KB
Welcome back to the Oldest Profession podcast. I'm your host, Kaytlin Bailey and today we are
going to talk about Rhode Island. Now, I talk about sex worker rights for a living. All day, I talk to
people about decrim and why it's the only policy that reduces violence, and why it's the only
policy that sex workers all over the world want. And often well-meaning people will ask me a
reasonable question, which is, how can you know that the decriminalization of sex work is so
great?
Now we can and do talk about New Zealand and several states in Australia and other examples
on the other side of the world. But what I want people to understand is that we actually ran an
accidental or natural experiment right here in the US because for a period of time, Rhode Island
decriminalized indoor consensual adult prostitution.
So we have real statistics and real evidence about what can happen when you just stop
arresting people who buy or sell sex. Let's get into it.
​
[opening]​
KB​
There are a lot of places we could start this story, but I want to start with Mike.
Michael
Okay, My name is Michael x. I'm an attorney in Providence, Rhode Island. In the past, I was a
criminal defense lawyer, and now I'm a personal injury attorney.
I had an appointment to meet a client for an auto accident case, and the client never showed
up, but a Korean lady came walking in, actually running in, and she was kind of frantic and she
asked me if I would go help our friends that they were at the police station, and I agreed to do
that.
I saw the officer that was in charge, told them I was there to represent several ladies. I didn't
even have their names. My goal was to get them released on bail, contacted the bail
commissioner, and I waited at the police station, chatted with the girls, and eventually the bail
commissioner came. He read the charges. We entered not guilty pleas to all of them. He
released each one on a small amount of bail. They paid it and I drove them back to where they
had been arrested from.
So when I dropped them off, I didn't just open the door and say, “Here you are.” I went into the
building with them and there was a lady there who seemed to be in charge of running the floor
of the house that they were renting. She was very, very nice.We got into a conversation. It was a
very nice, pleasant environment. The place is beautiful inside. It's one of these old, old, old
Victorian type homes that they have on Broadway. And in the course of that, she asked me if I
would consider representing the girls on the charges.
KB
Can you talk about what happened next? You decided to take on this case. What did you find
when you started to look into it?
MK
Well, the first thing I needed to do was get up to speed on the criminal law. I looked at the law of
arrest and I looked at the law of misdemeanor arrests in particular and I found this aspect of the
law that talked about public, in public. And as I was thinking back to the day when I was in that
house, it didn't look like it was all that public to me. It looked like it was a private residential type
of building. So I started to think of a factual defense, whether I could build a defense around the
public aspect of the statutory requirement.
This is the first of a series of cases that led to the 2003 case. What I did was I went to court and
we entered not guilty pleas again in front of the judge. The case was continued two weeks for a
conference with the attorney for the city.
And at that time during the conference, I mentioned to him, “How are you going to prove this
happened in public? Based on the police reports, the officers were inside of the building.” And
he said, “Are you going to go with that kind of a defense?” I said, “It seems like a real defense
here.”
And eventually he went in front of the judge and agreed to drop the charges. And my case was
dismissed against these four women. And I thought that was the end of it. Sure. Until the
scenario repeated itself.
And I kept fighting my cases while the other lawyers were leading, a couple of the other lawyers,
were pleading their clients. So what was really happening was the prosecutor for the city was
dismissing my cases rather than getting a decision from the judge or pushing the issue on the
public aspect.
My thinking was most of my clients were not U.S. citizens. There is a provision, where at that
time, there was a provision in the immigration law that if you were convicted of a prostitution
type offense, you could be at that time, you could be removed from the country as undesirable
because of the nature of your conviction. It wasn't just prostitution, but that was definitely in my
mind, that if I pled my client to something that sounded like it was prostitution, that it might get
them excluded from the country.
KB
So after a few of these cases, Michael became the go-to guy for prostitution related arrests.
And so you got the attention of the, you know, powers that be in Rhode Island. They came after
you, right?
