Carla is a young woman in her late thirties. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade, because she “had never done well, so there was no point.” She had her first son not long after that and started dancing to provide for him. “I didn’t have an education or any skills and doing that I could take care of him,” she explained. Carla learned survival from watching her mother – even though her mother never had much, she made sure her family always had a place to stay and that they were fed. Carla said that’s why it became so important that she give her boys their own house. She didn’t want them to have to stay with friends and family members. She wanted something more stable.
As Carla got older, she realized that the work she had been doing wasn’t ‘age-appropriate’ any more. “I knew it was time to hang up the stilettos,” she said jokingly. The club where she worked allowed the dancers to have sex for money, but they wanted their cut. She figured she could do the same work and keep all of the money she earned, if she struck out on her own. She spoke adamantly about using protection, saying that she had her boys at home to think about.
Carla’s story is not an uncommon story – she first turned to sex work as an act of survival when dealing with the harsh realities of living in poverty as a single mother. For some women, consensual, transactional sex work is an act of last resort, putting food on the table when there is no other way, and for others, it may be a viable professional option to provide for themselves and their families. In all instances, hearing stories like Carla’s further shows us the complexities of women’s lives as they navigate choice, bodily autonomy, and economic survival.
What is Sex Work?
“Sex Work” is a term first coined in the late 1970s. It is sometimes viewed as a synonym for prostitution, but it can have a more generalized meaning when used as an umbrella term by human rights activists and advocates to refer to people who work in all aspects of the sex trade, indoor or street-based, legal and criminalized, and it 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. Advocates, governmental agencies, NGOs, and labor unions often use the term ‘sex work’ to remove the stigma associated with the word ‘prostitute,’ and to underscore that sex work itself is ‘work,’ and should receive the same protections as other forms of work.
Across the world, many forms of sex work remain highly criminalized and highly stigmatized, and the rights of sex workers go largely unprotected, and ignored. Yet, despite the anti-sex worker political climate and the prohibition of many forms of sex work, such as solicitation, sex worker rights’ advocates continue to push for greater rights and visibility, and for laws that make sex workers safer rather than push them further underground. Advocates across the globe are pushing for policies that provide decriminalization and alternatives to incarceration for adult, consensual sex work, in the broader interests of public health and human rights.
The World’s Oldest Profession
The debate over sex work is as old as civilization, and at different times in human history it has seen acceptance or marginalization. In the late 1800s, New Orleans was home to one of America’s largest, legal red-light districts. But in the centuries that followed, the move away from legalized commercial sex and the pushing underground of the sex trade has had a large impact on marginalized women and their relationship to incarceration. In fact, some of the country’s first women’s jails were timed with the crackdown on prostitution.
Today, in cities across the United States like New Orleans, the mass criminalization of street-based sex work has meant the mass criminalization of poor women, women of color, and sexual minorities, and it has meant increased violence in communities already facing high rates of violence. The majority of individuals arrested for prostitution in the United States are poor, non-white, street-based sex workers – what many advocates call ‘the low-hanging fruit’ of the industry – and these individuals constitute some of the most vulnerable, most marginalized, and most stigmatized populations in the United States.
Across the board, sex workers experience high levels of incarceration, harassment, and violence due to the stigma, isolation, and invisibility associated with their work. 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. Cycled in and out of jail and prison, individuals involved in transactional sex work daily face arrest, interpersonal and state-based violence, and other abuses.
To then understand the context of sex work in a city like New Orleans, one must understand how underground, street-based economies are survival industries in communities facing high rates of poverty, drug use, homelessness, and incarceration, all issues which exacerbate individuals’ and families’ financial struggles. In the post-Katrina New Orleans landscape, income inequality has grown – it’s now on par with parts of the developing world – and low-income communities face difficulties in accessing affordable health care, housing, food, education, and employment. In this climate of socio-economic inequality, some low-income women may choose to engage in adult, consensual, transactional sex work to support themselves and their families.
Given the structural contexts of racism and income inequality, laws then instituted to prevent sex work can often cause more harm than good by keeping marginalized women away from the services and opportunities they need to survive. The solution to prostitution often presented by local and federal officials often centers on increased policing and harsher punishments, but human rights advocates argue that solutions should instead center on providing better access to services and reducing barriers. They argue that incarcerating sex workers does nothing to improve their situations; instead it has the opposite effect of providing more roadblocks and fewer options. Advocates point out that incarceration turns women into numbers and does not allow them the ability to rebuild their lives, nor does it make it easier for women to safely access programs such as job training, drug treatment, and mental health and trauma recovery services.
