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Freedom Network USA now supports sex workers’ rights

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

What we found was that it all came back to the denial of human rights. Denying rights and enabling trafficking are the same thing. When we refuse to protect workers, when we refuse to protect immigrants, when we allow discrimination against people based on the colour of their skin, or their gender identity, or their sexual orientation, when we throw people away – that’s when people get abused. If we protect people, people are less likely to be abused. To our mind it’s really that simple.

Our dual purpose is to work on that systemic change while ensuring that the folks who are still being abused and exploited are getting the best services possible. It's mostly our members on the ground who are providing those direct services. We enable them to do that work better by fighting the policy battles.

Joel: How do you understand trafficking in the sex sector vis-à-vis other labour sectors? Many people in the field accept that increased labour rights are a part of the solution in non-sex work sectors, but make an exception when it comes to sex work. They seem to think that, in that sector only, the usual logics don’t apply. How do you understand and navigate that break?

Jean: We see sex work as another form of work. It’s certainly a dangerous form of work, and a lot of harm is done to workers in this industry. But it’s a form of work. The people who disagree, who say it's inherently exploitative and thus not work, usually give moral or ethical reasons for why they think that. But frankly all our work at FNUSA is grounded in representing workers who are doing dirty, dangerous, unpleasant work. No little girl dreams of being a garment factory worker on American Samoa without air conditioning or sufficient food. No little girl dreams of being a poultry processor cutting apart animals and being covered in their blood and viscera for long periods of time without breaks. No little girl has such dreams.

Yet that is what some little girls end up doing, which is why we must put protections and regulations in place that make their environments less dangerous. FNUSA has always come from the perspective that there are many kinds of dangerous, difficult, unpleasant work that is harmful, that is painful. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which organises tomato pickers in Florida, is one of our founding members. It knows that agricultural work can be incredibly painful, dangerous work. Yet it’s not trying to make agricultural work unlawful or to mechanise it completely, but rather to change the systems in which that work is done. It’s trying to ensure that workers get the most protection possible, and that they can choose when to come and go from that industry.

I don't see the difference when it comes to sex work. I see it as another form of work that is dangerous, that is difficult, that is unregulated. Some sex workers suffer greatly. But, even if it’s an industry that little girls don’t dream of going into, all sex workers deserve protection. They do. And we don’t protect workers when we criminalise an industry. We leave them on their own. We leave them out in the cold.

FNUSA’s sophistication on the issue of sex workers’ rights has been a bit slower than in other areas. I think this is because our founders were simply rooted in other industries. We've been much quicker to articulate a really clear position on, say, immigration reform, because all our founding members were working with immigrants. The sex workers’ rights movement, understandably, is a lot more closed off. It is self-protective for all the right reasons. But that means we’ve had fewer connections to it.

A time came where we decided that needed to change. The tipping point had a lot to do with organisational capacity. At the beginning it was simply a network of people working other jobs. We now have a full-time staff of 12, and that has given us a lot more capacity to engage. The Trump administration also forced us to really think deeply about the systemic work, and to understand that there are communities that are taking the brunt of these wrong-headed, terrible policies. We realised that if we weren't actively working against that, then that was a failure. That really spurred us to get more engaged on the issue of sex workers’ rights.

Joel: I’ve had the impression for a long time that anti-trafficking organisations aren't comfortable criticising their peers. One of the main issues here is that people don't want to say anything negative in a context where it is generally assumed that everyone shares the same overarching goals. That seems to have changed with the Trump administration. With Trump anti-trafficking became – more so than ever – entwined in border protection, xenophobia and racism, and a conservative sexual politics. Some organisations went along with that, a choice that seems to have broken this surface-level unity. Is that an accurate reading of what happened? Is it perhaps actually easier to take a stand now on controversial positions than before?

Jean: I’d say there’s been a bit of an arc from divisive, to separate and siloed, to divisive again. In the early 2000s, when the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the UN’s Palermo Protocol were being signed, anti-trafficking politics were really divisive. It was the abolitionists vs. the human rights folks, and it got very ugly. People, including some of our founding members, were personally attacked and had their careers harmed. It was a highly toxic experience at that time.

Once the law got passed and the money started flowing, people really wanted to shift gears. They were happy to just focus on doing the work – there was a real backlash to the experience of the early 2000s. So that’s what our members did. They got to work providing services and started up programmes all over the country. The abolitionists also got to work, but in a different way than we did. They started up well-funded policy organisations, wrote white papers and studies, and issued positions. They slowly and steadily lobbied members of Congress. They managed to push the US even further into an anti-sex-work stance, and pushed forward policies and laws that were increasingly harmful to sex workers.

We watched this with growing distress at FNUSA, but we were unclear what to do about it. A big problem was the real dichotomy that exists in the US in terms of funding. There are some very well-funded abolition activists, some even have their own foundations. But there didn’t seem to be anybody on the other side. The folks that you would expect to fund that work were maybe doing it internationally, but not in the US. The only funding that people were getting here was coming from the government, and that had the prostitution pledge attached to it. The result was that people became very skittish about talking about decriminalisation or sex work at all. Doing so a) wouldn’t get them any funding; b) could lose them funding; and c) wouldn’t help the people standing right in front of them needing medical care, mental health services, a place to live, a job and care. So they buckled down and said, ‘You know what? Focus.’
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