MK
Well, they weren’t coming after me, they were coming after my attack on the statue. My defense
that I was using. And the pressure came from the top as I understood it. It probably came down
through the police department that we have to stop dismissing Mike Kiselica’s cases. We think
we can build a charge for illegal massage and for loitering for purposes of prostitution. So we
had to have a trial on this case, on this issue.
KB
Okay. And so you guys went to trial. And can you talk a little bit about that experience?
MK
Yeah, it wasn't a real trial in the classic sense. There was no pounding on the table,
cross-examining witnesses or anything of that nature. I looked at the police reports and I said to
the prosecutor, “Are your officers going to testify that anything that isn't in their report?” And he
said, “No, they're going to be testifying to what's in their report.” I said, “Well, I'll stipulate that
your officers’ reports can be used as evidence against my client.”
So we talked to the judge about it and she said, “Really, I don't have to listen to a couple of days
of testimony? I can read, you know, and have it researched and have, you know, instead of me
recording what I think, you will have it on paper as stipulated facts. Sure, I'll do a trial like that if
it's okay with the defense.” I said, “Yeah, Judge, it is.”
And we reached an agreed statement of facts and signed our names to it. At which point I filed a
memorandum of law to dismiss the case based on the fact that everything the police officers
must be accepted is true, it doesn't amount to a violation of the law because none of this
occurred in the public setting.
The judge, if I remember correctly, took about a month or so to analyze my arguments and also
the counterarguments of the city. She gave this a lot of thought and she told us what day to
come to court for a decision. It was in the afternoon. It was Judge Elaine Bucci. And I think it
was a pretty courageous decision by her, one that was not going to put her in good standing, so
to speak, with the public.
She knew exactly what was going on and she said, “I know what's going on here, but I have to
look at the fact that in this particular case, the building where the events took place had an
exterior glass door that had a lock on it, and you had to be buzzed through that. You walked
through a lobby and you got to another solid wood door, which also had a lock on it that had to
be opened from the inside only, and that was opened by someone working for that particular
spa. Once you got inside there, you were taken to a small room which didn't have a lock on the
door but had a solid wood door where it was just you and a woman inside that room and no one
could hear what was going on. No one could see what was going on.”
I had a pretty good argument.
KB
Yeah, that's hard to make an argument that that's happening in a public space.
MK
Yeah. And it failed that part of the test and the prostitution charges were dismissed. They also
tried their fallback position, which was that this is the crime of giving a massage without a
massage license. There are particular requirements in the law for a massage to take place. It
has to be targeted for health purposes. The officers rendered no complaints of any physical
problems. They did not ask for anything to be treated, any particular areas of the body. The
women did not offer to treat any area of the body. The word massage was actually not used and
the judge found that this, whatever it was, was more like a backrub than a massage. It was not a
medical type of procedure that would be governed by the rules of the Department of Health.
KB
All right, so this judge's decision comes down. Is this the moment that this decision gets a lot of
press? Like, is this when it becomes known throughout Rhode Island?
MK
It did not get a lot of press initially. And there were other police departments that were still
arresting girls under similar circumstances. Not every one of these businesses was located in
Providence. So some of the outlying communities were still having raids and arrests and
prosecuting this law like it was a valid law.
I would say that every six or eight months it seemed like there was a raid on one theory or
another. They went into business requirements and zoning requirements and inspection
requirements. They tried to prove that people were living on the first floor of a commercial
building, which apparently is illegal, or they had a stove or people were living overnight. They
had a lot of different angles they approached the business at. They went after the landlords a
little bit. Those kind of things.
KB
We’re going to get back to Michael’s story in a minute, but first I want to address one burning
question which is how did this happen? There's a lot of talk from politicians and people in the
media about there being some kind of overlooked loophole, or how maybe legislators
accidentally decriminalized indoor sex work in Rhode Island. But I sat down with a couple of
folks to get the record straight.
