hunter of justice

Challenge to USAID anti-prostitution pledge in 2d Circuit

Excerpts from a report by Katherine Franke on the oral argument in Alliance for Open Society International v. USAID:

...[which is] a case brought by the Brennan Center challenging the 2003 Bush era regulations that required any entity receiving USAID under the Global AIDS Act to sign a pledge that “no funds made available to carry out this Act … may be used to provide assistance to any group or organization that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.”  22 U.S.C. Sec. 7621(f).  It also prohibits recipients from saying or doing anything that the Government deems “inconsistent with [an] opposition to prostitution,” 75 Fed. Reg. 18,760 (Apr. 13, 2010).

The lawsuit claims that the “anti-prostitution pledge” requires Plaintiffs to espouse the government’s viewpoint on prostitution, conditions Plaintiffs’ eligibility for public funds on holding favored beliefs, and prohibits Plaintiffs from saying or doing anything contrary to the government’s viewpoint with their private funds...

The government itself has trouble explaining exactly what recipients of Global AIDS Act money must do to comply with the pledge, assuming they’re willing to sign it.  The government has said that beyond a prohibition on advocating for a ban on legalization of sex work, the pledge may, MAY, also include a ban on advocating for a reduction in penalties for sex work, or even helping sex workers unionize.  So too, any work helping sex workers to prevent police abuse might also violate the act if were merely a fig leaf for legalization.  Worse yet, even using the term “sex work” or “sex worker” might violate the Act since the underlying politics of these terms might indicate support or legalization.

Read the complaint and other documents in the lawsuit describing the real and anticipated problems that health advocates working with sex workers, oops, prostitutes will have in both accomplishing their harm reduction mission and complying with the pledge.  They’re all available here.

In 2006 the plaintiffs won in the trial court – opinion here – and it’s been up and back to the Second Circuit, and the argument today was on whether the Obama Administration’s April 2010 interpretation of the pledge requirement cured the pledge of any constitutional problems.

Hearing the case were Judges Chester J. Straub, Rosemary Pooler, and Barrington Parker Jr.  Arguing for the Brennan Center was Rebekah Diller and for the government was Ben Torrance (Columbia Law School ‘00).

Shortly after Torrance got started he was interrupted by Judge Parker who asked him: “Could the government require organizations to write into their charter that marriage is between a man and wife, on the grounds that a major spread of AIDS is homosexual conduct?”

Torrance hemmed and hawed, and returned the discussion to the government’s judgment that there is a strong causal relationship between prostitution and HIV transmission.

Shortly thereafter Parker lept in again: “What does it mean to oppose prostitution?  If OSI works in the back streets of Mumbai, can it work with street workers and organize them not to work with customers who don’t use condoms?...Must an OSI intern on the streets of Mumbai cable Washington to get ok before proceeding in her work?”

Canadian judge orders halt to enforcement of anti-prostitution laws that endanger sex workers

Ontario Superior Court Judge Susan Himel invalidated key provisions of Canada's anti-prostitution laws on the ground that they contribute to the danger faced by sex-trade workers and violate rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms [the equivalent of a constitution].  

At issue were prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and living on the proceeds of prostitution. 

"These laws, individually and together, force prostitutes to choose between their liberty interest and their right to security of the person as protected under the Canadian Charter," Judge Himel said in the 131-page decision. "I find the danger faced by prostitutes greatly outweighs any harm that may be faced by the public."

The judge suspended the effect of the decision for 30 days to allow time for appeals and a legislative response, saying that "I recognize that a consequence of this decision may be that unlicensed brothels may be operated, and in a way that may not be in the public interest...[It now falls to Parliament to] fashion corrective action."

The ruling does not affect provisions applicable to persons under 18.

Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson and Rona Ambrose, minister for the status of women, both said the government is concerned about the decision and "is seriously considering an appeal."

"It's like emancipation day for sex-trade workers," said plaintiff Terri-Jean Bedford. "The federal government must now take a stand and clarify what is legal and not legal between consenting adults in private."

