Women With a Vision has a long commitment to fighting for the human rights protection of street-based sex workers and their families, addressing the needs of women impacted by laws and policies that make them unsafe, and that put them at risk for violence, stigmatization, and marginalization. WWAV believes that sex workers’ rights are human rights.
Last week WWLTV reported a story claiming that human sex-trafficking is expected to increase during Carnival season this year, but the report itself continues a misguided tradition of claiming that sex trafficking increases during large-scale events in New Orleans.
Women With a Vision has previously discussed the connection between the mass criminalization of consensual sex workers and the continuing myth of increased human trafficking during large-scale city events. The myth has already been debunked a number of times by experts, as Women With a Vision examined and discussed most recently on the Melissa-Harris Perry Show on Super Bowl Sunday. Studies and data have shown that no significant increase in prostitution or trafficking has ever been found during large sporting and entertainment events here in the U.S. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, “even with this lack of evidence [of increased sex trafficking], the myth has taken hold through sheer force of repetition, playing on desires to rescue trafficking victims and appear tough on crime.”
In this same way, the myth continues to make its round across the New Orleans news media landscape every time a big event hits the city, and WWAV is concerned that the myth, aided by sensationalist reporting and false data, will continue to contribute to policies that end up harming many of the women city officials and anti-trafficking organizations argue they are helping.
In New Orleans, the myth asserts that women and girls are being brought in from other states to work on Bourbon Street, but the reality is the numbers and arrests don’t add up. The myth instead contributes to a dangerous conflation between sex trafficking and consensual sex work in a city like New Orleans where the mass majority of prostitution/sex work operates in an underground consent-based economy.
This means that poor women, women of color, and transgender women, already the targets of excessive profiling and violence by law enforcement, end up facing the brunt of even more profiling during police raids occurring at the time of large events in the city. This mass criminalization works to shame, stigmatize, and decrease sex workers’ access to safety and human rights. It also increases over-policing in already highly-profiled and over-policed neighborhoods.
Therefore when officials and organizations tell the public at large to keep an eye out for people they think could be involved in sex work or “who clearly look like a prostitute” and to report suspicious activity to authorities (as the WWLTV news report advised people to do), this sets a dangerous precedent. These public practices work to conflate all sex work with human trafficking and can actually put women in more danger. The increased profiling, targeting, and stigmatizing of marginalized women in our communities during large-scale events like Mardi Gras do not make women involved in consensual sex work safer. In fact, it works to further isolate and endanger them and put them at risk for violence.
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What is a sex worker? 

“Sex worker” is a term used to refer to people who work in all aspects of the sex trades, indoor or street-based, legal and criminalized, and can include people who trade sex for money as well as safety, drugs, hormones, survival needs like food shelter or clothing, or immigration status or documentation. Sex workers are mothers, daughters/sons, teachers, organizers, people — who experience high levels of violence due to the stigma, isolation, and invisibility associated with their work.

Since prostitution/sex work is criminalized and highly stigmatized in many countries, individual sex workers and organizations are exposed to high levels of harassment and violence by law enforcement agents and benefit from little protection from violence within their communities. Speaking out against the violence against sex workers and finding or organizing support for sex workers can be dangerous. As a result, any participation in sex work as part-time, full-time, or even temporary entails a life on the margins. This is particularly true for sex workers of color and transgender and gender non-conforming sex workers, who live and work at the intersections of multiple forms of structural oppression based on gender, race, and class. (source)