KB
And the first is long serving sex worker rights activist Bella Robinson, who founded COYOTE,
Rhode Island. Now, of course, longtime listeners of the podcast will recognize COYOTE as one
of the first sex worker rights organizations in the U.S. And of course, it stands for, Call Off Your
Old Tired Ethics.
BR
Well, it started with Margo St. James and Margo sued Providence police in the state because
the prostitution laws were so vague. It said if you had indiscriminate sex, you didn't even have to
pass money. Have sex with someone beside your husband and be locked up. Right. And it was
a felony. So, she sued the state, the city and the state.
And the one complaint was they were only going after the women. And the second complaint
was what right does the state have to do in the sex lives of adults in private?
KB
I'm the kind of nerd that likes to get into the details of the law. So I contacted Steven Brown, who
is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, and he's been in
this fight for a long time. Steven, what happened in 1976?
SB
COYOTe, the sex worker rights organization filed a lawsuit here in Providence, Rhode Island,
challenging Rhode Island's prostitution laws. That lawsuit led to a settlement where, the Rhode
Island legislature, revised the state's prostitution laws and essentially made, indoor, consensual
sex, even for compensation, lawful.
So, Rhode Island for a number of years until 2009, which I know we'll get to, essentially had
decriminalized prostitution in the state.
KB
Can you help me understand? So this case happens. The legislature is tasked with revising the
law. They do so. Why does this suddenly come up in 2003? Why isn't this a big story in 1980?
Why aren't there, you know, consensual adult brothels everywhere?
SB
Yeah, that's a great question. So the 1980 settlement was agreed to by all sides. I mean, it was
not just, COYOTE, the state, the state's attorney general all agreed that the law needed to be
changed, and they all recognized what they were doing. You know, one of the one of the real
myths that occurred in 2009 and before then when there was an attempt to re-criminalize
prostitution in the state, was that there was somehow a loophole that occurred in 1980 with the
settlement of the case.
But that's not at all. Everybody knew what the General Assembly had done. And there was
really no pushback for a few decades. That was still early. You know, it's important to note, I
mean, the soliciting for prostitution in public that remained illegal. So arrests were still going on,
but the act itself was not, what occurred inside was perfectly lawful.
And things just stayed that way for a long time. And that what happened in 2003 is that, the
Providence police suddenly became very concerned because there was an increase in
so-called “Asian Spas” in Rhode Island. And they were conducting raids but unable to bring
charges a lot of the time because indoor prostitution was not illegal under the law.
KB
Steven, can you talk to me a little bit about what these raids looked like? Like, what were the
police doing?
SB
First, they were arresting women. You know, it was almost all women, of course. And doing it
and specifically saying they were doing it to try to get them to name names, you know, to name
who was, you know, who they were giving their money to, you know, who the so-called pimps
were. So they were arresting them, putting them in prison all in the name of helping them.
And at the same time, what was going on is they were also contacting immigration officials. So
the, again, the women they were supposedly trying to help, they were, you know, they were
letting immigration know if their statuswas not legal.
KB
I think what's so frustrating to so many people that I spoke to is that these raids were being
framed as a rescue operation, because the dominant narrative is that the people that worked at
these spas were literal sex slaves. But let's go back to Michael to hear how these raids and this
narrative impacted his clients.
MK
It was alleged many times to me that none of the clients I represented wanted to do this, that
they were all being held there against their will, that they didn't have access to their passports,
they did not have access to health care. They were being moved around like you would trade
cattle, horses, or something like that.
I saw zero of that. I saw very grateful clients and not one of them ever confided in me. And I had
a lot of conversations face to face, me, the client only,no one else there. Not one of them ever
said to me, “Help me, help me get me out of this.” Not one of them did. And the police would
often bring it, like, many of the girls were Korean. They would bring a Korean interpreter and put
them together in a room and never uncovered evidence. I'm not saying it's that way in every
circumstance, but every circumstance I was involved in it was that way.
