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Fence-sitting and its discontents: the fear of taking a stand on sex work in the US
By: []
Date: 2021-08
The Anti-Prostitution Pledge is a clear act of political silencing and compulsion that contravenes First Amendment free speech protections. It has emboldened those opposing sex workers’ rights, who face no such restrictions on promoting their views. And it has enabled anti-trafficking organisations who support or would like to support sex workers to collectively sit out this important conversation. More broadly, it has restricted the development of knowledge in the anti-trafficking field and in the public sphere about the scope, details, and impact of various legal approaches to commercial sex.
There are only a few examples of decriminalised sex work in the world, with New Zealand being the most well-known model. However, the effects of this approach where it has been implemented have been ground-breaking. Decriminalisation has reduced harm in the sex industry and opened avenues to justice previously unimaginable. Developing a similar model within the US would take study, collaboration, and a knowledge and evidence base. This is hard to do when you cannot talk freely with all stakeholders about decriminalisation. Thus, when the sex industry is discussed, there is tendency for opponents and even proponents to focus on moral questions – not on the evidence of effects or details of implementation. Decriminalisation bills are not treated as a serious and necessary public policy proposals that they are.
Funders on the fence
The power of the Anti-Prostitution Pledge is partly due to the limited sources of funding that anti-trafficking organisations have outside the federal government. Local community foundations can rarely sustain these programmes, and national funders are unlikely to fund direct service provision at a national scale – the bread and butter of most of anti-trafficking organisations.
Philanthropic foundations are also strongly inclined to stay ‘on the fence’ regarding sex work. In 2019-2020, the Sex Worker Donor Collaborative worked with Strength in Numbers to research global funding for sex worker rights, including what strategies would help funders to deepen existing support or unlock new funding. In addition to the tragically low amounts of funding available (less than 1% of human rights funding in 2018 was given to sex workers’ rights), we also identified several reasons why philanthropists are reluctant to stand a stand.
For many funders, fence-sitting happens pre-consciously. Even funders who regularly support programmes focusing on poverty, women’s rights, racial justice, criminalisation, and other issues in which sex workers’ rights are central, often don’t feel like they have to take a position on sex work. They may claim they don’t know enough about sex work to form an opinion, because sex workers and sex workers’ rights defenders are not seen as a community which these funders need to consult or be accountable to.
On some level, these funders erase the many sex workers affected by their grant-making because they are uncomfortable with the existence of sex work. Although sex workers routinely traverse and code-switch through many terrains, there is a strongly held idea that sex workers can’t be made palatable. That bringing them more fully to the table would disrupt the flow of philanthropy culture, which is polite, wealthy, and largely white. As the reproductive justice organisation Women with a Vision attests, sex workers’ “existence is political”. Many funders can easily avoid this discomfort and face no negative consequences.
Fear and power
There are other funders who are clear that their grants affect sex workers, yet consciously avoid taking a clear position. We interviewed some of these funders for the 2019-2020 research. Some encounter strong and opposing opinions from their grantees regarding the best approach to commercial sex. In the US, there is a growing movement to implement the Nordic model of criminalising just those who buy sex, with many survivors as spokespeople. This leads to political disagreement and counter-campaigns, with people with lived experience of the sex industry on both sides. When faced with this disagreement, some funders find it impossible to take a position reflective of all of their grantees.
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