Varför vill ni feminister förbjuda mig från att köpa sex?

Across the country, cops are implementing a strategy that has long been debated in Europe: targeting the men who buy sex while trying to help the women who sell it. Some police and scholars say that focusing law enforcement attention on sex buyers reduces demand for prostitution, which strangles the sex industry and curbs human trafficking. But some human rights organizations, most recently Amnesty International, advocate for the decriminalization of all aspects of sex work, including buying sex.

While Amnesty International members were considering whether to recommend decriminalizing sex work altogether, I was with a TIME video team on two buyer-focused sex stings in Cook County, Ill. We thought it would be like an adrenaline-pumping episode of Law & Order SVU, but we were wrong. Sex stings aren’t glamorous—they’re grim windows into the loneliness and desperation that motivates some men to grasp at the sexual cornucopia they think they are owed. Watching guys get caught is like watching that fantasy get destroyed over and over.

The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, led by Tom Dart, has been the driving force in a national push to make it harder for pimps to sell sex and johns to buy it.

But since 2011, Sheriff Dart’s office has organized the “National Day of Johns Arrests,” now re-named “National Johns Suppression Initiative,” a series of stings coordinated with other jurisdictions over the course of several weeks, aimed at encouraging a permanent change in police practices.

Dart’s office now arrests just as many johns per year as sex workers, and with a radically different agenda— while clients are hit with a ticket and fine that can reach $1,300, sex workers are arrested and then offered counseling and job training through the Sheriff’s Women’s Justice Program, which is run by sex trafficking survivors.

New York established a special court system in 2013 to process sex workers and trafficking victims, with the goal of offering them counseling and social services, the same year Nassau County, NY caught more than 100 johns and posted their pictures online in a controversial sting called “Operation Flush the Johns.”

Amnesty can’t make or enforce laws, but its recommendations carry international weight. “It’s not just saying that sex workers need rights so AIDS doesn’t spread,” says Molly Crabapple, a prominent artist and journalist who has long advocated on behalf of sex workers. “It’s an acknowledgement that sex worker rights are human rights.”

But Amnesty’s decision was met with heavy criticism from some who argue that full decriminalization would enable pimps and johns and could contribute to an explosion in sex trafficking. Former President Jimmy Carter wrote a strongly worded letter to Amnesty members urging them to vote against the policy

Sheriff Dart says he’s open to any solutions, but is skeptical of the “naiveté” around legalization. “The pimps and the traffickers are not going to say ‘oh it’s legalized now, we’re out of the business,” he says.

“I’ve been stopped by preachers, Bible in hand, who after they’re done preaching their sermon, will ask me for a sexual act,” says Officer Kate*, who’s posing undercover as a street prostitute. “They’re just men. If they see it, they want it, and they think they’re not going to get caught.”

According to a 2014 report from the UN-backed International Labor Organization, 4.5 million people are trafficked for sex, generating $99 billion a year in revenue from forced sexual exploitation. Of the 208 human trafficking prosecutions pursued by the Department of Justice in 2014, 190 were for sex trafficking, according to a State Department report on trafficking released in July. That’s over 91%. Dart’s officers say they can’t help these women if they’re not allowed to take them off the streets.

But even trafficking victims who think prostitution should stay illegal say they don’t think it helps to be arrested. Caprice is a former prostitute who says she was coerced into selling sex for a pimp from the age of 17. She’s in Cook County Jail on charges unrelated to prostitution, but she said she’s been arrested for prostitution 10-12 times in different jurisdictions, and she “didn’t feel there were any positive outcomes at all.”

Many advocates for decriminalization point to a well-documented police mistreatment of sex workers as justification for lifting all laws against prostitution. “I would no more support arresting trafficking victims to get them help than I would support arresting battered women,” says Molly Crabapple.

Despite her experience with arrests, Caprice still thinks something should be done about the sex trade. “When you have sex with someone, you give them a part of your soul,” she says. “So I don’t think — I don’t think that it should be something that’s sold.”

New York took a significant step toward expanding the national conversation about sex and crime when a collection of lawmakers on Monday introduced bills to decriminalize prostitution.

Described as the first decriminalization bills ever in the state, and the most comprehensive decriminalization effort ever initiated in the United States, the bills expand upon recent attempts in several other states and the District of Columbia.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/nyregion/prostitution-legal-ny.html