KB
It is easy for me to imagine being incredibly grateful for being out of jail. It feels like you're the
one who's rescuing someone in the situation, right? Not the police officers. Right. These raids
are not helping any of your clients. It's why they enlisted your services, right?
MK
Wow. What a question you just asked. I hope you put the question with my answer. The change
in the law to make this, to re-criminalize this, was pushed as a move to help the women, to
protect the women. We need to be able to arrest them so that we can identify who they are, that
they're in the country legally. We need to find out if they're getting appropriate health care or if
they're being held against their will, if they're being forced into this. If we can't arrest them, we
can't fulfill that purpose.
So I was shocked to hear law enforcement speaking that way. But they did. And that was one of
the official positions of why we needed to change that law.
KB
Let's pause here for a minute. We established that in 1980, Rhode Island effectively
decriminalized indoor prostitution. And this doesn't seem to be a problem or cause any major
fuss from anyone involved.
But around this time, you start to see an increase in migration from Southeast Asia—Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos—following the Vietnam War. This increased visibility of Southeast Asian
women, especially in the Asian owned massage parlors, causes a xenophobic backlash.
So I called up fellow sex work history scholar, Aya Gruber, who is a professor at USC Gould,
who explained this pretty succinctly.
AG
Recently, I've gone back and looked at just the whole history of sex criminalization. And it just
strikes me that sex workers were really the women, mostly women, upon who people displaced
their anxieties, anxieties about sex, anxieties about women's role.
Because when you think about it, here were women who were not only, you know, in violation of
these chastity mores. They were actually in the economy.
Imagine that you're in the position of a undocumented sex worker, right, who's already liable for
all kinds of criminal things. They have children, they have established lives. It is very hard to
make public statements.
And yet, when they were taking testimony finally for the hearing, sex workers came out with
interpreters and talked about their experiences. And one sex worker said, look, I've been doing
this a while, and I just and it really hits you. She said, “I just need to pay for my oldest child to go
to college. And then you can criminalize me.”
I mean, here is somebody putting their children through college. That's what we want, you know,
from our immigrant communities, is to make a better life for their children.
KB
This period of open decriminalization in Rhode Island gave many people an opportunity to build
a better life for themselves, and their children. Bella, who you heard from earlier, has this story
to share about coming to Rhode Island to work openly under decrim.
BR
In Jersey, before I moved to Rhode Island, when the SWAT team kicked in my door because me
and my friend, who were both in her 40s, had a Craigslist ad, they kicked in our door like we
were terrorists, with the ram, without a word, with guns. And I was jailed for 90 days. And they
me pay $3,720 fine and I told the judge, “I have a 17-year-old daughter, I didn't have a job. I
could give you $25, I can't pay this.” You’re going to pay $310 a month for 12 months or we’re
going to issue a warrant.
So when I get out of jail and my first client tells me, you know, it's legal in Rhode Island. He
leaves and I google it, you know, guys will say anything to impress you. Honey, I packed up the
house.
I moved here in March of 2009. It was freedom. It was total freedom. No one even tried to
threaten, you know, I don't remember there being a lot of violence or things like that.
KB
So during this time, raids continuing and the pressure to close down these spas and
re-criminalize sex work is ramping up. And part of that is the increased visibility of sex work. As
Michael said, the police are coming at this from all angles, and other people start to get involved
too.
MK
I'm going to give you my take on this. And I could be wrong, but my sense was that Mayor
Cicilline wanted to have the spas in Rhode Island closed down as he was moving towards
higher political aspirations on a statewide basis.
And it was very, very well known outside of Rhode Island. I mean, much of the traffic, much of
the business came from outside of Rhode Island. A lot of it came from Massachusetts. It was
getting noteworthy that Rhode Island was a location where you could come to meet with a
woman who was interested in providing sexual services and, you know, in exchange for
remuneration and financial remuneration.
Several of the mayors were talking about how there’s nothing illegal about what's going on. We
can't shut these businesses down.
There was a lot of frustration. The newspaper picked up on it. I ended up on that, I think my
picture was on the front page. Kind of had to tell my mom at that point what was going on.
