Getting Screwed (31 page)

Compared with sex workers in Canada, however, Doogan and her band are operating under a distinct disadvantage: they haven't been able to find a law professor, like Alan Young, willing to take on the case pro bono. While they are working with a private attorney who is familiar with the country's prostitution laws, they will have to pay him the going rate for his services. The northern California chapter of the American Liberties Civil Union (
ACLU
) is considering mounting its own constitutional challenge to the prostitution laws. If Doogan's group files first, the
ACLU
may come in with an amicus brief.

The northern California
ACLU
chapter has intervened in other issues involving sex workers. Proposition 35, for example, was originally written to require traffickers to register as sex offenders and inform police about their online activity. Right after the law was passed in 2012, the
ACLU
requested a restraining order against that particular provision, arguing that it would have a chilling effect on free speech. A district judge in the northern California circuit court agreed and issued a restraining order so that part of the law could not go into effect until a formal challenge was heard in the courts.

A constitutional challenge to U.S. prostitution laws must clear yet another hurdle. While Americans have a clear right to free speech, the U.S. Constitution does not confer the same right to safety and security that is spelled out in Canada's charter. It was that basic right that Canada's Supreme Court cited in overturning that country's prostitution laws.

“The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was written in 1982, and the American Constitution was written by a bunch of slave owners back in the 1770s,” Doogan says. “[The Canadian plaintiffs] were able to bring their case based on the issue of safety. We will not be able to make a challenge based on safety because safety is not a value in our U.S. Constitution.”

In March 2015, Doogan's group filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court challenging Section 647(b) of the California Penal Code, which prohibits compensation for a lewd sex act, on the grounds that it violates people's right to privacy and equal protections under the law. The lawsuit argues that laws making consensual commercial sexual activity between adults illegal are unconstitutional because they infringe on privacy rights protected by the 14th Amendment. There is legal precedence for such an argument. In 2003, in the
Lawrence vs Texas
decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a Texas law classifying consensual adult homosexual intercourse as illegal sodomy violated the privacy and liberty rights of adults, under the 14th Amendment, to engage in private, intimate conduct.

Doogan and others believe that ruling could be extended to prostitution. “The
Lawrence
ruling invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private,” says Michael Chase, a retired high-tech executive who now devotes his time to human rights issues in California. “It was a great decision because it allows people to live their sexual lives without governmental intervention.”

The lawsuit that the
ESPLER
Project filed also argues that the state's law against prostitution denies individuals the right to free speech and the right to choose how to earn a living. The lawsuit further alleges that
the enforcement of antiprostitution laws discourages safe sex because the possession of condoms is used as evidence by prosecutors. Like the Canadian case, the California lawsuit will have multiple plaintiffs, including several sex workers and a client. As in Canada, the lawsuit also argues that criminalization, particularly the recent spate of antitrafficking laws in the United States, has caused all sorts of human rights violations. “One of the issues we have with antitrafficking laws is that they result in the arrest of sex workers themselves,” says Chase. “The definition of trafficking is so loose that women who are helping each other be safe are considered to be trafficking.”

What got Chase involved in this cause was reading the literature of Proposition 35 supporters. “I was personally appalled by the way they attempted to infantilize adult women,” he says. “It reminded me of the civil rights movement in the South and the way they referred to adult men as boys.” Chase says he's known in northern California's human rights circles “as the straight guy who understands transgender and sex work issues.”

As of this writing, the
ACLU
had still not decided whether it will file a brief in support of Doogan's group. And that doesn't bode well for the sex workers' rights movement, in large part because Doogan and her group are having trouble rallying other sex workers behind their legal challenge and raising money. “Most of this community thinks they're at low risk of being arrested,” Doogan says. “They don't really understand this is a full-on war that has been declared on us by the antitrafficking movement.”

Some sex workers' rights groups do avow support. Rachel West, who remains an organizer with
US PROS
, says her street-based group endorses Doogan's constitutional challenge and will help support it financially. West says her group has worked with the
ESPLER
Project on a number of recent battles, including a successful fight last year to get the state to pay workers' compensation for sex workers who have been raped on the job.