"We don't have to worry about being raped and robbed and murdered," plaintiff Valerie Scott said. "This decision means that sex workers can now pick up the phone, and call the police and report a bad client. This means that we no longer have to be afraid, that we can work with the appropriate authorities." Scott envisions that sex workers will set up guilds and associations, health standards, workers' compensation programs, as well as pay income tax. 

The plaintiffs were represented by Professor Alan Young of Osgoode Hall Law School, who handled the case pro bono with the help of 20 of his students. The case does not solve the problems related to prostitution, he said. "So what's happened is that there's still going to be many people on the streets and many survival sex workers who are motivated by drugs and sometimes exploited by very bad men. That's not going to change," Young added.

"Here's what changed. Women who have the ability, the wherewithal and the resources and the good judgment to know that moving indoors will protect them now have that legal option. They do not have to weigh their safety versus compliance with the law."

NYC teacher taken out of classroom for online defense of sex work

According to the NY Times, a public school teacher in New York City is being treated the way gay teachers were treated 30 years ago. Her crime is not sexual orientation. but her acknowledgment that she previously worked as a prostitute. 

You know, there was a famous referendum, a famous Supreme Court case and, two years ago, a famous movie about the effort to purge schools of gay teachers and anyone who advocated homosexuality. This situation is really no different.  

Where's the new Harvey Milk?

A teacher at a Bronx elementary school has been reassigned after writing on a Web site about her past as a sex worker. In a short online article in The Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the teacher, Melissa Petro, criticized Craigslist for shutting down its “adult services” section, which carried sex-related advertising.

Ms. Petro wrote that from October 2006 to January 2007, she “accepted money in exchange for sexual services I provided to men I met online.” She said that she used Craigslist to meet men and it provided “a simple, familiar forum through which I could do my business with complete anonymity, from the safety and convenience of my own home.” She also wrote that she found “the lifestyle physically demanding, emotionally taxing and spiritually bankrupting,” and gave it up after a few months.

Ms. Petro was hired as a teacher in August 2007, a spokeswoman for the city Education Department, Natalie Ravitz, wrote in an e-mail on Sunday. She said that Ms. Petro worked at Public School 70 in the Bronx and had tenure. Ms. Ravitz said that Ms. Petro had been reassigned pending an inquiry by Richard J. Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for the city schools. She declined further comment. 

"Mr. Green" and the VIP concierge

New York Magazine has posted its "look inside the life" article on how super rich straight men get sexual recreation. It's written as if the story is far different from what it used to be, but I have my doubts about that. Still, it seems that boom times probably expanded the reach of this adult male fantasy world - the more money, the more men with money, etc etc.  The article is built around the story of Rachel Uchitel, who became Tiger Woods' special someone:

...Rachel Uchitel ... occupies a position of power in this strobe network of girls and money and celebrity. As VIP concierge and director of VIP hospitality at Tao in Vegas and at Dune in Southampton and at the Griffin, Marquee, Stanton Social, and Pink Elephant in Manhattan, she was the ambassador of client desire.

Her job was born out of the culture of bottle service. The concept of paying for a whole bottle of alcohol and sitting at a table originated in Europe and grew a tail in the States in the early nineties, at New York clubs Life and Chaos. But it didn’t stick until 2001, when bottle service became the new way of gaining entry into a world that had previously not been for sale. You no longer had to be an Andy Warhol descendant to party at a place like Bungalow 8; you could be Joe Banker or Joe Banker’s son with his father’s credit card. And the staffers changed, too. Cocktail waitresses evolved from out-of-work actresses into Penthouse Pet–level creatures who sparred with their co-workers for client gratuities by expanding their breadth of service. Their take-home pay skyrocketed from $300 a night to $3,000 banner shifts. With the volume of VIP clients growing and the number of tables quadrupling, the need for organization spawned the creation of the VIP host, someone who could be trusted with the biggest clients.