KB
So politicians are panicking and there’s a broad coalition of folks that really start fanning the
flames and pushing this issue. And people like Donna Hughes who is a rabid anti-sex,
anti-pornography, pretty transphobic and also racist researcher becomes very publically
involved.
AG
There was one particular vert active, neo-abolitionist feminist in Rhode Island named Donna
Hughes. And she was teaching students and she had students and former students that were,
that were, you know, in this coalition, she was hooked into the larger anti-trafficking world. And,
you know, she was saying, “Oh my gosh, right, I cannot believe that this form of a modern day
slavery, that is all sex work is allowed in my state.”
And this coincided with, of course, the longstanding religious groups who were against all forms
of sex and sex work and sex not inside of marriage. And then there was a third group. And the
third group was concerned Providence citizens who saw a growing red light district of mostly
Asian sex work establishments and were very not-in-my-backyard about it.
So that was the coalition on one side. The other side had a coalition and that included the ACLU
and even the mainstream National Organization of Women and civil rights groups. So it was a
very left, progressive coalition, against this sort of right wing but also feminist, anti-trafficking
coalition.
And there's this one amazing story of one of her students. They're basically staking out these
establishments, and watching who goes in, and they're going to publicize the men who go in
and, you know, rescue the women. And one of the cohorts of the neo-abolitionist group, one of
the women who was kind of going around and surveilling the establishments told the reporter
like, “Look, there's the Mama-san and she's the one who runs all the girls and da da da da da.”
So there's this language coming out of a supposedly feminist movement that is just, I mean, the
intersection of racism and sexism. Right?
KB
So as soon as this issue starts getting publicity in 2003, there is immediate pressure to change
the law. Let's go back to Steven, who was there for this fight.
SB
It did take five years for the General Assembly to ultimately pass a law. I mean, there was a lot
of pushback from organizations, not just the ACLU, but others who, you know, thought that the
law was perfectly appropriate as it existed at the time and pointed out all the deleterious effects
that would arise from re-criminalizing this.
One of the other troubling results of this crackdown on prostitution in 2009 was the legislature
also passed a handful of other laws that were specifically aimed at sex workers. They passed a
law requiring anybody convicted of prostitution offenses to undergo mandatory HIV testing. They
passed a special law just for people convicted of these sex offenses to pay an extra fine if they
were convicted. Nobody else. It was specifically aimed at prostitution offenses. So, there were a
few other really just terrible laws, you know, with no real reason for them other than to punish
sex workers more than criminalizing it in the first place.
[break]
MS
Scott Cunningham, who is a professor at Baylor University, who I didn't know back in the day,
emailed me out of the blue and was like, “Have you heard about this really neat thing that
happened in Rhode Island?”
Now, mind you, I didn't know Scott at the time and I didn't know what had happened in Rhode
Island.And so I did a little research on my own and came to learn about this huge thing that had
happened,and that was really the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Scott and myself
that lasted about six years before we published this paper.
My name is Manisha Shah and I am a professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of
Public Affairs. I am an economist by training, and I have been researching sex markets and
thinking about the optimal regulation of sex markets probably for about the past 20 years of my
career.
What's super exciting about what happened in Rhode Island is, you know, at least from a
research perspective, we have this natural experiment where we have this unexpected
decriminalization that basically happens overnight.
So the significance of something like this is huge for a researcher like myself. And the reason
for this is because in the social sciences, and especially in economics, we're sort of obsessed
with this idea of causality, right? And this is because we want to be able to show that X causes
Y, which is a much stronger statement than like X is simply correlated with Y.
We can think about Rhode Island as our treatment state. That's where the decriminalization
happens. And we can think about the rest of the US where, you know, policy around sex work
doesn't change at all, as our control states.
We could also think if we wanted to get smaller, we could also just look at New England as our
control states. But the idea here is that we have this really nice natural experiment that will allow
us to do some causal analysis on the impacts of decriminalizing sex work on outcomes that we
care about.