But the battle is far from over. There are times when seasoned advocates such as West and Doogan feel as though they are alone on a beach
facing a tsunami. West says
US PROS
has been fighting for decriminalization since 1980, but it is constantly struggling to find funding to survive and help individual street workers with their legal troubles.

“Prostitution is really in large part about poverty,” West says. “A lot of the women we represent are mothers, and they are doing it to support children. The people going to jail are mothers.” While West herself attended the 2013 Desiree Alliance conference, the single mothers she represents were conspicuously absent. They are too busy struggling to survive on the streets, she says. Most of the men and women who go to the conference are escorts who have middle- or upper-class clients, and they are not being arrested or harassed by police. That may explain why there was not more discussion about a legal challenge at the conference.

Indeed, the day after her rousing speech on the trafficking panel, Doogan again mentioned her plans to mount a constitutional challenge — at a smaller, standing-room-only session on the history of the sex workers' rights movement. But the only person who approached her afterward to talk about the challenge was a board member from the California
ACLU
. He wanted to discuss legal strategy. “I'm glad he's interested,” she says. “But no one else seemed to be.”

A Saner Approach to Prostitution

M
addy has a “date” Friday evening in Washington, D.C., with a high-ranking government official who saw her ad on
eros.com
, a popular website for escort ads. The hazel-eyed twenty-six-year-old from North Carolina (whom I met at the Desiree Alliance conference) is staying at a boutique hotel in Dupont Circle, and she has agreed to meet with me before her date. We decide to rendezvous at Kramer's, a popular bookstore and eatery a few blocks from her hotel. Earlier in the day, she had called to move up our meeting because her client was thinking of booking extended time with her. So I rush over to Dupont Circle on the Metro, and as soon as I walk into Kramer's, I get a text from her: “The timing didn't work out so there's no need to rush.” I text her back saying I'm already at Kramer's and will wait for her here. What better place than a bookstore for dawdling?

Ten or fifteen minutes later, I get another text from Maddy: “I'm here.” A minute later, I discover her bent over behind a table of stacked books, changing from flats into high-heeled black pumps. She straightens up and grins. “You caught me in the act,” she says. Maddy, it seems, takes her persona as an enticing escort seriously.

We grab one of the few unoccupied tables in the back room at Kramer's, but Maddy orders only a coke. “I have serious food allergies,” she says. “But that's okay. I'll have a soda.”

She is dressed casually, in a light-pink tailored shirt and tight-fitting blue jeans; a gauzy white scarf is wrapped loosely around her neck. She is wearing no makeup, and she has tied back her flyaway blond hair in a
loose braid. Even so, she looks model-fresh and exquisite, like a porcelain doll that could easily break.

Maddy says she comes to Washington, D.C., about once a month to see clients. Most of her clients are corporate executives and top government officials who have seen her ads — one recent ad she wrote described her as a “sharp wit in a soft body.” “This guy I'm seeing in a few hours, he found my ad a few months ago and finally got around to getting in touch,” she says. “According to a survey done by
eros.com
, most gentlemen will peruse a lady's website five times before they actually contact her.”

Once a client contacts her, Maddy does her due diligence. “I never see clients I haven't screened,” she says. “I find out where they work, and I can verify that they actually are who they say they are.”

This evening, Maddy will meet her gentleman caller at the boutique hotel where she is staying and spend two hours with him (for a set fee of $1,200), fulfilling any fantasies he might have. Going to a sex worker, she says, “is a safe place for [clients] to explore their desires, such as cross-dressing or getting fucked in the ass. I use a strap-on with a lot of my clients.” (A strap-on is a dildo that Maddy can strap around herself.)

Many married men choose to go to an escort rather than risk endangering their marriages with an affair. “We're not going to call them, we're not going to disrupt their marriage or their family,” Maddy says. “They love their wives, but they have physical needs.”