In Las Vegas, at the Bank, Woods’s club of choice, a host would meet him at the door and walk him to his table on the second or third floor. From his perch high above the dance floor and flanked by superstar friends like Michael Jordan, Woods could look over the balcony and say, Oh, that table of pretty girls there, bring them up. The nightclub has become a smorgasbord. All you have to do is point and ask....

The hosts are much closer to their clients than almost any other service provider in a wealthy person’s life. Money isn’t exchanged directly in most cases, so it can genuinely feel as though the host is taking care of you for no other reason than because she wants to. In return, she—or he; most hosts are actually men—is a part of the entourage, a trusted confidante....

A source in the business estimates that [Uchitel] made more than any other VIP host. “At my best,” Uchitel says, “I made $250,000 base, plus a guaranteed $250,000 from the tip pool.” Half a million a year, paid by a single club—probably Tao, though Uchitel will not confirm it. (She also says she has never been kept on retainer or paid by a client directly.) This does not include the extracurricular trips, on yachts in Saint-Tropez and to Monte Carlo...

[Uchitel] really hates the accusation that she set up sex for any of her clients. She is not a pimp or a madam, she says. “It’s not our job to get anybody laid.”

What the hosts do is more like placement. They are puzzle-doers, wielding a table chart and making sure the room looks good, depositing models beside Wall Street bankers in a Rubik’s Cube of dovetailing desire. They are also realtors, selling tables, sometimes auctioning them off to the highest bidder. At the door, a host will procure a man’s credit card and his I.D. and quote him what the minimum will be at a certain table. Table minimums are usually around $1,500 at clubs in Manhattan, but a prime spot can go for as much as $30,000. And Uchitel has seen bills of $245,000 and higher for patrons who are buying huge Methuselahs of Champagne—the equivalent of eight standard bottles in one—or, in their schnockered magnanimity, have decided to treat other tables to rounds of Cristal.

In their BlackBerrys, VIP hosts lovingly store all of their clients’ birthdays, children’s names, sports teams, preferred vodkas. (Some of them also note which types of girls their clients like: loose brunettes, intelligent blondes, C-cups, real, and so on.) These are the things that make a good host. ...

Uchitel won’t talk about Tiger Woods.... She announced a press conference in early December, as though she were going to tell all. Suddenly the press conference was canceled amid reports that Uchitel’s boldface attorney, Gloria Allred, was seen leaving Woods’s attorney’s offices. Allred’s daughter, attorney Lisa Bloom, told The Early Show, “That can only mean one thing: As we say in the law, Mr. Green has arrived.” TMZ has reported that the amount is in the neighborhood of $10 million...

New Orleans police use "crime against nature" law to harass sex workers

Two web sources - Colorlines and Change.org - are reporting that New Orleans police are using the old Louisiana state sodomy law to increase the penalties imposed on (mostly) women convicted of prostitution from a misdemeanor to a felony, creating absurdly harsh punishments, based on the type of sexual activity involved. Wait, you may say, what about Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that ruled such "crime against nature" laws unconstitutional? Lawrence, however, specifically excluded commercial sexual encounters from the ambit of constitutional protection that it recognized for consensual sexual acts between adults. And the Louisiana statute specifically criminalizes solicitation for sodomy for payment. As a result, the state can argue that this portion of the law is not affected by Lawrence. (Like several other states, Louisiana did not repeal its sodomy law after the Supreme Court ruling.) Or, you might have thought that sodomy laws applied only to same-sex activity. Wrong again - sodomy at common law was defined the way that Louisiana defines it: as oral or anal sex between any two persons. 

The result: sex workers in New Orleans who are arrested for soliciting johns for oral (or anal) sex are charged with felonies; those who don't mention or can't be tricked into mentioning blow jobs are charged only with misdemeanors. Ridiculous -- except if you're sent to prison for five years and then have to register as a sex offender when you are released.

This ought to be challenged as an outrageous equal protection violation - essentially imposing radically different penalties for the same behavior, for no rational reason. It's also a dramatic illustration of how local power structures can exclude the least powerful strata within a minority group from protections, such as the impact of the Lawrence decision, that protect others within the same group.

