Morning Wire - The Nationwide Push to Decriminalize Prostitution I 6.4.23

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

Politicians and activists across the country are pushing to decriminalize prostitution with the mantra: “sex work is work.” However opponents including a former sex worker say decriminalization is not the answer. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Omaha Steaks: Get $30 off your order! Use promo code WIRE at http://www.OmahaSteaks.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Night my way. Forever. I just love my job. Get tickets now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 in theaters May 1st. Directed by David Frankel. Progressive activists and politicians. across the country are pushing to decriminalize prostitution, promoting so-called sex work as real work.

Meanwhile, opponents, including some former participants in the sex trade, say decriminalization is not the answer. I also feel like you're going to kind of open the market for prostitution and pimps. And I just feel like the market's just going to grow and get bigger. In this episode, we hear firsthand accounts from a former prostitute, a police chief in the throes of a prostitution legalization initiative. and others about how this effort affects communities and victims of sex trafficking. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Vickley with Georgia Howe. It's June 4th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the movement toward decriminalizing prostitution as Daily Wire reporter Amanda Presta-Jacquimo.

So Amanda, first, give us some background on this effort to effectively legalize prostitution and how that intersects with sex trafficking. Yeah, well, a lot has changed in the framing of this issue over the past decade. or two, back in 2002, then President George W. Bush signed a national security presidential directive outlining the U.S. government's strong position against legalizing prostitution. Now, that was based on evidence that prostitution is inherently harmful and dehumanizing, that it fuels sex trafficking, which the government classified as a form of modern-day slavery. In 2004, the State Department said that prostitution fuels the growth of this modern-day slavery by providing a facade for pimps and sex

traffickers, stating, quote, where prostitution is legalized or tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery. To that point of child sex trafficking, some studies have estimated that the average age a child is first exploited through prostitution ranges from 12 to 14 years old. Now, there's some disagreement on these numbers just because of the nature of the crime, as you can imagine, but just really horrific stuff. Yeah. Moving on in 2015, the State Department's Office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons

echoed that same anti-prostitution language, tying prostitution to sex trafficking and advocating for the promotion of policies and cultural norms that, quote, disallow paying for sex. But now we're seeing the atmosphere really change, politically speaking. Yeah, that's right. Fast forward to today. and activists and prominent politicians are promoting the decriminalization

of what they call sex work. They argue that prostitution is not inherently dehumanizing, and this can be done without exploitation and as such, it's no different than any other work. And by decriminalizing that, you're helping, generally speaking, women.

They also make a distinction between decriminalizing prostitution and legalizing it. If prostitution is decriminalized, it would technically remain illegal, they say, but the legal system would not prosecute people for engaging in the act. There could be no penalties tied to the act or a civil fine, for example, whereas legalization would remove all legal prohibitions against prostitution.

And just how mainstream is this push to decriminalize prostitution today? Well, this certainly is not a fringe movement anymore. Let's start at the top. Our current vice president, Kamala Harris, has gone on record saying she believes prostitution should be decriminalized. That's really a flip for Harris that. seem to come from public pressure from the far left. Remember, Harris was a prosecutor who once bragged that she, and this is a quote, led the fight

against Backpage and other sex trafficking platforms. Other mainstream politicians, mostly all Democrats, are on board with this movement, too. At the least, they're saying that decriminalization of prostitution should be considered, or they're parroting that sex work is work mantra. This includes the likes of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New Jersey, Senator Cory Booker, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the last three of whom are former presidential candidates. Right.

And we can add Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to this list. Last summer, Newsom signed a highly controversial bill into law SB 357, and this has effectively become a case study on decriminalizing prostitution. The law backed by Democratic State Senator Scott Weiner and the ACLU decriminalized loitering with the intent to commit prostitution. Weiner claims the law is a protection for trans and black and brown women, whom he claims are harassed by police for merely their identity. Here's the state senator in his own words,

making the claim that SB 357 is necessary. Why would we have a criminal law allowing a police officer to arrest you based exclusively on how you look, not on what you do? That's wrong. We shouldn't have that kind of law on the books, and the police have plenty of tools to deal with traffic, and they should be doing more work to address human trafficking and less complaining. Now, those on the other side of this issue just flat out disagree with that premise.

And by the way, these aren't all people of one political persuasion. There were even some California Democrats who warned against SB 357 before it was signed into law. Vanessa Russell, founder of an anti-sex trafficking nonprofit called Love Never Fails, pushed back on Senator Wiener's narrative during an appearance on East Town Church's YouTube channel. The reason why black women and LGBTQ plus people are disproportionately represented in prostitution stings in arrests is because they are disproportionately trafficked. And so to me, that is the greater issue. Why are we not providing necessary services to provide exit for trafficked victims for people who do not want to be sold for sex? And unfortunately, the agenda of

Scott Wiener and the ACLU is that they want to promote an agenda called sex work is work. And they are strong believers in full decriminalization, meaning no one gets arrested in the sex buying food chain, meaning not the victim, not the buyer, and not the exploiter. I also spoke to San Diego Police Chief David Nislyte. He and his officers are on the ground seeing firsthand the effects from this law. And here's what he had to say about this disparity issue Senator Wiener talks about. This is primarily a complaint-driven issue. Law enforcement, we deal with behavior.

We deal with criminal behavior. So if we constantly get a complaint every single day about the behavior out there, we go out there to who is doing the activity. And so is there a disparity about who is being contacted out there as far as people of color? Yes, but that's in my area. and I'm going to only only going to specifically talk about San Diego, that's who we contact. That's who's involved in this criminal behavior. There's other ways to look at what is causing this disparity.

