Art by Nicolla Etzion 

One in five sex workers in the District have been asked for sex by a police officer, according to the Urban Justice Center. There is nothing stopping police from arresting them afterward. The exploitation and abuse of sex workers are all rooted in one main issue.

Sex work is illegal.

Councilman David Grosso wants that to change in D.C. He proposed a bill on October 5, 2017 to decriminalize sex work in the city.

The bill, called the “Reducing Criminalization to Improve Community Health & Safety Amendment Act”, would eliminate criminal charges for sex work in an effort to promote public safety, health and human rights. Currently, sex work is punishable by fines and up to two years in prison.

The District would be the only jurisdiction in the country to decriminalize sex work, outside 11 counties in Nevada, where strictly regulated brothels operate.  

Grosso developed the legislation in partnership with Sex Worker Advocates Coalition, a coalition of more than 16 organizations and advocates working to increase sex workers’ access to basic necessities and human rights.

“I believe that we as a society are coming to realize that excessive criminalization is causing more harm than good, from school discipline to drug laws to homelessness,” the councilman wrote in a press release.

Metropolitan Police has repeatedly arrested sex workers, but their efforts are only temporarily successful at deterring sex work. As the police focuses on one area, these workers move on to another.

Police Captain McLean says that there isn’t much they can do unless they catch someone in the act of selling or soliciting sex.

“They have every right to stand on the sidewalks,” McLean said. “We can’t arrest a woman just for looking like a prostitute.”

Right now, a majority of sex workers work along the District’s K Street NE between 10th and 11th Streets, and Florida Avenue, according to Ward 6a Commissioner Brown. Next month, they’ll likely be somewhere else.  

However, the number of sex workers on the streets in the District and the number of sex work-related arrests have decreased in recent years, according to the MPD’s 2013-2017 Year to Date Prostitution Arrests Overview. There were only 216 arrests in 2016, compared to 714 in 2015 and 596 in 2014. From January to August 10, 2017, there have been 166 arrests by D.C. police.

Leading human rights advocacy organizations like Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and Human Rights Watch argue in favor of decriminalization because banning sex work denies workers basic human rights.

One of those rights is equal protection under the law. Roughly 80 percent of street-based sex workers experience violence in the course of their work, according to a fact sheet by  Councilman Grosso.

These organizations argue that law enforcement’s focus on arresting sex workers compromises their access to health, safety and judicial protections, and thereby silences women and fosters an environment of impunity for the human rights abuses committed against them.

This bill would protect sex workers from exploitation by law enforcement. Amnesty International claims that criminalization creates openings for law enforcement officers to commit violence, harassment and extortion against sex workers without reprobation.

In Chicago, 24 percent of street-based sex workers identified a police officer as their rapist. This abuse of power endangers a worker’s ability to attain judicial protection.

When workers speak up, society often holds them responsible for abuses they incur. In Philadelphia, Judge Teresa Carr-Deni refused to allow a sex worker to press aggravated sexual assault charges after she suffered a gang raped at gunpoint. She charged them instead with “theft of services.”

One component that strips sex workers of human rights is social bias. A 2000 study published in the Journal of Violence Against Women found a correlation between anti-sex work rhetoric that establishes workers as a public nuisance and the violence and bias committed against them. This bias is worse for oppressed people, including people of color, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, immigrants, and people with criminal records, according to Grosso’s fact sheet.

Criminalization also denies sex workers the right to health services and information. Decriminalizing sex work would allow women and clients to gain access to sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment.

D.C. has one of the highest rates of HIV in the country, with one in 13 people contracting the disease at some point in their lifetime, according to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention.

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law argues that denying women these resources not only puts the District’s residents in danger of contracting STDs , but it also directly undermines global HIV prevention efforts.

The bill continues to prohibit coercion or exploitation, but opponents still worry that decriminalization would increase human trafficking.

“There are just so many issues,” said Dan Donahue, who has been living in the District since 1965. “Health issues, exploitation, minors. If they could figure out how to regulate that, then I’d think about it.”

D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson also opposes the bill.

“We have amended the current law over the years to recognize that sex workers are often the victims of trafficking,” Mendelson said in a statement, the Post reported. “Moreover, the penalties for first-time offenders are minor. But there is a great deal of collateral crime associated with prostitution, and it often presents a public nuisance.”

Research conducted by many global human rights advocacy groups suggests that decriminalization of sex work would fix these issues, not enhance them.

Sex work is legal in many countries, including Denmark, Australia, and Germany, which have seen positive impacts on their communities. Germany has seen a 10 percent decrease in human trafficking, and their rates of STDs among sex workers has evened out and is now no different than STDs among the general population.

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003 and data found five years later that about 90 percent of sex workers thought decriminalization gave them employment, legal, health, and safety rights, 64 percent said it was easier to reject clients, and 57 percent said that police views of sex workers was more positive, according to the Christchurch School of Medicine.

Despite reported benefits, efforts to decriminalize sex work in the United States have largely failed. The District bill may also face opposition by the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which has legislative ruling over the District.

Councilman Grosso hopes the proposed changes will enhance sex worker’s access to human rights and decrease human trafficking in the District.

“It is time for D.C. to reconsider the framework in which we handle commercial sex — and move from one of criminalization to a focus on human rights, health and safety,” Councilman Grosso said.

Elyse Notarianni is a senior studying Spanish and journalism.