On March 14, Rhode Island became the latest state to introduce a sex work decrim bill. S0810 would repeal large portions of state law criminalizing “commercial sexual activity.” But it also would add human trafficking as a racketeering activity, a category of criminalized activity that in Rhode Island currently comprises “any act or threat involving” murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, larceny, prostitution, felony drug distribution or child exploitation. The bill would remove “prostitution,” and swap in “human trafficking” in its stead.

Similarly, the legal parameters of child abuse would no longer include any actions by a caretaker that “allows, permits or encourages the child to engage in prostitution.” Instead, it would include anything that “[s]ubjects or allows the child to be subjected to any of the … human trafficking offenses.”

By March 18 the bill had already appeared stalled, as a Senate committee recommended it “be held for further study.”

No state has decriminalized both the purchase and provision of consensual sex.

Sex work is consensual. Sex trafficking, by contrast, involves force or coercion. But those lines are not always black and white, and it’s very easy for law enforcement to capitalize on that and arrest people doing survival sex work—often trans women of color—charge them with trafficking and make it sound like victims of actual trafficking had been rescued. Human trafficking is a real and serious problem, but many people being prosecuted for it are sex workers who are neither forced to do that work nor forcing anyone else to do it.

In Illinois, which previously downgraded sex work from a felony to a misdemeanor, multiple proposals related to criminal penalties around sex work have been sitting in the House since mid-February. One would repeal the statutes criminalizing “prostitution,” and create a pathway for record expungement. Another would create a Sex Workers’ Bill of Rights Act under which people in the sex trade would receive the same labor protections the state extends to other workers, including minimum wage and workers’ compensation.

But those aren’t the only ones. Another bill proposed in February would make people facing human trafficking charges ineligible for pretrial release, meaning they’d sit in jail for months or even years before going to court. Under another proposal, people facing charges involving human trafficking or grooming of a minor would be ineligible for plea deals—people facing those charges wouldn’t be allowed to serve time for anything less serious instead. Prosecutors wouldn’t even be allowed to offer them a deal. And another bill would introduce mandatory minimums for human trafficking, in some cases up to 60 years.

Most sex workers I’ve known would be best described as “self-employed entrepreneurs.”

Maine partially decriminalized sex work in 2023, and Nevada has exemptions for brothels, but no state has decriminalized both the purchase and provision of consensual sex.

When I was doing survival sex work in Baltimore as a minor, it’s true that I was in desperate circumstances but I was also capitalizing on my sexual appeal by choice. I didn’t have a pimp. I wasn’t being “groomed” at that time, nor were the girls I was working with. We were in the trade of our own volition. But the vast majority of my adult life so far has been spent behind bars because I was prosecuted not for sex work, but for sex trafficking—I was arrested at 19 working with another trans girl who was 17.

Most sex workers I’ve known would be best described as “self-employed entrepreneurs.” Some sex workers are in objectively desperate circumstances, but that isn’t the only reason people work in the trade. If someone can make, even charging on the low end, $250 or maybe $300 for 30 minutes of work—or $400 for one hour‚ that’s a couple of days’ worth of work at pretty much any other job. Painting all sex workers as victims erases the reality that people have good reason for choosing the work even when they had other options.

Anyone under 18 who engages in sex work of their own volition cannot legally consent and is automatically a “trafficking victim.” Yet many underage sex workers who enter the trade by choice—not all of them, but many of them—do so because of their circumstances, because the government has in some way failed to protect them and left them to fend for themselves.

Image (cropped) via Federal Bureau of Investigation

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