Protecting the Health and Rights of Sex Workers in the U.S. and Globally

For several years, the GHJP has worked closely with the Sex Workers Project (SWP) of the Urban Justice Center to understand the ways in which criminalization impacts the lives of people in the sex sector and to explore potential strategies for changing harmful laws and policies in the US. The work with the SWP has been in tight synergy with GHJP’s global work on sex workers’ health and rights: although every country has seen historically-specific evolutions of its prostitution laws and other criminal laws regulating sexuality, the trans-national flow of ideologies, bodies, and funding (particularly for HIV/AIDS), among other factors, closely ties the US law and policy on sex work and now “trafficking” to the global context. The project has evolved in its focus and scope concomitant with our investigations and engagement with key actors, including sex workers, AIDS advocacy and service organizations, people of color and criminal justice organizations, LGBT and trans-specific advocates and public health and legal researchers and advocates.

Beginning in 2014 with a focus on the double threat of prosecution for sex workers in the United States through the intersection of laws that criminalize prostitution and laws that criminalize HIV exposure or transmission, our research revealed constant, yet unpredictable and locally-driven distortions of policing, prosecution, and judicial practices — such as, de facto detention until HIV testing could be carried out, coercive plea bargaining, and involuntary public exposures of HIV status, sometimes coupled with ad hoc judicial work-arounds to avoid these problems without confronting the law itself.

This research, and conversations with public health, HIV/AIDS, LGBT, anti-racism, anti-incarceration, and civil rights advocates who had been following the municipal debates around prostitution and related arrests with concomitant failures in legal and social service regimes, led us to a second phase conducting a national mapping and examination of the different histories, models, and possible impacts of “prostitution diversion programs” (PDPs), as a ‘go to’ responses to street level offenses, allegedly modeled on harm reduction and drug courts and claiming an evidence base for policies. The initial findings of this work were included in two inter-related reports released in 2018, developed through clinic projects, and student summer internships at the SWP and in Atlanta to continue our collaboration with local partners and related research efforts.

Similarly, with the rise of the “progressive prosecutor” movement and the fraught positionality of prosecutors as agents of criminal legal reform and in impacting many of the dynamics we had explored in previous project phases, we worked with clinic students to develop a handbook on non-prosecution policies that include sex work-related charges, released in 2023, for advocates, district attorneys, and others engaged in the development, implementation, and/or evaluation of these policies as part of efforts to mitigate the harms of sex work criminalization on sex workers’ health and rights.

Our work has also included a team of scholars and students supported by GHJP drafting a sign-on letter in support of Amnesty International's (AI) movement towards the decriminalization of sex work to support informed debate and discussion at the AI International Council Meeting in 2015. As further elaborated in the letter, we believe not only that it is most consistent with human rights principles and practices to decriminalize sex work (allowing for both selling and buying of sexual activity) as proposed in the AI resolution, but that evidence and careful analysis of the research on both sex work and trafficking supports this conclusion.

In 2016, GHJP co-director Alice M. Miller, with other academics and scholars who have extensively researched the regulation of sexuality through criminal law, released a letter in response to UN Women’s call for submissions in an online consultation seeking views on the UN Women’s approach to sex work, and prostitution law. The letter focuses on understanding gender identity and its implications for UN Women’s human rights goals while framing a policy position with regard to sex work which is “gendered;” existing credible research and why it supports the rejection of the so-called Nordic model (decriminalizing the seller of sex while penalizing the buyer); and rigorous studies on the relationship between human trafficking and the sex sector and why they support total decriminalization of un-coerced buying and selling of sex and related activities.

In 2024, GHJP and CREA co-authored a submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, as part of a Call for Input to inform the Special Rapporteur’s thematic report on “prostitution and violence against women and girls.” The submission highlights the diversity and rights of persons involved in the sex sector, and the importance of formulating analyses and recommendations regarding the frameworks regulating anti-trafficking interventions and the selling and buying of sex with attention to all persons impacted, in line with a human rights approach. It underscores the importance of precise statements of international law to effectively guide state action and not produce negative rights implications, clarifying points of law occluded by the Call for Input before highlighting how precise analysis in this area ensures that the final report aligns with other human rights bodies and experts, and facilitates the full development of rights for people in the sex trades. Finally, the submission addresses shortcomings in some anti-trafficking research and analysis, and presents the existing credible research on violence against people in the sex trades and its insights. The submission was informed by interviews with sex worker collectives in Bangladesh, Kenya and Uganda.

The Count Me In! Consortium has developed a repository of some of the sex workers' rights-based inputs to the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls' report on "prostitution and violence," including the submission by the GHJP and CREA.