Competing values at play in addressing sex trafficking

For Capitol Weekly’s third and final story for National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, we look at some of the most commonly debated policy options for combating pimps and other sex traffickers.

Almost a year ago, San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen made headlines for introducing a resolution asking state lawmakers to introduce their own bill to legalize sex work in California.

The supervisor’s controversial proposal came in response to complaints about an increase in sex workers strolling on Capp Street. Barricades were erected in February 2023 in the hopes that it would discourage johns from soliciting prostitutes in the Mission District.

Immediately, locals said the temporary barricades did nothing to stem the problem. “Drivers pushed them aside, or in some cases, completely drove over them,” an unidentified Capp Street resident told the news site Mission Local in mid-February.

Ronen’s response to the escalating problem was to propose legalizing sex work in the state, which was presented as a more permanent solution than a band-aid like the barricades.

“There has been a prostitution track on Capp Street in the Mission, for decades if not a century,” Ronen said at the San Franciso Board of Supervisors’ meeting on February 14, according to SFist. “Over the past few months, the situation has gotten out of control. All along Capp Street, from 17tth to 24th [Streets], dozens of women stand out in the cold in the middle of the street soliciting johns from sundown to sunrise. This is on a narrow, fully residential street where kids and parents are trying to get a good night’s sleep.”

Her proposal generated a lot of talk, both in San Francisco and across the state. For example, Sal Rodriguez, the Southern California News Group’s opinion editor, praised the supervisor, saying California needs to discuss legalizing sex work.

But the supervisor also faced a lot of questions from people both locally and nationally. In an interview with ABC7 Investigative Reporter Stephanie Sierra, Ronen said, “Criminalization makes it harder to address the issues and to protect women who are stuck in abusive relationships with pimps or with johns.”

But Sierra pushed back, noting that the owners of legal brothels in Nevada have been accused of sexual assault and trafficking. Sierra asked, “What do you say to those who criticize legalizing prostitution will just open the door for that to continue?”

“There are those examples in Nevada,” Ronen replied, “but I’m telling you it’s a lot easier to investigate and arrest and get women to testify against traffickers when they are not at risk for prosecution themselves.”

“But some argue legalizing prostitution will inherently make it easier for these sex trafficking operations to exist,” Sierra said.

“Trafficking will never be legal, let me be clear,” Ronen said. “It’s very, very hard to hold traffickers responsible and I believe legalization would make it easier and not harder.”

In the months after that interview, Ronen and her staff “met with many non-profits and other groups working on this issue who wanted to share their expertise,” Ronen aide Jackie Prager told Capitol Weekly in an email. “Unfortunately, our office no longer had the capacity to work on this resolution, but I’ll let you know if that changes in the future.”

Prager gave a slightly different answer to the San Francisco Examiner in a June 8 story headlined “Sex work legalization plans stall as consensus in the industry remains elusive”: “What we realized is that the language of the resolution didn’t fully align with what this community wanted or needed.”

And while the welfare of trafficking victims and the efforts to catch and convict pimps might not seem related, practically speaking they are deeply intertwined.

As with many policy issues, there are competing values at play when considering ideas for addressing sex trafficking.

On the one hand, there is – appropriately – deep concern about the welfare of sex trafficking victims, the girls and women (and sometimes men and boys) who are coerced into the sex trade by manipulative pimps. Many advocates don’t want to see these victims of one of the worst crimes plaguing our society to be charged with crimes themselves.

At the same time, other advocates argue that sex work is empowering and a means for poor people to lift themselves out of poverty. These advocates believe sex trafficking reforms should address what they describe as the needless harassment women who are just trying to make a buck.

There is infinite nuance to this particular debate, but a couple key points stand out:

(1) These two groups of advocates, who are often lumped together as being on the same side of the issue, are often (if not always) not in agreement, and

(2) Academic research and the on-the-streets experiences of police who have rescued girls and women from what’s known as The Life or The Game have found that a majority of working prostitutes are actually under the control of a third party. In other words, they’re being trafficked.

Whichever of those two camps one might fall into, the critical value underlying the sex trafficking reform debate is concern about individuals involved in prostitution – concern about them being unfairly criminalized, stigmatized, etc.

The other major value to consider is prosecuting sex traffickers. And while the welfare of trafficking victims and the efforts to catch and convict pimps might not seem related, practically speaking they are deeply intertwined.

As we noted in Part I of this series, sex traffickers can theoretically be convicted solely on circumstantial evidence, such as a pimp’s association with known prostitutes while living a luxurious life without any known source of income.

However, how can police know who the prostitutes in their community are if they’re not tasked with regulating prostitution? As it is, prostitution enforcement is not a high priority for most police departments – and prostitution is illegal in most places.

If prostitution were to become legal, police would have no incentive – or budget – to track the activities of prostitutes in their community. This in effect would allow pimps to operate without anybody looking over their shoulders. Their activities would fall deeper underground, which isn’t going to help the victims brainwashed into this lifestyle.

Another factor to consider – and this is quite controversial option among many anti-trafficking advocates – is that many sex trafficking survivors credit their arrests for prostitution as the impetus for getting them out of The Life.

For many women and girls trapped in the life, an arrest for soliciting is the intervention or wake-up call they need to start them on the journey to leaving the shackles of their pimps. This is especially true if the police involved in the arrest are experienced and trained in sex trafficking. Rather than dismissing the prostitutes under arrest as trash, these informed officers treat them respectfully and compassionately, and offer them assistance.

Ronen’s proposal to legalize sex work in California falls under the category of reform ideas known (appropriately) as legalization. Under this model, sex work is limited under supposedly controlled, tightly regulated circumstances.

