During last week’s House hearing on Craigslist and the sex industry, advocates and policymakers debated the lives of young people engaged in sex work and the sex trade, with little involvement of those young people themselves. They made a case for censoring online ads for sex work and increasing law enforcement power and resources to police sex work. They stated that they were doing this to end violence against young people in the sex trade.
A 2009 study of Chicago girls in the sex trade, conducted by the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, tells a different story of girls’ needs than the one advocated for in Congress. The girls themselves reported that even when they sought out the support they needed to confront violence, they were denied help because of their involvement in the sex trade. Girls describe hospitals discriminating against them and not providing full care, being physically and sexually assaulted by foster parents, and being accused of lying by the police when they seek help after being raped.
If policymakers and advocates listened to young people engaged in sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade, they would understand that the police are not best positioned to protect our communities from violence. In Washington DC, Different Avenues surveyed sex workers and people profiled as sex workers by law enforcement. One in five of their respondents have been solicited for sex by the police. Different Avenues also reports that police routinely confiscate their safer sex supplies, and have strip-searched and assaulted them.
When we consider where to move resources to support young people who do sex work and are impacted by the sex trade, we need to listen to young people themselves. Whether they come to sex work and the sex trade through choice, circumstance, or coercion – young people engaged in sex work and the sex trade are not victims. They are the experts in their own lives.
Melissa Gira Grant is a writer, a contributor to AlterNet, and the external relations officer at the Third Wave Foundation.