After her business engagement, Maddy plans to have a late dinner and a “foursome with two men and another woman,” all three of whom she is friendly with. “These are all people I enjoy,” she says. They know what she does for a living and are not at all bothered by it, she adds.

Even though she has been working as an escort (on and off) for nine years, Maddy has never come close to being arrested. “I'm very careful. I never discuss money and I never count my money. I just leave it there until after the appointment is over,” she says. “I won't compromise my safety.”

As a stylishly dressed white woman catering to upper-class clients whom she has carefully screened, Maddy does in fact face little risk of being arrested. She herself is acutely aware that there is a double stan
dard in the United States when it comes to enforcing the laws against prostitution. While the D.C. police routinely arrest streetwalkers and raid massage parlors in poor and mixed-income neighborhoods, they tend to leave high-end independent escorts like Maddy alone. Abolishing laws against prostitution would benefit streetwalkers the most, if only because they bear the brunt of law enforcement. “The practice is not to prosecute what isn't seen,” Maddy says. “It's economically advantageous to have [high-end sex work] going on.”

Maddy believes that many companies and government agencies are less likely to hold major conferences in places where prostitution laws are strictly enforced. And indeed, several gentlemen's clubs (a euphemism for private clubs where men can drink, obtain lap dances, and meet sex workers) are openly advertised right next to the restaurant listings in
Where
magazine, one of the free publications on display in my Marriott Hotel room.

“[Going to an escort] is so prevalent among the upper level of government that if they really prosecuted it, it would collapse the government,” Maddy says, giggling. “My client list alone would be enough to put the country on hold for a few days.”

The woman sitting at the table next to us is staring at her; it's likely that she has overheard parts of our conversation. Maddy feels the intensity of her gaze and flushes. “I'm going to have to talk more quietly,” she says. “I have a loud voice.”

Like many other sex workers, Maddy doesn't understand the distinction that society makes between men like Donald Sterling (the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers) who have a trophy girlfriend and pay all their expenses and then some, and men who spend a few hours with an escort like herself in exchange for compensation. “That is the only thing where two consenting adults can engage in something, but because money is involved, it's suddenly illegal,” she says, her eyebrows drawn together into a dark-blond line. “What's the difference between this and maintaining your younger girlfriend in an apartment?”

Four blocks to the west of Kramer's, the sex industry assumes a decidedly different cast. A passerby would never know that on the fourth
floor of a narrow building on Connecticut Avenue hides the office of
FAIR
Girls, the nonprofit organization that serves sexually exploited girls and young women. There are no signs outside or in the lobby announcing the organization's presence. A prearranged appointment is required, and the door to the suite is locked. When the door is opened, I walk into a brightly lit room buzzing with young women; there are no men on the premises. Three young African American women are sitting around a conference table; they look up and smile at me brightly. A twenty-something woman rushes over and introduces herself as Teresa, the director of
FAIR
(Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored) Girls. Teresa guides me through another room, containing a blanket-strewn sofa, a chair, and a small refrigerator, to a back office where Executive Director Andrea Powell is typing intently on her laptop. She looks up briefly and asks me to wait a few minutes until she finishes. She too looks young and is slender, with long blonde hair and bare legs under a short skirt. Two necklaces of brightly colored beads hang around her neck, made (I later learn) by the girls her organization helps.

FAIR
Girls provides services to girls and young women, age eleven to twenty-four, who are “survivors of sexual trafficking and labor exploitation,” Powell explains. “The average age of our clients is sixteen, and the average number of years they've been trafficked is four years.”
FAIR
Girls provides emergency housing, clothes, and food, along with counseling and legal support. It also helps its clients find jobs or schooling and teaches them the skills they need to become independent.