You know, there's a lot of talk about, kind of, associations between sex market and STI
transmission, right? Disease transmission is always a big sort of potential negative externality
that people talk about. And then the second thing that you often hear about in the news and
media is violence against women, right? That there's just a lot of violence associated with sex
markets. And in fact, STI transmission as well as violence against women are two of the
reasons that we often push this idea that, you know, we shouldn't have legal sex market.
Let me also step back for a minute and say two things. From a theoretical perspective, right, if
we were just looking at theory, the relationship between decriminalization and STI transmission
is actually an ambiguous relationship, right? So theory doesn't help us with a prediction. And the
reason that it's an ambiguous relationship is because on the one hand you could have
epidemiological models which suggest that, like, the bigger the sex market, the more sex people
are having. And if STI transmission is a function of sex, well then you would expect increasing
STIs. So that's kind of one side of the theory. The second side of the theory, though, is, you
know, and what this first piece of the theory ignores is that there could be a behavioral
response.
And so what do I mean by a behavioral response? What I mean is once you decriminalize sex,
workers could feel more empowered to reject clients who are risky, to reject clients who say,
“No, I'm not going to wear a condom.” Right. And they could actually engage in much safer sex
and much safer behavior. And of course, as we all know, less risky behavior could then result in
lower disease transmission.
And so we investigate this empirically. We got CDC data on gonorrhea, you know, from all over
the US for a long period of time. And basically what we show is that in Rhode Island, during the
six year period of decriminalization, gonorrhea decreases by about 40% for women in the state
of Rhode Island.
KB
Wow. Those are incredible numbers. I hear, I remember vaguely from my AP statistics class
approximately 1000 years ago that we talk about statistically significant changes. So can you
give us some perspective on, like, what does a 40% decrease mean? Like when you're looking,
like, what would the World Health Organization consider to be like a dramatic decrease?
MS
Yeah, you know, a 40% decrease is a very dramatic decrease. I mean, it's big on, you know, it's
a substantial decrease and a big result. And I think one of the reasons that this study got so
much press and so much interest was precisely because we had this nice natural experiment.
These are causal results. This is CDC data. And, you know, kind of really dramatic findings.
The second area of interest was what happens to violence against women, right? We were very
interested in looking at this question. We were able to use uniform crime reports data. So this is,
again, you know, a big national database. And we looked at reported rape offenses over time.
And again, what we're finding in in Rhode Island is during this period of decriminalization,
reported rape offenses, so women reporting rape, decreases by about 30% in the state of
Rhode Island during this period.
And so, again, this is, you know, this is a statistically significant result of pretty large magnitude.
And I want to say, and sort of another interesting thing that was happening, was there was a
companion study happening in the Netherlands during this period, and they were looking at the
impacts of legal tippelzones that were kind of policy across the Netherlands. And they found
very similar magnitudes in reductions in violence against women also by around 30%. And so it
was kind of, it was a nice companion piece to our paper at the time.
And this, you know, again, I want to say this is not a new finding for us in that there's work
actually that's come out of New York City that has shown that when, you know, establishments
selling sex opened up in different neighborhoods in New York City, again, we saw a decrease in
reported violence against women in in these places.
KB
Great. I also have heard theories about how the decriminalization of sex work increases the
negotiating power of people participating in this work. And so it's, you know, thought that like I
know that many people turn to sex work as a way of escaping acute domestic violence
situations.
And so did you see anything where, you know, I understand that like sex work or the availability
of sex work creates kind of a release valve, right, on the pressure of male violence. But is there
also a counterforce of it creating more pathways or more opportunities for women to get out of
violent situations or avoid violent situations like, for example, at the hands of police?
MS
Absolutely, I mean one thing that I’ve wanted to mention, I've sort of focused on the quantitative
data work of this study, but we did a lot of qualitative work as well, interviewing police and, you
know, legal, people in law, etc.. And I think one of the really interesting things that came up is
during this period of decriminalization, there was a lot more collaboration between law
enforcement and sex workers than we probably normally see.
