Getting Screwed

ForeEdge

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2015 Alison Bass

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit
www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bass, Alison.

Getting screwed: sex workers and the law / Alison Bass.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN
978-1-61168-634-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN
978-1-61168-845-0 (ebook)

1. Prostitution. 2. Prostitution — Law and legislation. I. Title.

HQ
118.
B
37 2015

306.74 — dc23 2015010963

For Carmen Rudy
and all the other sex workers
whose murders remain unsolved.

PREFACE

I hadn't given much thought to the largely hidden world of sex work until a student met with me one day to go over the draft of her profile assignment. She had chosen to write about a young activist who helped defeat an ordinance that would have made it illegal for homeless people to panhandle on the streets of Northampton, a progressive but increasingly gentrified city in western Massachusetts. My student had heard this twenty-seven-year-old woman speak at a town meeting and, impressed by her passion for helping those less fortunate than herself, had interviewed her for the profile. But my student was having trouble bringing her subject to life on the page, and as we discussed how to do that, she suddenly blurted out, “She's also a sex worker.” How interesting, I thought. I told my student that this information would be intrinsic to any profile she wrote about this woman. Two other interesting facts leaped out at me: the young woman's middle-class background and her volunteer work with the Freedom Center, a Northampton-based advocacy group that offers support and alternative treatment for people with mental illness. She had apparently struggled with depression at a teenager, and after being heavily medicated, she had chosen to stop taking psychoactive drugs and use alternative methods of treatment. At the time, I was writing a weekly blog about the side effects of antidepressants (the topic of my first book), so I decided to interview this woman about her work with the Freedom Center.

I met Jillian at a café in Northampton, and during that initial interview, the topic of how she earned a living (so she could spend most of her time volunteering) came up. “I enjoy being a middle-class escort,” she said, as if what she did was just an ordinary job. “I provide a girlfriend
experience for an hour. I create a persona, and in that persona I can connect and bond with someone. It's fun.”

Over the next months, I met with Jillian (her professional name) several times, and she opened up a fascinating window onto the reality of being a sex worker in the twenty-first century. When I expressed an interest in writing about prostitution, she put me in touch with other sex workers around the country. The stories that Jillian and her compatriots told me clashed with the popular narrative of prostitutes as drug-addicted, victimized women who were invariably forced into the sex trade by abusive pimps and traffickers. Research by respected academics also contradicted this narrative and pointed to a very different story: that laws criminalizing prostitution not only are largely ineffective in curbing the sex trade but also create an atmosphere that encourages the exploitation of sex workers and violence against all women. A growing body of research showed that antiprostitution laws in the United States and other countries only make it more difficult for sex workers to protect themselves — from physical harm and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV infection.

The more I delved into this issue, the more I realized that in many respects, history was repeating itself. The historical record shows that during periods in the United States when prostitution was either legal or operating under a de facto system of decriminalization, there was less violence toward sex workers and working conditions were safer. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, for example, an atmosphere of relative tolerance prevailed, and many sex workers operated openly, particularly in the American West, where they were often respected as entrepreneurs (more on this in
Chapter 1
) By contrast, during times when the U.S. government actively tried to suppress prostitution with restrictive laws — in the run-up to both World Wars — sex workers were at greater risk of violence and harassment from clients and police.

As the sexual revolution of the '60s began eroding moralistic views about casual sex, it created a paradoxical surge in demand for commercial sex (despite the promise of all that free love). Yet even with the more permissive attitudes toward sexual experimentation and the emergence
of the modern sex workers movement in the '70s, laws against prostitution in the United States continued to wreak havoc on women's lives (
Chapter 2
).

More recently, conservative groups allied with some feminists have used the rubric of sex trafficking to create public alarm and opposition to prostitution, even when it's clearly consensual. While there is no question that some foreign-born women are being smuggled into the United States and forced into the sex trade, most references to sex trafficking today reflect a new attack on an old problem: the exploitation of teenagers from dysfunctional homes in their own communities (
Chapter 5
).

In the last decade, antitrafficking proponents have wielded inaccurate and highly inflated statistics to persuade state and local authorities to pass ever more restrictive laws against prostitution. At a time when the rest of the developed world — most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, even parts of South America — has moved toward decriminalizing commercial sex, the United States has lurched in the opposite direction: toward increasingly punitive measures against prostitution. Yet such laws have done little to curb either trafficking or the exploitation of runaway teenagers. Nor have these measures reduced the numbers of women and men engaged in prostitution.

In fact, as shown in
Chapter 3
, the demand for commercial sexual transactions here and abroad has soared in the last three decades, in large part because of globalization and the growth of the Internet. What sociologist Barbara Brents calls the “pornographication of culture” extends beyond traveling businessmen; it permeates every facet of American society, spread by mass media (advertising, television shows, YouTube, Snapchat) that encourage voyeurism and sexual experimentation. “This ‘sexed-up' nature of contemporary society forms the backdrop for understanding the prevalence and visibility of sex venues in Western society,” Brents and coauthor Teela Sanders write in a 2010 essay for the
Journal of Law and Society.
¹