From the report in Change:

Normally, a first-time prostitution conviction is a misdemeanor leading to less than six months jail time. But Jordan Flaherty reports in Colorlines that many New Orleans sex workers are being charged for selling oral or anal sex under the crimes against nature law, which carries a first-time felony penalty of up to five years prison time and requires them to register as sex offenders.

When used against sex workers, these controversial registries, created to keep communities aware of child molesters, become a severe rights violation that endangers an already vulnerable population, and wastes resources that could be directed toward dangerous offenders. The New Orleans Police Department's own website on sex offender awareness states that only 4% of sexual assaults are perpetrated by women -- yet in New Orleans, women make up the vast majority of crimes against nature convictions, which account for a whopping 264 out of the city's 861 actively registered sex offenders, according to registry statistics provided by LA state police spokesperson Doug Cain.

Though the registry doesn't keep track of how many of these crimes against nature were for solicitation of sex, it's safe to assume that we're looking at convictions for sex workers...

Josh Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, estimates that about half of prostitution arrests get tried as crimes against nature. This is up to the discretion of the police and district attorney, and sex workers and their advocates allege the harsher law is disproportionately utilized against black and transgender women.

Flaherty reports an array of problems, such as that women registered as sex offenders are excluded from regular storm shelters... The sex offender shelters lack separate safe spaces for women... Furthermore, since a crimes against nature conviction is a felony right of the bat, unlike a normal prostitution conviction, these women -- who in many cases turned to sex work due to poverty and a lack of other options -- are unable to get public assistance such as food stamps. Many of these women are homeless, and if sympathetic non-profits did not allow them to use their locations for a permanent address, they would end up violating the terms of their sex registry.

New judicial ruling: no medical deduction for visits to prostitutes

No, I'm not kidding.  HT to Feminist Law Professors for pointing out this new decision from the U.S. Tax Court -

In Halby v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, T.C. Memo 2009-204, the Tax Court ruled that William Halby, a New York attorney (for 40 years) and specialist in tax law, could not deduct as medical expenses $65,934 for visits to prostitutes in 2004 and $42,152 for the same purpose in 2005. The opinion did not say whether this one-third drop in one year reflected an improved medical condition, a diminished disposable income, or a realization that he could be prosecuted. 

Further, the court holds that the amounts spent for "books on sex therapy and pornographic materials ... were incurred for [Halby's] general welfare, not pursuant to a doctor's prescription or for a specific medical condition." That would be $2,368 in 2004 and $5,005 in 2005. Has this guy never heard of the internet? Or little blue pills?

And you thought tax law was boring ...

New job opportunities in Nevada sex work: men wanted

From AP:

The owner of a Nevada brothel suffering from the recession thinks she has been ignoring about half the market — the half that prefers men. Bobbi Davis is looking for male prostitutes to help expand the clientele at the Shady Lady Ranch, her small roadside brothel about 150 miles north of Las Vegas. "We've had requests for men in the past, and there's nothing else like this out there," she said.

Indeed, the 25 legal brothels scattered throughout 10 rural Nevada counties are staffed by women and cater to men. The Shady Lady, however, isn't the only one thinking about hiring male prostitutes. Nevada Brothel Association lobbyist George Flint says other brothels have approached him with the idea lately to drum up business. Like Nevada's gambling, hotel and convention industries, the prostitution business has hit hard times. Flint estimates that bordellos have seen a roughly 50 percent drop in revenue since the economy turned sour. "Business is so bad right now, I think brothels would do anything to survive. Disposable income is just in short supply at the moment," he said.

Flint says other brothels have offered male prostitutes over the years, with little success. He argues that the business model for a brothel that caters to women just doesn't pencil out. "Seducing a woman and seducing a man in a brothel environment are different things completely. One can take a few minutes, the other can take hours. It wouldn't make money," he said. Davis agrees that women customers could differ significantly from men, though she plans at least initially to keep her current prices for services — $500 for two hours, $800 for three. "That may change. We're figuring that women may want a longer period of time, maybe a little more romance. They're not quite like men in that respect," she said.

