A different kind of issue education
Policy change around the sex trade is often centered on decriminalization or anti-criminalization, which requires broad changes to criminal law and divestment from the criminal legal system. Under the US’s legal structure, direct criminalization of the exchange of sexual services for resources happens at the state level and is enhanced by municipal laws and local law enforcement policy. Currently, there is no federal law which directly criminalizes sexual exchange. And, based on a 1911 Supreme Court case, there can’t be.
Nonetheless, federal actors enhance criminalization in important ways. Sex worker advocacy in federal spaces, therefore, requires nuanced and substantive conversations on federalism as well as sex workers’ rights. For example, federal funding to local law enforcement sometimes requires them to undertake activities to avert “demand for trafficking”, and the accompanying trainings only show examples of sting operations against sex workers’ clients. Immigration and customs law bar entry into the country for people who have engaged in sex work, even from those countries where the selling of sex is legal. Immigration jurisprudence has ruled that a prostitution arrest and conviction is enough to bar someone from adjusting their status from temporary to permanent.
Coalitional partners have been key to moving policymakers because they are able to put the issue of sex work into more familiar contexts.
Federal laws also cover “interstate commerce” or things crossing state lines – including internet regulations – which made the passage of FOSTA/SESTA, a bill which expanded criminal and civil liability for websites which hosted information related to the sex trade and led to dozens of websites preemptively closing, possible. Federal projects have international reach as well, such as the trainings the US gives to foreign law enforcement agencies on how to engage in trafficking work. These often replicate and encourage the same law enforcement tactics and racist narratives and imagery that American sex workers are all-too familiar with.