“We are a society that isn’t providing for marginalized women,” said Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With a Vision, Inc. (WWAV), an advocacy group that works with sex workers in New Orleans. “Criminalization blocks them from making any changes in their lives if they wanted to. It’s impossible to get a job with nine prostitution charges. Instead of locking women up, we need to find ways to give them tools to make their own decisions, in safe and healthy ways.”
Finding Alternatives to Incarceration
Removing barriers to services is a critical issue in a state like Louisiana, where the homeless shelters and women’s shelters are constantly full, where Medicaid expansion has been denied, and where limited public transportation makes it increasingly difficult to access the services that do exist. When services are available, many sex workers are met with service providers and law enforcement who deem them less than human, giving them subpar service or denying them access to resources. Societal stigma means that sex workers are often disrespected by even those who should be helping them.
Advocates in Louisiana have been pushing for a way to reduce the harm that sex workers experience from being locked into the criminal justice system. In Orleans Parish, this led to the creation of the first prostitution diversion program in Louisiana. In 2012, the New Orleans Racial Justice Improvement Project, inclusive of Women With a Vision, Inc., the New Orleans Municipal Court, Orleans District Attorney’s Office, the City Attorney, Orleans Public Defenders, and the New Orleans Police Department, came together to develop holistic, wrap-around case management services for women who are arrested on charges surrounding sex work.
The Crossroads Diversion Program, currently in its pilot year, aims to divert persons charged with misdemeanor prostitution offenses out of the criminal justice system. The program will provide an alternative to incarceration and criminal adjudication for sex workers in New Orleans, linking them to social services and other assistance.
If women arrested for sex work opt into the program, they go to Women With A Vision, where they are given a case manager who helps them come up with an individual service plan that they must complete in order to successfully fulfill the program. WWAV’s curriculum works to aid women in the exploration of historical trauma and oppression faced at the intersections of their identities.
Modeled after different programs across the nation and guided by evidence-based practices, trauma-informed counseling, and proven curriculums, Crossroads utilizes a holistic approach to addressing the immediate and long-term needs of marginalized women. Recognizing that many healing and wellness approaches are often short-term or crisis-oriented and thus trap people in survivalist thinking, Crossroads sees long-term goals and future planning as integral to the success of clients and the program.
At WWAV, participants in the program attend classes about harm-reduction, know your rights trainings, safer sex education, navigating trauma, and many other evidence-based curriculums. These classes, or “sessions,” are held once a week and last about 90 minutes. If the participants attend all of their mandated sessions (anywhere between 6 and 12), they will have their charge dismissed. In the end, women are able to access referrals for housing, résumé building, budget management and counseling, instead of more jail time.
“There are many intersecting forces that lead women to engage in sex work: poverty, racism, lack of healthcare, and lack of educational opportunities or job opportunities that provide living wages, and more,” said WWAV’s Deon Haywood. “It’s our belief at Women With A Vision that incarceration and conviction only serve to exacerbate these problems, cutting people off from the opportunities they need to live full, healthy lives. This program offers women access to support, resources, training, and other services that can offer new opportunities and new possibilities.”
This is support that WWAV has been offering for a quarter of a century. The organization was founded in 1989 by a grassroots collective of African-American women in response to the spread of HIV/AIDS in communities of color. In New Orleans, WWAV has had 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 disease, violence, stigmatization, and marginalization. The organization successfully spearheaded and won a campaign to challenge the criminalization of sex workers under Louisiana’s Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation law, which until 2012, publicly branded sex workers as sex offenders for life. Earlier this year, Women With a Vision was one of the featured organizations in the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP)’s report on “Good Practice in Sex Worker-Led HIV Programming.”
One of WWAV’s primary goals with Crossroads has been to create an environment that works to minimize the stigma associated with sex work, and provide women, who feel that sex work is a necessary part of their lives, a safe place to envision a future and use their skills to determine how to achieve new goals. WWAV staff want the women who come through the doors of the organization to be seen as people first and foremost, not as the stereotypes and stigmatized roles society often casts them in.
To organizations like WWAV, sex workers are a diverse group of people, each with their own stories and struggles, as well as with their own set of motivations, skills, and strengths. Carla was one of the first graduates from Crossroads, and she is now working to find employment. Alexis, another single mother who recently completed the program, stayed on with WWAV after her charges were dismissed to find ways to further support sex workers in her community, “I just want to continue to help women who have been in my situation,” she said. In fact, many of the program graduates have returned to WWAV to receive further services or simply to drop in and be a part of the safe space that the organization works daily to create. “Thank you for treating me like a human,” said another participant on her last day at the program, underscoring the core philosophy of what many advocacy organizations like WWAV embrace: ‘sex worker rights are human rights.’
Desiree Evans is the Policy and Communications Director at Women With a Vision. This was originally posted at the blog of Louisiana Progress, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting public policy that moves Louisiana ahead without leaving some of its people behind.