Cheryl Quan, executive director of the Council Against Sex Trafficking, told me. “People know that sex trafficking is bad and should not be happening. I’d go so far as to say sex sales is the biggest problem on the street today. People think that if we could just get rid of this, it will stop.”
It isn’t the first time a city has been thrust into a national debate around prostitution and abuse. Sex trade advocates, including Quan, have said that police brutality charges against a woman in Miami earlier this year were used to discredit efforts to enact local prostitution laws or to prosecute pimps. Last year, a Washington, D.C. police officer was indicted on charges for allegedly coercing a prostitute into working in Washington, D.C. For a period of time, prostitution was declared illegal in the city’s District of Columbia; since then, it’s been decriminalized. (For local prostitution stories, check out The Sex Work Project, a website that offers comprehensive reports and analysis of the sex trade.)
“This is a national debate that is being played out right here,” Quan said. “And this isn’t a city in need of sex work that has a huge prostitution problem that we need to solve. We need sex workers that we can all trust and support.”
Many of the people I interviewed cited prostitution as a key factor in their work—even when they weren’t working in the sex industry themselves. The person I spoke with in Washington said that in the last 3 years, he had run into men and women working in the sex industry who came from troubled backgrounds and never saw themselves as the cause of their difficulties in life.
“None of them have ever told me, ‘I would change my lifestyle if it were easier,'” said the person from Chicago. The man added that he believes that the people he came in contact with were not only trafficked, but also exploited by people who looked to them for support in their own lives.
To date, the conversation about laws against sex trafficking continues to grow. As the number of people forced into life on the streets declines, laws against their exploitation are being put in place. There are a growing number of laws criminalizing sex trafficking throughout the nation—and New York is the latest state to put this agenda into play.
It’s hard to overstate the enormity of New Yorkers and state law and order’s response to the situation of prostitution on New