LOS ANGELES — Several mainstream media headlines this week heralded vague statements made by Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders supposedly concerning their “support” for “decriminalizing” sex work.
Warren’s statement to the Washington Post's influential politics reporter Dave Weigel was followed by a statement from Bernie Sanders’ campaign to Vice News.
“I’m open to decriminalization,” Warren told Weigel this week. “Sex workers, like all workers, deserve autonomy but they are particularly vulnerable to physical and financial abuse and hardship. We need to make sure that we don’t undermine legal protections for the most vulnerable, including the millions of individuals who are victims of human trafficking each year.”
"Bernie believes that decriminalization is certainly something that should be considered," Sanders's deputy communications director Sarah Ford told Vice News on Thursday. “Other countries have done this and it has shown to make the lives of sex workers safer.”
Warren and Sanders' statements follow (though at tortoise-like speed) on the heels of Kamala Harris’ equally vague statement to African-American-perspective news and culture website The Root last February.
Harris’ contradictory statement was ballyhooed by her campaign and the mainstream media as support for “decriminalization,” though a close reading of her remarks easily shows that she favors the so-called Nordic Model of targeting what the California Senator and former career prosecutor calls “the pimps and the johns.”
Sex worker organizations, as XBIZ reported in an extensive piece in March (“Can Sex Workers Ever Trust Kamala Harris?”), overwhelmingly and vocally reject the Nordic Model (i.e., aggressively prosecute “facilitators” — including assistants and support personnel like security — and clients, making sex work essentially impossible) and “legalization” solutions.
Both Nordic Model and legalization give State entities like licensing boards and law enforcement agencies total power over commercial sexual activity among consenting adults. Those State entities have an abysmal track record (e.g., "'Stormy Vice Squad' Disbanded, Officer Indicted for Actual Sex Crime") when it comes to sex worker rights, many harm-reduction and advocacy organizations point out.
Sex worker organizations, Amnesty International and other non-profits support the decriminalization solution (or “decrim”), which does away with stigmatizing concepts like “prostitution” and treats sex work issues as labor issues and violence against sex workers as any other kind of violence against anyone else.
Harris is mistrusted by much of the sex worker community (“Once a cop, always a cop,” is how many describe their attitude) because she launched into national prominence riding a single-minded crusade trying to shut down Backpage.com. Even after the FBI acknowledged that the online classifieds website made sex worker’s lives safer, Harris joined extreme-right Republican congresspeople from the Midwest in stoking “human trafficking” fears to pass the reviled FOSTA-SESTA legislation (signed into law by Donald Trump in April 2018) that resulted in the closure of Backpage.
Both Sanders and Warren voted in favor of the FOSTA-SESTA legislative package, co-sponsored by Harris.
None of the three candidates, as of this writing and as far as they or their campaigns have acknowledged, have met with sex workers or sex workers advocacy organizations to listen to their concerns.
All three candidates have qualified their statements about sex work linking it with their positions on “human trafficking,” which appear to be informed by distorted data from religiously motivated lobbies.