Why is it that these people are out here involved in sex trafficking? Are they there because they want to be? Or are they there because they're being forced into this business? And so, again, we can look at this differently, but we shouldn't be risking lives of young women because of that. And he's really seen it on the ground there. Okay, so SB 357, has been in effect for months now.

How is that playing out on the ground? Chief Nisleit told me the law has really hamstrung officers in San Diego from cracking down on sex trafficking, which he said was completely predictable. It's made it extremely difficult. I mean, so in the past, when we were able to contact women or those involved in sex trafficking, we could use the lording with intent after we watched them. Once they decriminalized that, we really don't have an entryway into making that contact. anymore. And what we're seeing now is we've had these open sex markets, 24 hours a day, 365 days

out of the year. These open sex markets, as Chief Nisleit put it, of course, are affecting the surrounding communities. There have been dozens of local news reports in California revealing rampant prostitution happening outside schools and in neighborhoods where mothers are pushing their babies and strollers and so on. Here are some residents in a San Francisco neighborhood describing such prostitution issues to a local Fox affiliate. Violence of the pimps that they not only intimidate the women and men handle them aggressively, they also sometimes intimidate the neighbors. Noise it brings at night.

I mean, I wake up multiple times a week at night. My kids have missed school. I've missed work. It's, and it's the Johns driving by in their car, racing back and forth, turning their music on, having side shows with their cars. Chief Nisly emphasized that this hurts sex trafficking victims the most. In echo of this view, our government used to hold. It's also making it for those that will traffic women, specifically younger women,

for them to put them out there with now to reduce their chance of being caught. Then those that are put out there involuntary has made it much harder for us to rescue those victims. And so what we're seeing is a spike in this type of behavior. You know, and just because you decriminalize something doesn't mean the impact on the victim, those that are being trafficked or on the community goes away. In fact, and sometimes like this, it increases. Now, advocates for decriminalizing prostitution often complain that so-called sex workers are not part of these conversations when it comes to laws against selling sex.

They claim these women, men too, but they typically talk in terms of women, are happy and unharmed selling sex, and therefore law enforcement should not be involved. I wanted to kind of go down this avenue. So I spoke to former prostitute, Brittany de LaMora, about her time as a prostitute for over four years, starting when she was just 21 years old. Even before that, Brittany was selling sex. At 18 years of age, she was working in the porn industry. Brittany told me her pimp was her boyfriend and that she was never coerced into prostitution,

though she did express to me feeling trapped by her past choice. I was in a relationship with a guy right before the pimp, and he was stabbed to death in front of me, and I was living with him. So after that, I basically had nowhere to live. Honestly, at first, I didn't want to have a relationship with a pimp, but I literally had nowhere to go. And he gave me a place to stay. About five months into that relationship, this man encouraged Brittany to sell her body. I didn't really want to do it, but I just kind of was in this place where, Right, but these are the choices that I've made with my life.

And I didn't really see a way out. I didn't really see how I could come out of that. So I just, I kind of accepted his guidance and I went back to porn and prostitution. Brittany, who is now a devout Christian, told me it was an encounter with God that gave her the push to get out of the industry. After she left with the help of her mother, her home was robbed. She believes it was her pimp. I have a lot of suspicion to believe it was him because it was like, you know, the safe with the code and everything that he's, knew it was opened. And so, yeah, I think he did that to scare me because he wanted me to feel

like I couldn't do life without him. But I just pushed through and I did not go back to him. I asked Brittany about the others she encountered who were also selling sex. She acknowledged this theme of vulnerable and broken women, even for those whom she said were not forced into prostitution. I didn't personally meet anybody that was pressured. I mean, there's definitely some manipulation that goes on with the pimps. They pray on both. vulnerable young girls. We know that they pray on teenagers, but the women that I met were all adults that were vulnerable. They came from broken childhoods. And so they were kind of inclined to this way of life because when you've been abused as a child and you haven't healed from that, you often choose a life of abuse. You just subconsciously attract what you think you deserve. Now coming out of that line of work, I've met women that say that they were forced, they were pressured, maybe there were runaways. And this was kind of the lights that they fell into. not by choice. Brittany told me she wasn't sure

how to best handle prostitution in the legal sense and thought the issue should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Women who are forced into the industry should not be criminalized, she said. But decriminalizing the whole industry is probably not the best solution.

If I had gotten arrested when I was doing what I was doing, I think that it absolutely would have changed me. I know that it would have changed the course of my life. I mean, maybe I would have continued with porn, but I would have stopped prostituting. Now, Brittany is the mother.

She's married to a Christian pastor, and a lot of her life's work is dedicated to helping people transition out of prostitution in porn, which I think speaks to her own experience. The couple does this through their nonprofit called Love Always Ministries. So her past experience really inspired her to be an activist on this issue. Final question, what are the latest statistics on prostitution in the U.S.? Just how many people are we talking about here? Well, as you'd expect, we don't know for sure, but the estimates range between one and two million. That's in the U.S. Worldwide estimates are more than 40 million people.

And we should note that a significant percentage of traffic children are boys. So again, this isn't just a female issue. This industry can victimize anyone. Right. In the end, this all really comes back to this one question. Is sex work inherently dehumanizing and inseparable from breeding exploitation, or is it merely work? And if there is non-exploitative sex work, how is that separated out from abuse and trafficking. Would victims be a sacrifice of this movement as they seem to be in California? Yeah, well, all crucial questions that have to play into policy decisions on this issue. Amanda, thanks for reporting. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire reporter Amanda Press to Giacomo, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.