As Brents and Sanders note, sexuality has become a central component of late-capitalist consumer culture, despite the moralistic tone the mainstream media take whenever a well-known politician or official gets
caught with a sex worker. Prostitution continues to flourish under new guises, blurring the lines between what is legal and what is not. Escort services, strip clubs, private lap-dance parties, and pornography — all legal — constitute a multibillion dollar industry, and that doesn't include the millions of dollars that hotel chains such as Marriott, Holiday Inn, and Hyatt make each year from supplying adult films to their guests and renting hotel rooms to people in the sex trade. Nor does it include the millions that giant telecommunications companies earn from phone sex or cell phones used by sex workers to screen clients and arrange liaisons. Indeed, the sex industry here and abroad has largely converged with other mainstream service industries. In 2006, Americans spent $13.3 billion on adult videos, DVDs, live sex shows, strip clubs, cable films, phone sex, and X-rated magazines, according to one researcher, who counted about 3,500 strip clubs in the United States.
²
The same year, $97 billion was believed to have been spent on pornography globally.
³
The money spent on the illegal sex trade (the actual exchange of money for sex) is harder to gauge precisely because it is still illegal in some countries. In the late '90s, the illegal sex industry in the United States was estimated to generate about $18 billion annually.
⁴
The global sex industry was estimated at between $30 and $50 billion per year, according to another study.
⁵

In areas of the United States where prostitution is legal (such as rural areas of Nevada) and in European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, commercial sex is treated as a commodity like any other service and has become increasingly dominated by mainstream corporate entities that sell escapism, adventure, and specially tailored fantasies (
Chapters 7
and
10
). The same corporations that run upscale brothels in Nevada also own restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels.

Yet the actual individuals who work in this increasingly mainstreamed industry remain marginalized by social stigma and are often exploited. As freelance contractors, rather than employees, the women who work in legal brothels here and abroad have very few rights to protect themselves from labor abuses. The situation for women and men who work in the illegal sector is much worse. While antiprostitution laws have
done little to stem the thriving industry in recreational sex, they exact a high price on public health and safety. Although violence is not intrinsic to the sex trade (
Chapter 4
), many sex workers fear getting arrested if they report violent clients or exploitative pimps. Hence, criminalization allows killers and others to prey on women with impunity. Predators target prostitutes precisely because they are less likely to go to the police, and nonprostitutes are victimized as well when killers go unchecked (
Chapter 6
).

As shown in
Chapter 8
, laws criminalizing prostitution also foster corruption among some police officers, who harass sex workers for free sex in exchange for not arresting them. In addition, recent antitrafficking measures that dispense money from stiff fines and fees to police and prosecutors create a financial incentive for law enforcement to go after adults engaged in consensual prostitution and make the problem of trafficking look worse than it actually is.

This stands in stark contrast to the situation in countries where prostitution is legal and prostitutes work with police to curb crime and sex trafficking. The red-light districts in the Netherlands, where prostitution has been decriminalized since the 1970s and has been legal since 2000, are safe places to live and walk around in (
Chapter 10
).

Laws criminalizing prostitution likewise make it difficult for many sex workers, particularly those who are homeless or addicted to drugs, to practice safe sex and gain access to health care that could stem the spread of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases (
Chapters 10
and
11
). More recent antitrafficking laws in many states prevent women from working together as a safety measure, since they face an increased risk of being arrested and charged with trafficking each other (
Chapter 12
). Antitrafficking proponents have also been successful in shutting down Internet sites where sex workers advertise their services, making it more difficult for them to work off the street in safer indoor locations (Prologue and
Chapters 10
and
11
).

Such policies are not only dangerous and disingenuous; they are a colossal waste of taxpayers' money. As shown in
Chapter 8
, the overwhelming majority of prostitutes who are arrested are not prosecuted or
imprisoned, and most are back on the street within hours. At the same time, police often fail to distinguish between women and men who do sex work by choice and those who are forced into it against their will. Despite laws that classify the latter group as trafficking victims, these women are usually treated as criminals, and if found to be in the country illegally, they are deported against their will (
Chapters 9
,
10
, and
12
).

As I hope to show in this book by weaving together the true stories of sex workers and the latest research, many of the problems associated with prostitution in the United States would diminish if sex work were decriminalized and regulated to some degree. The most successful approach from a public health and safety standpoint can be found in New Zealand. In 2003, government officials there removed all prohibitions against adult consensual prostitution (retaining laws against child prostitution and trafficking). At the same time, the government required brothels, escort agencies, and other commercial sex venues to be licensed. New Zealand's hybrid law allows for periodic inspections of such venues and gives local officials the authority to shut them down if violations are found. However, unlike sex workers in Nevada's brothels and those in Germany, New Zealand's sex workers are not required to register with the authorities, thus reducing the social stigma these women experience. As shown in
Chapter 10
, New Zealand's semilegal approach has vastly improved working conditions for both indoor and street workers, not only reducing the risks of violence from clients, pimps, and police but also curbing the spread of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases.

As I argue in this book, federal and state authorities in the United States would do well to consider a similar approach toward adult consensual prostitution. Under such a scenario, brothels and other venues engaged in commercial sex could be taxed and regulated as businesses. Adult sex work would be decriminalized, making it easier for women and men who are doing sex work by choice to protect themselves from violence and disease. A hybrid approach that decriminalizes and regulates sex work would free law enforcement to go after real criminals, such as rapists, violent predators, and men who traffic in vulnerable children.