Sex Workers and Civil Rights

"Pretty Woman" it isn't. A sex worker's life is filled with violence from clients and police; with discrimination and scorn from the general public; with drug addiction, homelessness and lack of health services.

And by utilizing a "revolving door" approach where sex workers (the majority of them women) are incarcerated time and again but never offered the economic, psychological and social services they need, the criminal justice system only exacerbates the problem and violates the civil and human rights of sex workers in the process.

These are some of the conclusions of a just-released study by the Sex Workers Project, an initiative of the Urban Justice Center in New York City. The study followed female, male and transgender street sex workers in New York City, and analyzed specifically how they have been affected by the city's infamous Zero Tolerance approach to law enforcement.

Meanwhile similar results -- rampant violence, harassment, substance abuse, health and housing problems -- were documented in a Chicago study released in 2001 by the Center for Impact Research. That study found 1,800 to 4,000 girls and women are involved in on- or off- street prostitution activities in Chicago in any given year, along with about 11,500 people who trade sex for drugs. These numbers -- comparable in other major cities -- show that the mistreatment of sex workers is a significant national civil and human rights situation that affects thousands and thousands of women (and men) and by extension their children or other family members.

The CIR study showed that 21.4 percent of women working as escorts had been raped 10 times or more, with comparable rates for other types of sex work. Meanwhile the rapes, beatings and other abuses male and female sex workers suffer are rarely prosecuted.

“Crimes against prostitutes usually go unpunished,” says the New York study, authored by Juhu Thukral. “There is a tacit acceptance of this form of violence, usually committed against women. The overwhelming majority of sex workers did not go to police after they experienced violent incidents. Others who attempted to report violent crimes were told by police that their complaints would not be accepted, that this is what they should expect, that they deserve all that they get.”

The results of the Chicago and New York studies mirror situations reported in anecdotes and quantitative studies done in other urban areas around the country. The treatment of sex workers by police, the courts and their clients -- as well as the general population -- should be seen as a violation of the civil liberties and human rights of these women, and on a larger scale, a collective violation of our society as a whole.

"The police are getting away with murder," said Louise Lofton, a former sex worker in Chicago who said police would often arrest her just for being on a certain corner or stretch of street. "Maybe she was just trying to go to the store. Sometimes you're trying to leave to go somewhere but you know if you go down this street they'll get you."

On a collective level, the mistreatment of female sex workers by police, johns and society represents a vicious form of sexism and misogyny. Sex workers’ customers, the vast majority of whom are men, may be vilified by their spouses or communities when it is discovered that they regularly visit or have visited sex workers, but this behavior is treated as an individual act, not a condemnation of the man’s entire existence.

Women, on the other hand, are treated as if sex work is not just their “job” or even their “crime,” but their entire existence. Police officers and judges don’t treat sex workers as women who have violated a law, they treat them as “prostitutes,” actually often referring to them in much cruder terms. Likewise for johns who see them only as bodies or specific body parts at that; and for the homeowners or angry wives who want them out of their neighborhoods, seeing them as eyesores, temptresses or carriers of disease rather than human beings.