The Seattle Times continues to ignore that the policies theyve chosen to endorse will affect a range of people in different situations.
The Seattle Times continues to ignore that the sex work policies they've chosen to endorse will affect a range of people in different situations. Alex Garland

According to the Seattle Times Editorial Board, the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office should continue its "end demand" crackdown on the sex trade. Under this recent strategy, prosecutors are primarily going after sex buyers—sex workers' clients—in the hope that this will reduce demand for commercial sex.

In February, the Editorial Board cited two reasons why they support these end demand policies:

The average age of entry into prostitution is between 12 and 15 years old, according to the prosecutor’s office. While a few insist they work in the commercial sex industry by choice, a deeper look at many of their backgrounds often reveals they are victims of abuse, neglect and other trauma.

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that the Seattle Times Editorial Board is relying on the word of the prosecutor's office, and the prosecutor's office doesn't have the research to back up the assertion that the majority of sex workers in Seattle start working as children, nor do they have the research to back up the idea that most of them are victims of abuse. The second problem is that even if a majority of sex workers did have a background of abuse or sexual victimization—like many people do, regardless of their occupations—is it okay for the Seattle Times to decide that sex workers cannot make decisions for themselves?

Today, the Seattle Times published another opinion piece in response to what I posted. The authors of the new piece wrote that I tried to "minimize the number of trafficked people."

This is not true. What is true is that I pointed out that the Seattle Times' numbers don't exist in any credible way.

In light of this, the writers of today's op-ed—Organization for Prostitution Survivors executive director Debra Boyer, Center for Children and Youth Justice CEO Bobbe Bridge, and YouthCare executive director Melinda Giovengo—abandoned the Seattle Times' earlier arguments and dug up some different numbers that are equally inconclusive as a single body of research:

In the last five years, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has charged pimps, traffickers and sex buyers with exploiting 88 minor victims. Of the 88, 51 percent were age 15 or younger. That figure is not a mean, average or range — it is a raw figure of children who have experienced significant harm as victims of serious crimes.

No kid or adult should ever feel like sex work is their only option to survive. And separate from survival sex, sex trafficking is a particularly vicious and traumatic form of forced labor. Social workers and others taking care of child survivors of any of the above are some of the hardest working and most under-appreciated members of our society.

The writers of today's op-ed also pointed out that YouthCare social workers often work with more exploited youth than are accounted for in the criminal justice system:

Since April 2014, these caseworkers have received more than 161 unduplicated referrals for children ages 17 and younger.

This is horrible. There's no qualification about that. No kid, and no adult, for that matter, should ever be forced or coerced into having sex for money.

But the existence of child sexual exploitation doesn't prove that "end demand" policies work. Just because a problem exists doesn't mean the King County prosecutor's chosen strategy will solve it.

There's also far more complexity to the commercial sex trade than the Seattle Times and the op-ed authors are acknowledging. Different sex workers live and work on a continuum between forced labor, coercion, exploitation, and full adult consent. We don't know how many are "trafficked" and how many are not. Not all sex workers start off as children, either. We don't know how many do.

What we do know is that consensual sex workers say that the "end demand" policies the Seattle Times supports put them in danger. They say targeting sex buyers still pushes their work into more dangerous corners, which can eliminate trusted and vetted clientele as well as increase the risk of transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. But the sex workers and sex worker advocates in the Sex Worker Outreach Project aren't the only ones saying this.

"The conflation of consensual sex work and sex trafficking leads to inappropriate responses that fail to assist sex workers and victims of trafficking in realizing their rights," a UN Women position paper published in 2013 reads. "Furthermore, failing to distinguish between these groups infringes on sex workers' right to health and self-determination and can impede efforts to prevent and prosecute trafficking."

Last year, Amnesty International also published a policy supporting the decriminalization of sex work, including support for the decriminalization of policies that indirectly criminalize sex work—like laws that prohibit buying sex. Amnesty also came out against the Nordic model, another term for the "end demand" policies the Seattle Times endorses.

"In reality, laws against buying sex mean that sex workers have to take more risks to protect buyers from detection by the police," the Amnesty policy Q&A reads. "Sex workers we spoke to regularly told us about being asked to visit customers’ homes to help them avoid police, instead of going to a place where sex worker felt safer."

The Seattle Times and the authors of the latest op-ed have also failed to address the factor that contributes to some of the most harmful aspects of the sex industry. It's poverty. How does cracking down on sex buyers address the economic and social conditions that leave people feeling they have no choice to survive other than by selling sex? How does the criminal justice system's "end demand" strategy provide these people with alternatives—with jobs, with medical treatment, with housing?

My point in saying all this is not to minimize or trivialize the existence of trafficking. It's to widen the Seattle Times' view. The world of commercial sex is a lot bigger, and a lot more complex than the Seattle Times and the King County Prosecuting Attorney are saying it is. The policies the Seattle Times endorses will end up affecting a range of people in different situations: They'll affect trafficked people, as well as coerced people, as well as survival sex workers, as well as adult consensual sex workers, too.

To willfully ignore the existence of the people these policies would impact—and to wave away the importance of empirical evidence in making social policy—is irresponsible, both for Seattle's paper of record and for its prosecuting attorney.