Bodily Self Determination & Law

This message came though a work Listserv this morning. It's a bit lengthy for a blog post, but I thought it was interesting reading, and information sort of typical to IJS-- it has sex, politics, religion, academics, and good reasoning. Have at it.
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With Prop 8, the right of two persons of any gender to wed is contested; and this is rallying the UCSF LGBTIQ community -- we are thinking of our friends, ourselves, the future of societies here and elsewhere.

I remember when I interviewed lesbian scholar/author Priscilla Alexander in New York City in the late 1990's; she said that she believed that LGBT movement should be inclusive of sex workers. It always struck me - and still does -- as a thought-provoking argument. Certainly a number of sex working people are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, and from my own experience doing street-based research in San Francisco, I am aware that the two communities are overlapping, and share issues related to the right of adults to have consensual sex. From this same research,and from doing HIV prevention work, I have learned that criminalization of adult consensual activity benefits no one. The memory of the sodomy laws that criminalized a number sex acts between consenting adults is still very recent history, as is the celebration that followed the Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which finally struck those laws down.

What follows is part of an Open Letter which I wrote to Friends/Quakers on this issue:

In considering decriminalization, it is instructive to engage a comparative law perspective. For example, in New Zealand, decriminalizing sex work has not resulted in an increase in the number of practitioners but in an increase in the ability of those workers to seek assistance from authorities in response to acts of violence. Great Britain passed a law determining that juvenile prostitution would no longer be punished, although clients were to continue to be prosecuted. By law, then, criminalization is not used as a pathway to services. Rather than receiving services through the mode of incarceration, youth involved in prostitution are brought directly to locations where they get free assistance with housing, job training, and education. As a social scientist who has conducted research with homeless and migrant youth in San Francisco for over a decade (1992-2002), and is currently completing a manuscript on the topic, I see the practical good that can come from such a change in legislation.

Criminalizing adults for consensual sexual activities makes little sense. Criminalization drives people further underground, increasing reliance on exploitive and sometimes dangerous modes of support. As evidenced repeatedly, jail and prison often have a deteriorative affect on an individual’s overall life trajectory. With decriminalization, it will be possible for workers to utilize the mechanisms that assure fair labor practices and occupational health and safety. In my course on legal and political anthropology, I teach university students about the history of San Francisco peep show workers who unionized and negotiated for better and safer terms of their labor, enabling them to eventually create a worker owned shop. The difference in the dignity they experienced as workers -- and later as worker-owners -- was substantial. This organization was possible because they were working in a legal part of the sex industry. The right of workers to organize is fundamental to a just society. As the lore of the Barbary Coast suggests, San Francisco has long been known for its sex work. Individuals who chose this service work need to be accorded worker rights, as they have been through progressive legal change in a number of countries that have chosen decriminalization.

At a UC Berkeley symposium, data was presented showing that the amount of money per year expended to prosecute and jail sex workers was equivalent to the amount of money it would take to enable each one of the prosecuted workers to attend four years of college. Criminalization, and offering people services through the criminal justice system, is not an efficient way to provide opportunities, under pain of increased penalty. The San Francisco Department of Public Health has committed itself to supporting a harm reduction approach that assists people while honoring them as decision making individuals. Decriminalization is the first step to creating more open routes of access to services for adult sex workers. The decriminalization initiative is separate from existing laws criminalizing the practice of kidnap, extortion, forced migration, forced labor, child labor, and abuse. Decriminalization will improve the ability of authorities to investigate and prosecute these criminal actions. For example, victims of trafficking will be more likely to come forward and contact authorities, knowing that they will not themselves be criminalized.

We speak, as Quakers, of the economic draft, and its disproportionate effect on societies’ most vulnerable people – those without economic resources and those subject to multiple discriminations. The people who suffer the most from criminalization are the most vulnerable workers – those who have the worst working conditions and the fewest resources: street workers. As Friends considering this issue we must look not only at the intent of the law but at the impact of the way that it is carried out – distributive justice. When the Exotic Dancers Alliance and the SF Dept. of Public Health originally opened the St. James Infirmary, it created a safe zone for all sex workers, especially street workers to seek judgment-free medical services. Decriminalization will help to remove the stigma and fear of legal reprisal, which inhibit sex workers from accessing legal and health services. In this sense, decriminalization is a public health issue as well as an issue of conscience. Given the commitment of Friends to social and economic justice, I would hope that Friends would consider supporting this ballot initiative in the November 4th election.

Sincerely,

Amy Donovan