Davis said the requests she has received for male prostitutes have come mostly from women, but that she also would welcome business from men seeking men. "I can't discriminate, nor would I want to," she said, adding that it would be up to prostitutes to decide whether they entertain any particular guest. Licensing male prostitutes might be a problem. State law allows for legal prostitutes of both genders, but the health codes that regulate the business largely are written to apply to female prostitutes. That includes a requirement that the working girls have mandatory cervical exams. "It's kind of hard to do that with a man," Davis said.

Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo, whose office administers work cards for prostitutes, said he's aware of Davis' plan and has sought legal advice from the district attorney. Meanwhile, Davis is drawing up her help wanted ad. She said she'll be looking for one or two men "in good shape, in their mid-30s to 50s." Asked about the age range, she notes that's another way women differ from men. "Look at George Clooney, he's 50 and he's still considered a very sexy man. Women don't consider a man washed up by the time he's 50," she said.

Conservative feminists, together with other idiots, oppose honoring "revolutionary" sex worker

The following post from the Times of London tells the latest chapter in the story of a woman I'm embarrassed to say I had never heard of, but who was well enough known in Europe to garner lengthy obits like the one in The Independent, which called her a "virtuoso writer and revolutionary whore." Someone needs to write a biography about this lady.  As for the likes of the "women's rights activists" who object to honoring her, the less said ...

A decision by the [Geneva] city government to transfer the remains of Grisélidis Réal, a renowned prostitute and champion of prostitutes’ rights, to a grave of honour next to some of the city’s most illustrious former citizens has erupted into a very public row. In the conservative Swiss financial centre the idea of a prostitute being buried near to the Protestant reformer Jean Calvin, the right-wing Argentinean-born writer Jorge Luis Borges or the educationalist Jean Piaget has appalled traditionalists and even angered women’s rights activists.

They believe that the elevation of a woman who represents a profession demeaning to their gender is wrong and have threatened to stage a protest. “This is an insult to all women. It is the pinnacle of bad taste to bury a woman who glorified prostitution next to the religious reformer Calvin,” said Odile Roulet, a Geneva lawyer and activist who has lodged a complaint with the local council.

Born in 1929 to a respectable middle-class family, Réal became a prostitute after completing her studies in art and music. She moved to postwar Germany to entertain Allied soldiers, with a preference for the British whom she deemed “true gentlemen”. She became popular as an author of books about her life as a high-class prostitute, such as A Courtesan’s Dance Card. In her memoirs she detailed the often embarrassing perversions of her clients, many of whom were later publicly identified from her descriptions.

When she retired from entertaining clients at the age of 66, Réal became a social worker, establishing associations and groups to help prostitutes and to campaign for their rights as sex workers. She died of cancer in Geneva in 2005 aged 75 and was buried at a normal cemetery. In March last year Geneva city authorities said they intended to exhume her remains and lay them to rest at the Cimetière des Rois – Cemetery of Kings.

Local laws stipulate that only people of exceptional merit can be buried at the cemetery, but Patrice Mugny, an MP and head of the cultural authority of Geneva, said Réal deserved her neww status. “Grisélidis Réal championed the women’s right of choice and she fought her whole life over for prostitutes to be able to do their job with dignity. She was famous all over Europe for her struggle,” he said...

The double standard lives

Yesterday, a 24-year-old college student was sentenced to six months in prison for managing the prostitution business that former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer patronized, the exposure of which led to his resignation.  Spitzer was not prosecuted for any crime, in light of the fact that he used no public funds to pay for his visits to prostitutes.

Cecil Suwal was not so lucky.  Apparently, the six month sentence she received was something of a compromise between the two years of imprisonment sought by the prosecution and the recommendation  from the court's probation office of a suspended sentence plus time on probation.