The obvious comparison to this is Nevada’s brothels, which are legal only in the Silver State’s rural communities. Nevada’s brothels are overseen by the local sheriff’s departments, which do not have the resources or sophistication to understand sex trafficking, particularly international sex trafficking. Many Nevada brothel workers have also complained about poor working conditions and unfair wage practices.

But legalization has the benefit of not stigmatizing prostitutes and does not put sex trafficking victims (working under legal conditions) in jail.

These benefits are also found in another reform idea known as decriminalization. That’s where all penalties are removed for the buying and selling of sex, period, full stop. Under decriminalization, prostitution is legal everywhere, not just in specific places like brothels in a rural area.

Police and some anti-trafficking advocates do not favor these two models because they fear they go too easy on traffickers. Instead, some advocates favor models that try to balance enforcement with compassion for victims.

The most well-known of these models is the Equity Model, also known as the Nordic Model, because it’s been adopted by Nordic countries. Under this model the selling of sex is decriminalized while the buying of sex remains illegal – and, meanwhile, a social service network is built to help transition girls and women out of prostitution when they’re ready.

Another model that attempts to balance compassion and prosecution is the “Agency” or “Accountability” model used in Texas. Under this scheme, the buying and selling of sex remains illegal, but police just direct more resources towards arresting johns, who face harsher penalties than prostitutes.

The anti-trafficking community effectively has no consensus over which model is the best. In fact, there are some in that community who strongly believe no policy changes are necessary at all.

Instead, this subset favors better education of the police and prosecutors and the public, believing that more compassionate policing and more knowledgeable jurors will lead to more traffickers being put away and more prostitutes being helped out of the life, without fear of judgement or scorn.

The anti-trafficking community effectively has no consensus over which model is the best. In fact, there are some in that community who strongly believe no policy changes are necessary at all.

There is also a need for lawmakers to be better educated about the issue, says Jenna McKaye, a trafficking survivor who has become a vocal advocate for better educating families, educators and police to the signs of trafficking and how to help survivors heal from their trauma.

McKaye worked with state Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) on last year’s SB 14, the controversial measure that added the trafficking of a minor to the crimes that can be considered a strike under California’s Three Strikes law. Grove says the bill as first constructed applied to the trafficking of anyone, not just those under age 18. The change, Grove said, was the only way she could get support for the bill from her colleagues.

Sen. Shannon Grove addressing Capitol anti-trafficking rally. Photo by Capitol Weekly

That was very frustrating for McKaye, who said she wishes all lawmakers would invest the time learning about the issue that Grove has.

“When they [lawmakers] amended [SB14] to apply only to those who are underage with the idea that someone over 18 has a choice, they clearly don’t understand force, fraud and coercion,” she said after a recent anti-trafficking demonstration at the Capitol. “If they understood that on a deeper level, then they might understand that SB 14 and other legislation does need to be for all ages.”

For her part, Grove says her goal “is to continue to move legislation forward that will address these horrific crimes against all individuals that succumb to this dark underworld.”

Asked if she is confident that will happen this year, Grove said “I’m not confident in anything,” noting she is only one of 120 lawmakers, each with their own priorities. But she says the “overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans” SB 14 received outside of its original turn in the Assembly Public Safety Committee has made her “optimistically hopeful” that such a bill could happen this year or next.

Education is also a top priority for Ashlie Bryant, founder and CEO of 3Strands Global Foundation, an El Dorado Hills non-profit focused on combatting trafficking through education and reintegration programs.

She points to a measure 3Strands sponsored in 2017 (AB 1227, carried by then-Assemblymember Rob Bonta) that made California the first state to require public schools to provide human trafficking education for teachers and students. But Bryant says passing the bill was one thing: enforcement has been another.

“They’re not following through on that mandate,” she says. “So our legislators need to do an audit to hold schools accountable and make sure they are actually teaching this in the classrooms.”

As with many issues, not all those seeking to help trafficking victims are of the same mind.

“When they [lawmakers] amended [SB14] to apply only to those who are underage with the idea that someone over 18 has a choice, they clearly don’t understand force, fraud and coercion.”

Lawmakers in Sacramento don’t often get to hear from anti-trafficking advocates who do the “boots on the ground” work day in and day out with victims and survivors. That’s because the people and organizations who are on the frontlines are often too busy to advocate under the dome, said Alan Smyth, the executive director of Saving Innocence, a Los Angeles nonprofit that serves child and adult sex trafficking victims.

“Everybody is up to their eyeballs in what they’re doing,” Smyth said of California nonprofits dedicated to the issue.

Saving Innocence supported Sen. Shannon Grove’s SB 14 last year, but Smyth said that’s not typical of his organization. (“We don’t have the bandwidth to lead that,” he said.) And he said most anti-trafficking organizations he’s aware of in California are similarly too stretched to engage in the political process.

At the same time, Smyth said there’s not a lot of incentive for groups like his to be active in Sacramento because, “There aren’t that many lawmakers and legislators that are fighting for this.” Smyth acknowledged that there are “good people” in state politics who are trying to do the right thing. But also said his impression is that legislators are focused on the issues that will “keep them in power” and there’s a common misperception that sex trafficking doesn’t impact lawmakers’ districts and constituents, that it’s a problem elsewhere, involving other people.

That’s simply not true, and Smyth had a message for politicians in Sacramento: “I would like them to know the scourge of human trafficking is bigger than they think and closer than they think, and they should act accordingly.”

Brian Joseph has been researching domestic sex trafficking since early 2017. This fall, his non-fiction book Vegas Concierge: Sex Trafficking, Hip Hop, and Corruption in America will be published by Rowman & Littlefield.