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 inital 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.