Katherine Franke nailed what was going on here:

One way to understand this is that Michael Garcia, the U.S. Attorney in New York, has decided that when Eliot Spitzer paid to have sex with the women who worked at Emperor’s Club V.I.P, he had sex and they committed a crime. In fact, it is the policy of most federal prosecutors to charge sellers, but not buyers, of sex with a crime. Last I checked, the federal government hesitates not in the least to prosecute both the buyers and the sellers of illegal drugs, and both the givers and the receivers of bribes. Yet sex, it seems, is different.

Even sex hits hard times

The Nation

By JoAnn Wypijewski

...Act I. Scene I. Before. Ed Hayes, New York attorney and man about town, has long gauged the stock market's temperature by a High-End Girlfriend Index and High-End Stripper Index. "When times are really good, guys spend fortunes at strip clubs: $2,000, $5,000... You got a 20-something-year-old, he just got a $3 million bonus, he might spend $20,000 in one night. This guy in a club once says to me, 'Listen Eddie, whatever I spend it's cheaper than the divorce.'" Likewise, a courtesan's time, even if it cost $10,000 a month, was a bargain next to the package for courting the young, fashionable girlfriend: the lease on a car, the $2 million Lower East Side condo, the dinners and baubles and $1,265/night weekend getaways at the Mandarin Oriental....

Such was the situation before panic set in at the top. In the intimate economy, sex has always been the least of it, particularly at the levels of mad wealth, where transaction costs take a different form. Average townhouse: $17 million. Baby: $50,000. One-day Yelling Center evaluation of the child's bad behavior: $4,250. ... In the web of exchange relations, perhaps the only person who fully grasped the extreme privilege and vulnerability of her situation was that relative rarity, the high-end call girl who had hustled her way up from the cheap brothels and champagne bars, and whose survival has always depended on a careful calibration of spreading her risk.

Scene II. The phone stopped ringing. Sandra was the new girl with the agency in July, when she was getting twenty calls a night for phone sex, while established workers got fifty. Most callers wanted her "co-ed" character--blond, petite, barely legal. Some wanted her mature lady. About five times a month someone called for her "ebony" character. Sandra is 35, creole--black to white men, unless she tints her hair red and wears green contacts to bring out her Latin features, as she sometimes does to get a gig dancing in a club. Since the crash, her twenty callers have dwindled to six; the other girls' to twenty. ...The day the bailout passed she got fifteen calls.

Playing politics with sex workers, British version

guardian.co.uk
Belinda Brooks-Gordon

In her speech to the Labour conference this September, the home secretary Jacqui Smith made clear her intention to criminalise clients of "trafficked" sex workers and stated that, from October, she will begin work to outlaw paying for sex with those who are "forced into prostitution at another's will, or controlled for another's gain".

Stirring stuff, yet Smith seems coy about giving the actual figures for trafficked workers. The official figures for the police operation Pentameter 1 showed, that despite 55 forces hunting for them, only 88 women were trafficked. Since it is accepted on all sides of the debate that 80,000 work in the sex industry, then the number of those trafficked amounts to 0.11% of those in sex work. According to a recent parliamentary answer, Pentameter 2 improved on that performance with the recovery of 167 victims of trafficking – but that still represents only 0.21% of sex workers.

In other words, the impression Smith gives that the sex industry is rife with trafficking is highly misleading. Meanwhile, criminalising the clients – who often tip off police when they have qualms about a worker's status – of that small percentage will only make things worse for the workers.

Smith wants to remove the word "persistent" from kerb-crawling laws as, in her view, "once around the block is once too many – and so we'll make kerb-crawling punishable as a first offence". This will create a new law for police to stop anyone at will. Smith also wants to give councils and the police new powers to close down brothels and clamp down on exploitation. But this only displaces the trade and puts women on the street where they are less safe.

SF to vote on prostitution

Among the most fascinating local elections this year is a ballot initiative in San Francisco that would effectively stop enforcement of anti-prostitution laws and prevent use of racial profiling to identify victims of trafficking.