And I think part of that is just precisely that, right, is once sex workers are no longer engaging in
something that is considered a crime, they are much more empowered to take care of each
other, to help each other, to report strange things to law enforcement and, you know, they're
much more empowered in their interactions with clients.
Clients know that they can no longer be as abusive as they might normally be, precisely
because now sex workers have legal recourse. Right? They can get out of the relationship.
They can report this guy. They can, you know, if they hear a woman in the next room screaming
and they think something is wrong with her, they can call the police and they can get help.
And so that's a big piece of this decriminalization story that I think that gets left out of a lot of the
discourse is just how empowering this is for women who sell sex on every margin. Right.
Whether it's getting out of a relationship, whether it's helping your friend, any margin. Once
you're no longer engaging in an illegal activity, you have recourse, right?
KB
Awesome. So yeah, then moving on, as somebody who has studied sex markets and the
various schemes and policies that we have tried at, you know, governing or controlling the
oldest profession, what is it that you as a researcher wish policymakers understood about sex
markets and how to regulate them or not?
MS
Oh, wow. Okay. So there's a lot of things I wish policymakers understood when thinking about
regulating the market. But unfortunately, I think one of the problems that policymakers as well as
DA's in this country face is there are a lot of people in the U.S. who find sex work morally
repugnant. And so what ends up happening then is in our public policy discourse, we sort of
conflate a lot of the moral issues with the evidence base.
And so maybe, you know, my dream, number one would be getting more of the evidence base
out there to people. I actually do research all over the globe in many different contexts. I've done
some work on legal and regulated, and I guess so, you know, one thing to policymakers would
be to start looking at the research. There are lots of great studies coming out from all over the
globe, whether, you know, our work in the U.S, but there's also a lot of work now on the end
demand model or the Nordic model.
So the things that we know now that, you know, there are studies coming out of Sweden and the
UK and places that have implemented the Nordic model. So there's a new newish study that
came out of the U.K. and they basically looked at the impacts of the end demand model, and
they were actually finding it's not that demand decreases, which is sort of the idea behind the
end demand model, right, is like, let's get these guys to stop buying sex. What happens is that
the type of guy who buys sex really changes and that type of guy becomes a riskier guy.
KB
I want to jump in and clarify what Dr. Shah is talking about. Because after speaking to so many
sex workers from these regions, what we understand is that this law does not prevent or
dissuade people from buying sex, but it does change the behavior of the people who are buying
sex for the worse, the much worse.
MS
So going back to public policy, this is not what we want. We do not want, you know, clients to
become more risky. Because that is just going to, again, have very negative implications for sex
workers. And honestly, for all of us in society.
I think the other thing, you know, there's another interesting study coming out of Sweden that's
showing, again, going back to this, does it end demand? No, it doesn't end demand, it displaces
demand. And so what they find is that Swedish men now are flying to places like Thailand to
buy sex, because it's become much harder for them to do it in their own country. They find that
reported rape offenses of Swedish women increased after the end demand model was
implemented.
So yes, my read of all of these places where studies have been coming out, where the end
demand model has been implemented, is that, yes, violence against women has increased in
these places.
And so, again, from a public policy perspective, I think thinking about public policies which sort
of decrease harms that sex workers face on the job, while also, of course, maximizing the
welfare of all of us individuals in society is probably the way to go when we're more thinking
about public policy.
[break]
KB
One good thing that did come out of the re-criminalization of sex work in Rhode Island is some
incredible activism.
BR
They criminalized it November 2009 and I founded COYOTE Rhode Island, Call of Your Old
Tired Ethics, in 2009 in response to them re-criminalizing prostitution.
I didn't think they were going to do it. I really didn’t get into activism, until you know, it pissed me
off. If I hadn't been pissed off, I might not have become an activist, might not have been
watching the news, seeing all the girls die. I'm still pissed off, but I’m more effective now.
