Having harmed New York’s public safety and quality of life over the past half-decade with marijuana and criminal-justice “reforms,” Albany progressives are pushing another one: the decriminalization of “sex work.”
Brooklyn Sen. Julia Salazar’s bill would decriminalize adult (18 and up) prostitution, deleting the buying and selling of sex from the state’s misdemeanor catalog.
The advocacy groups she supports argue that decriminalization “is the best way to reduce coercion in the sex trade, while … enabling sex workers to employ harm reduction,” such as insisting that a sex buyer wear a condom. Decriminalization “enables sex workers to seek medical or legal help.”
But nothing in current law stops a woman (or man) who is raped or robbed by a sex-buying “client” from filing a police report or seeking hospital treatment. Pro-bono firms offer “legal help” to “sex workers” on all manner of issues.
There is evidence that decriminalization will make things worse.
Consider this news from Rhode Island’s experience of decriminalizing prostitution between 2003 and 2009: Reported rapes statewide went down.
Great . . . except, The Wall Street Journal reported, “at least some of the decrease in rapes was ‘due to men substituting away from rape toward prostitution.’” Predators found someone who couldn’t say no.
Then there’s child prostitution. Advocates claim they’d decriminalize adult prostitution only.
One advocate, Jessica Raven, unwittingly shows the flaw in this approach. She argues that we should “let adults make their own choices,” then explains that she became an adult “sex worker” by entering the “trade” as a 15-year-old girl.
As a homeless teen, she “started trading sex in exchange for housing,” she wrote in 2019.
“Anti-trafficking advocates and laws define my experience as ‘child sex trafficking’,” she said. “This is not how I define my experience.”
Yet one research paper found that at least 21% of “sex workers” similarly began as children — and some researchers think the percentage is higher.
By eliminating the penalty for adult prostitution, the Salazar bill would remove even the slim possibility of arrest and exposure that johns face, which is a deterrent. The ensuing increased demand would create more child-rape victims, too.
Sex buyers are not exactly conscientious about ensuring that the young person in the hotel room is 18. In fact, Manhattan Sen. Liz Krueger, who opposes decriminalization, notes that survivor testimony indicates sex buyers, spurred by child porn, are looking for younger victims.
Decriminalization advocates say they’d still prosecute trafficking and coercion — but that becomes harder as the market grows.
Amsterdam is supposedly the gold standard of legal, regulated prostitution. Yet a BBC documentary found “vulnerable women … subjected to harassment, violence and exploitation” there, including “forced prostitution.” Most European “sex workers” are from Africa and Eastern Europe, not people with options who are exercising choice.
New York has hundreds of thousands of migrants with no access to on-the-books payroll jobs and few skills. Many owe debts to border traffickers. They are already selling sex in Jackson Heights. Decriminalization will encourage more, without even Amsterdam-style regulations to try to alleviate exploitation.
Salazar & Co. haven’t answered practical questions: Would brothels join our thousands of pot shops? Wouldn’t New York, with no check on open-air sex markets, become a sex-tourism magnet?
If “sex work” is regular work, as the advocates’ motto goes, could a business owner require that his front-desk receptionist perform “sex work” for him, as part of her regular duties? Most employees must do anything legal that the boss wants.
Our previous progressive experiments, from marijuana decriminalization to bail “reform,” remind us to ask questions now.
Indeed, it’s ironic that decriminalizing sex work is a goal of the Democratic Socialists of America, which rails against capitalism.
In the DSA fantasy, desperately poor immigrant women are able to be the equal capitalist negotiating partners of powerful men with money when it comes to selling the only asset they have, their bodily autonomy.
No, New York will never eradicate prostitution. But that doesn’t mean New York should normalize and encourage it, as it is has done with marijuana.
A better approach comes from Krueger, who would eliminate penalties levied against prostitutes — acknowledging that “the vast majority of people in the sex trade were there under coercive and violent” circumstances — while increasing penalties on buyers and traffickers.
Her bill would remove the “ignorance” defense made by men who say they didn’t know that a “sex worker” was under 18.
Decriminalization, Krueger says, only means “increased demand, increased violence.”
“People really think they can do anything to these people,” she has learned from prostitution survivors, with an attitude of “I paid for it, I’m allowed.”
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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