Bay Area Reporter

by Seth Hemmelgarn

...Opponents say the measure, Proposition K, would prohibit law enforcement from going after sex traffickers ... The measure would also prohibit the police department from applying for federal or state funds that involve racial profiling to target alleged trafficking victims. But in her argument against the Prop K, District Attorney Kamala Harris states the measure would strip all funding to investigate human trafficking rings.

In 1994, according to the measure, the Board of Supervisors established a Task Force on Prostitution to examine prostitution and to recommend reforms. In 1996, the task force released a report recommending that, among other things, the city stop enforcing and prosecuting prostitution crimes.

Prop K calls for the police department and the district attorney "to enforce existing criminal laws that prohibit crimes such as battery, extortion, and rape, regardless of the victim's status as a sex worker."

Maxine Doogan, who is largely responsible for getting the measure on the November ballot and is the founder of the Exotic Service Providers Union, said Prop K would not stop law enforcement from going after child abusers or traffickers.

Slava Osowska [another Prop K supporter] said law enforcement officials racially profile Asian sex workers, such as women in massage parlors, and assume that they're trafficking victims.

"The only way they can investigate is through racial profiling and making assumptions with no evidence," Osowska said.

Heather Weigand, a Prop K opponent, is program manager for Safe House, which helps provide housing, shelter, food, one-to-one therapy and other services to women who have been working in prostitution....Weigand said she opposes Prop K because it would open the city to pimps, johns, and traffickers, "and it does not protect any women in sex work ... it harms them by tying the police department's hands in investigating prostitution-related crimes."...

Osowska said the measure would make it easier for clients and sex workers to go to authorities when there's evidence of sex trafficking.

Connie Chan, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, [said that] Mayor Gavin Newsom assembled a task force on trafficking that included agencies such as the health and police departments. "Through this collaborative multi-agency effort numerous inspections and investigations into sex trafficking operations have ensued, resulting in over 20 brothels posing as massage parlors being closed down in San Francisco," Chan wrote....

Researchers condemn British report on prostitution

guardian.co.uk

Top academics involved in sex research ...claim that research into prostitution in the UK published last month by the Poppy Project, which is partly funded by the Ministry of Justice, is inaccurate and unethical. The research in the Big Brothel report "exhibits serious flaws in its mode of data collection and analysis," they warn.

The group of 27 key figures in sex work research from prestigious universities across the UK and overseas claim the report was conducted with neither ethical approval nor acknowledgment of evidence and co-authored by a journalist known for producing anti-prostitution findings.... The report's findings lend weight to Home Office moves to make it against the law to pay for sex.

The row comes just days before the October 8 deadline of a Home Office consultation into proposals to amend existing legislation on prostitution and brothels.

The proposals, which will go before parliament in December, would create a new criminal offence of paying for sex with a person "controlled for gain", and enable police to close brothels and change the definition of kerb-crawling.

The academics, led by Dr Teela Sanders at Leeds University and Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon at Birkbeck, University of London, ... stated: "The report builds a damning picture of indoor sex work on the basis of data whose reliability and representativeness is extremely doubtful and a methodological approach that would be considered unethical by most professional social researchers.

"It makes claims about trafficking, exploitation and the current working conditions of women and men employed in the indoor sex industry on the basis of that data," the response says.

"These claims cannot be substantiated in terms of the methodology, the data presented or in terms of wider, ethically approved, peer reviewed academic evidence.

"In short, the report does not provide any evidence concerning the current working conditions of women and men employed in indoor sex work venues in the UK."

The Big Brothel report, co-authored by journalist and campaigner Julie Bindel and Helen Atkins, received huge media coverage last month. But critics accused it of conflating fears over trafficking with general prostitution.

Brooks-Gordon said: "You can't just churn out political propaganda and say it's research. You end up with very dangerous policy....

The report's research evidence is based on telephone calls with brothel receptionists rather visiting or speaking to sex workers themselves and is therefore unreliable, the academics warn....