KB
I asked Bella to share some stories of what happened after criminalization
BR
So we found three 18-year-old girls they charged with felony sex trafficking of a minor. They're
housing 15 year olds and 20 year olds in the same group homes. Right. And they had a
28-year-old man that was a supervisor to the teenage girl group, where they worked, you know,
8 hour shifts, let that sink in first.
And they used the 18-year-old boy that aged out to drive the state van to pimp them out. But the
three girls were charged with federal trafficking. So they're going to be registered sex offenders,
right? And I'm pretty sure that's not with the law intended.
There is a lot more, you know, last year with the girl at the hotel, she kinda knew the bouncer.
He does the day he pays her, then he robs her, or he takes everything, even her coat and her
phone. He left her in her bra and panties. You know what would've happened if she'd called the
front desk, right? So, you know, I went down and I took another the rape victim. Did not want to
involve the police. Didn’t have a car, she knew if she called an ambulance, they were going to
call the police.
And we know that the more desperate and poor you are, the easier it is to exploit you. If you're
cold and hungry, I can get you to try a trick for a blanket and a burger. Right this way. The same
reason women sew Nikes tennis shoes for $0.26 an hour because they're poor, right?
And you know, our homeless population has increased 35% since last year. Rents have more
than doubled. This year it was cold. 54 people died of exposure in our state last year. And it’s
just sad.
KB
And Bella has made it her life's work to help the next generation.
BR
We do outreach different, where we just open up the car and anyone that comes up, we get
supplies to. We don't care who you are. If you're poor, if you're rich. But we don't chase anyone.
And they can usually tell who’s the street workers, but I don't say anything different, they don’t
treat ‘em any different, they shouldn’t have to out themselves.
One thing I did want to tell you is we started a support group, a little more than a year ago,
same people come every week. We take turns facilitating, someone gets a $50 Amazon card.
These group of people, it's just really awesome, the ties. We're doing a trans conference this
year in May in Rhode Island. We wanted to create this check-in culture that if someone's
missing that you know, and so we do this day we have actually a check-in culture, check-in
culture coordinator.And even if you don't feel like talking, you still have to respond with
something because it's important that we know when someone's missing, when somebody’s
isolated, when somebody’s in trouble.
KB
Along with her on the ground work. Bella has also participated in committees, educated
legislators, conducted community-led research that has been instrumental in setting the stage
for changing hearts, minds, and laws on this issue. Let's get back to Steven.
SB
One of the good things that happened is three years ago, the General Assembly established a
legislative commission to take a look at the prostitution laws, to reexamine them. And the
commission came out with a very good report, mentioning all, you know, some of the research
we've talked about about the positive effects of decriminalization, made a number of
recommendations. And this year, the legislature passed three laws, in response that were
helpful. I mean, they're small steps, but they repealed the law that had this extra fine if you're
convicted of a prostitution offense. They repealed the law that required mandatory HIV testing if
you were convicted of prostitution offense. And they also passed a law. It's fairly narrow, but it
provides immunity to sex workers if they report certain crimes to the police, they cannot be
charged with the prostitution offense if they're doing that.
So those all occurred this year, when one year, I think it was, you know, it was a very good step,
but you know, there is still a lot to be done.
KB
Any researcher that has looked at this issue with integrity knows that decriminalizing sex work is
the only policy that reduces violence and size, and leads to the human rights and dignity of
people working in the sex industry. But as any advocate will tell you, being right is not enough.
You also have to be brave. I'm going to leave you with these words of wisdom from our
accidental hero of this story, Michael.
MK
I think in all aspects of life we know we inherently know what needs to be done in the situation,
what the situation requires, what our responsibility, what our job is under those circumstances,
to have the actual courage to go forward and do what you know needs to be done, like this
particular judge did. To me, that's more than a courageous act. It's commendable, and I think it's
a rare thing.
[closing]