When people have a real chance to say what kind of world they want, they tend to tell similar stories: safety for themselves and their families, dignified work, health care. Viewed this way, there is something almost intuitive about many left ideas. Which means the real trouble with building support for them isnt so much the policies themselvesits getting away from what weve been told is realistic or possible. When it comes to connecting what people say they want with the laws and policies that can actually do what they want, the gap is enormous.
For so long, the overwhelming narrative around sex work and human trafficking has had very little to do with the lives of actual sex workers or victims of trafficking. It was a story told again and again about heroic cops and depraved men, girls for sale in plain sight, pimps in grocery store parking lots, a monotonous evening news moral panic. It stacked the terms of the debate: to be against violence meant to be for the systems and institutionslaw enforcement, penal welfare, capitalism-for-goodthat were themselves sources of violence and exploitation. The challenge for organizers for sex workers rights, then, has been to go beyond correcting other peoples misinformation to build a community of concern.
It has been slow and difficult work, but you can see some of that shifting tide in a poll to be released on Thursday by Data for Progress, which found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats support fully decriminalizing sex work, along with two-thirds of all voters under 45. Of voters of all parties, a slight majority52 percentsaid they somewhat or strongly support sex work decriminalization.
With this, sex work decriminalization joins other allegedly divisive political issues, like Medicare for All, which are in fact very popularif only voters are asked about them in a way that doesnt preemptively cave to their opposition.
The new poll provides a first-of-its kind national snapshot on the issue and also a model for left organizing that might help do the political work to actually turn data like this into social change. And it was sex workers rights advocates who saw the way.
Sex work is not a new progressive concern. The movement for sex workers rights emerged in the United States in the 1970s, alongside the womens liberation and gay freedom movements. Sex work, too, has fueled movement workwith cash. Movement leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were doing sex work to take care of the community, LaLa Zannell, manager of the American Civil Liberties Unions Trans Justice Campaign, told me. That is a part of our history. That is a part of this countrys history.
But its only in recent years that sex workers rights have been recognized as intersecting with other movements and shifted toward the mainstream. Since 2014, Nnennaya Amuchie, an organizer with Black Youth Project 100, as well as an attorney, told me that they see the genesis of that support building with and through other movements and political flash points: You have the Movement for Black Lives, which squarely exposed the U.S. police state and the systematic targeting, harassing, incarcerating, and murders of black folks. (BYP100 is part of DecrimNow, a coalition seeking to decriminalize sex work in Washington, D.C.) Then there was former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, added Amuchie, who was found guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault. His defense argued the women he assaulted were not credible because they were drug users and sex workers. But that is why he could repeatedly target them in the first place: They were criminalized. They were black women.
People in these communities are increasingly making these connections, Amuchie said: There is so much money going to these vice operations in the guise of keeping sex workers safe. And in our coalition, we have so many black women, particularly black trans women, who have been caught in these stings, who have been harassed and assaulted by police officers. (Those stings are also unpopular: The Data for Progress poll showed that only 35 percent of respondents support funding such policing targeting sex workers.)
Will any presidential candidates have the good sense to take up a position held by a majority of people? Probably not. ---