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Freedom Network USA supported sex work decrim and they’re fine [1]
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Date: 2023-10
Back in 2021 we interviewed Jean Bruggeman, the Executive Director of Freedom Network USA, about her organisation's decision to get off the fence and explicitly support the decriminalisation of sex work in the United States. She was a bit nervous. Two years on, we checked back in with Jean to find out if she, and the organisation she leads, are still standing.
Spoiler alert: they are.
Joel Quirk (BTS): Freedom Network USA came out in 2021 in support of the decriminalisation of sex work. At the time you were hopeful, but also had some concerns. Remind us what they were.
Jean Bruggeman (Freedom Network USA): We were worried that we might disrupt our members’ relationships with their local communities. Direct service providers in the US have no choice but to collaborate with law enforcement – it’s the only way they can secure immigration status for trafficking survivors. But those same law enforcement officers often engage in tactics hostile to sex work. That creates a delicate relationship that we have to be sensitive to, or we can cause harm.
We also didn’t want to sound more certain than we were. The fact is, we don’t know how decriminalisation would play out in the US given our legal and social service landscape. Our social safety nets, unemployment schemes, and relationships with law enforcement are all very different to what you see in Europe. So in our position paper, we acknowledged that other countries’ experiences wouldn’t necessarily be reflected here. And we called for rigorous research before and after the fact to fill in that knowledge gap.
To be clear: we think it will be wonderful. But explicitly acknowledging our uncertainty really helped our members take the leap. It allowed them to say that, based on everything we know and the beliefs underlying human rights work, this is the sort of stance that makes sense until something changes.
Joel: So what happened? Did getting off the fence have the impact that you were hoping to achieve? Or were your fears realised?
Jean: There wasn’t really any pushback, and two years on we still haven’t heard of our members having problems either.
There was, of course, the expected denunciation on social media. People called us out, tagged Congress in posts, and suggested we lose federal funding. But we didn’t. And in retrospect I do ask myself: was losing funding ever really on the cards? Performative trolling is part of the social media age. You can’t escape it, but it doesn’t change institutions and practices as much as people fear.
We would have been more worried under the Trump administration, but we were already at risk of losing our funding back then. Trump had plenty of fodder to blackball us if he had wanted to. But our position paper came out after he left office, and we’re now nearly three years into the Biden administration and our funding is still there. So that fear isn’t really there anymore.
The Twitter trolls said that by supporting decriminalisation we’d broken the anti-prostitution pledge in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and therefore the government should stop funding us. But we’d done our homework. A legal team did the research, and we firmly believe that the law as written is unconstitutional and unenforceable.
Besides that, the law is much narrower than people think. It says that you cannot support prostitution with federal funds, and we don’t. We’re not encouraging people to engage in sex work. We’re advocating for people to be safe regardless of their workplace and to know their legal rights. That’s very different.
Joel: Have you shared your good experience with others, and has it given them courage to follow suit?
Jean: We haven’t intentionally reached out to other organisations to share our experience. But I can say that our membership has increased, and I think clearly articulating our support for decriminalisation helped that happen.
When we speak to new members, we tell them that our three big policy positions are pro-choice, pro-comprehensive immigration reform, and pro-decriminalisation of sex work. These positions are not universally promoted in the US, and certainly not by trafficking organisations. So we are very clear about where we stand. These are the fault lines, and we don’t want anyone joining us who isn’t 100% on our side.
The response has generally been, “I’ve finally found my people.” They’re individuals who have been looking for an organisation that shares their views and are surprised to have finally found one. I think decriminalisation is a position that many people working in the field hold, but they’ve struggled to find support for it within their organisations. Now they’ve found a home with us. So any fear that our membership would suffer because of our stance on sex work hasn’t been born out. Quite the opposite.
I have heard of a few professionals elsewhere using our position paper to move this conversation forward in their own workplaces. It gives me hope that more organisations will soon feel empowered to take this position and openly support the decriminalisation of sex work in the United States.
Joel: Is there a chance of this actually happening in a country that seems to becoming more conservative rather than less? Given that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade not too long ago, it’s hard to imagine that the decriminalisation of sex work could be on the cards anytime soon.
Jean: American politics is a mess, but I’m hopeful. The upside of having a federal system is that we don’t have to convince the whole country all at once. Some bits of federal law will need changing, but most sex work laws are at the state and local level.
That works to our advantage, as progressive jurisdictions across the US are starting to think much more broadly about anti-racism in public policy. This is a huge entry point for talking about sex work. If we can connect decriminalisation to the anti-racism conversation in the minds of policymakers, that can lead to change.
The hard part is finding a district to go first. A place willing to hold the great experiment to show that the boogey man does not come – that we’re all going to be fine. For better or worse, that’s the way our system is designed in the US. But if it works out as we believe it will, I think decriminalisation will spread to other districts. Walls, once they start to crumble, fall quickly. Marriage equality showed us that.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/freedom-network-usa-supported-sex-work-decrim-what-happened-next/
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