Powell founded
FAIR
Girls in 2004, a few years after she first stumbled across the problem of sexual exploitation, while doing a junior year abroad in Germany. In a German class, she met a sixteen-year-old Bosnian Muslim girl who had been sold by her family into servitude as the fourth wife of a much older man. The relationship had become abusive, and Powell and her new friend made plans for her to escape, but before they could put the plan in motion, the girl disappeared. “I traveled to Bosnia to find her, and while I was there I saw a lot of girls and young women engaging in what you could call survival sex — this was not long after the Yugoslav war,” which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia,
Powell says. “I also saw what I think was some trafficking.” She never did find her friend.

After Powell returned to the United States and graduated from Texas State University, she started
FAIR
Girls in Boston, initially working with young women who had been trafficked to the United States from abroad. But when she moved to Washington, D.C., she started hearing more about domestic youth being exploited. “We now serve upwards of 125 to 150 girls a year,” Powell says. “Over 90 percent are American citizens.” Most of the girls have run away from abusive situations at home or in foster care. The work Powell and her employees do involves everything from helping their charges get their records expunged — laws in many states now allow sex workers to get convictions expunged from their records if they can prove they have been trafficked — to getting them back home or into school.

FAIR
Girls also runs an “empowerment” program that teaches the girls how to make jewelry. “They earn a small amount of money, but more importantly, their self-esteem goes through the roof,” Powell says. “We have an annual gala, and the girls sell the jewelry they made. Fesha, the young woman from Kenya, made a necklace that Rose [DeLauro], the congresswoman from Connecticut, bought. That made her feel so great.”

Powell works closely with local police, since they are the ones who often refer clients to her organization. But she doesn't think sex workers of any age should be arrested, and her organization (along with others that work with exploited youth) is currently pressing for the passage of a bill, known as Safe Harbor, that would prohibit the arrests of minors involved in commercial sex in Washington, D.C. Safe Harbor laws have already been passed in other states, including New York, Washington State, and Illinois. “Criminalizing those who are being sold is just retraumatizing the victims and pushing them further underground,” Powell says.

Like other nonprofits,
FAIR
Girls finds that working with law enforcement can be a double-edged sword, since many teenagers from dysfunctional families have had run-ins with the law and don't trust the police. Powell, who is now thirty-four and married, says she can also do without
the teasing from some cops. “I have a standing fight with one detective, who calls me ‘Rescue Barbie,' ” she says. “I tell him I know how to tweet and he doesn't, and one of these days something I say about him is going to go viral.”

Unlike some antitrafficking proponents, Powell recognizes the difference between trafficking and prostitution. “Prostitution is a crime in which a person is selling sex on their own and there's not any force, fraud, or coercion,” she says. But then she adds, “If the majority of our clients were between thirteen and twenty-four when they first got coerced into [sex work], the concept of choice gets pretty blurry.” For that reason, she supports laws that would criminalize buyers, particularly those who have sex with underage girls and boys. “Someone who buys sex from a sixteen-year-old and does it more than once, that's not a john, that's a serial child pedophile,” Powell says. “They need to be held accountable.”

Sex workers' rights advocates agree that it should be illegal to buy or sell sex involving underage prostitutes. However, several studies have found that blanket laws criminalizing the buyers of sex from adult prostitutes only expose sex workers to greater violence and make it more difficult for them to practice safe sex.
¹
For that reason, many academics who study the sex industry are opposed to overly broad laws that make it illegal to buy or sell sex.

Researchers, antitrafficking groups, and sex worker advocates all agree that sanctions against violent pimps and coercive traffickers should be increased but diverge widely on the definition of a trafficker and on the question of who should be subject to criminal penalties. Many states currently criminalize anyone who lives off the earnings of a prostitute, which means that a nonabusive boyfriend or husband or even a roommate can be arrested and charged with pandering, pimping, or trafficking. Some researchers say such overly broad laws should be repealed because they make it more difficult for sex workers to work safely with people who know when and where they are selling sex and who can be summoned if help is necessary.

“Punishment should be restricted to those who are violent or coercively exploitative — for example, forcing a person to work at certain
times, to earn a certain amount of money before she or he can leave work, to perform disliked sex acts, and so on,” says Ronald Weitzer, the sociology professor at George Washington University who has studied the sex industry for years.
²