A (Former) Sex Worker's Tale

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Laura LeMoon, How a Sex Trafficking Law Made My Job as a Sex Worker More Dangerous. Wall Street Journal, Dec 7, 2024, at page C4.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/pol ... -dangerous-958c94c3

Note: About a decade ago, The Economist has an article explaining prostitution should be legalized and that with Internet, clients and sex workers can choose one another safely (not to mention the record which may be used when rape or murder occurs).
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My phone’s tinny ring was once the sound of my liberation. As an escort working by and for myself, I used to field around a hundred calls and texts a day from prospective clients, most of whom found my ad on a then popular escort site called Backpage.com. The inquiries were plentiful, so I could be choosy. I had control over who I met and where and when I met them. Sometimes I didn’t feel like meeting anyone at all, so I took the day off.

The clients I chose to see were typically respectful. They often had wives, families and jobs, they paid their taxes and prayed to God. They had more regard for my well-being and boundaries than most of the men in my personal life. They were lonely, and they were grateful. They paid what I asked for without complaint.

There was one client I saw once a week whose wife lived in his home country. He was melancholic and hungry for human connection. Once when he was about to leave, he asked, “Can I take you out sometime? Like to dinner, on a real date? I want to get to know you as a person.” I smiled warmly and wordlessly walked him to the door.

I’m familiar with concerns about my safety, my agency, my choices. I’ve been told for decades that I’m being exploited, that by making sex work illegal—by banning commercial transactions between consenting adults—the government is trying to protect me. This suggests I shouldn’t have control over how I use my body. This presumes that I should find sex work demeaning, when in fact it can be lucrative and exhilarating. This misunderstands just how much power I have in these trades.

Or, I should say, how much power I used to have. In 2018 everything changed. That April President Donald Trump signed into law a set of bipartisan bills that aimed to crack down on sex trafficking online. Known as FOSTA-SESTA, the legislation was hailed for being tough on crime. It was supposed to hurt traffickers by making it illegal for online platforms to host content that “promotes or facilitates prostitution.” The actual effects of these laws, however, have proven more pernicious.

In 2018 federal authorities seized Backpage.com and shut it down. It had been the largest online platform for escort ads. Craigslist promptly removed its entire personals section, and social-media sites including Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit and Instagram began strictly monitoring and regulating the pictures and language users can post. The threat of seizure or a lawsuit has ensured that most websites won’t publish anything that could be seen as an ad for sex work, regardless of its source.

The U.N. defines sex trafficking as when “individuals are placed or maintained in exploitative situations for economic gain.” For adults, this usually means the presence of force, fraud or coercion. For example, a boyfriend who says he’ll break up with his girlfriend if she doesn’t prostitute herself to help pay for a new car. For minors, any commercial sexual transaction constitutes exploitation because no one under 18 can legally consent to commercial sex.

I know what it is like to be sexually exploited. After graduating from high school over 20 years ago, I moved from Seattle to New York City and promptly met an older man on the subway who became my boyfriend. He told me he loved me, but he also pushed me to have sex with his friends for money. I was young and lonely, far away from my family and insecure about my worthiness. I had also experienced abuse as a child, so I was familiar with expressions of love that felt coercive and with coercion that was framed as love.

It took a long time for me to disentangle myself from this insidious relationship and many years more to recover from it. My decision to become a sex worker was a way to reclaim my body. Many sex workers are in fact trafficking survivors. It has been empowering to take control of my story.

As a sex-trafficking survivor and anti-trafficking advocate, I am eager for prosecutors to find and arrest those who profit from taking advantage of vulnerable people, especially minors. Yet there is little evidence that banning online ads is an effective way to do this. A Government Accountability Office report in 2021 found that federal prosecutors used the law once, unsuccessfully, in its first three years. A survey of sex workers published in the journal Social Sciences in June found that “practices such as de-platforming and shadow banning have deleterious effects on sex workers’ safety.” Without online platforms, many sex workers have been forced to work the streets, increasing the risk of rape or arrest.

Lawmakers might have learned this if they actually reached out to sex workers and sex-trafficking survivors before drawing up this legislation. Few of us are surprised that SESTA has fallen short of its objectives.

SESTA has, however, made voluntary sex work much more dangerous. This crackdown meant I no longer had a safe and easy way to advertise my services. Even in the best of times, reliable, consistent clients are rare. They reconcile with their wives, get girlfriends, move out of town or simply don’t have time. Many clients also prefer to play the field rather than get locked into a relationship with a single escort. Suddenly it was much harder to find men, particularly men who made me feel safe. The increased federal scrutiny scared away the clients who had something to lose.

Before SESTA it was easier to say no to clients online for any reason, usually because I had a bad gut feeling. I owed potential customers nothing, least of all my body and my time. But without the websites or the decent patrons, we were left with the career criminals, abusers and exploiters who didn’t care about getting arrested. What was left were the people who saw SESTA as a chance to prey on financially desperate sex workers.

Suddenly men who knew my number from my former Backpage ad were sending me texts that read, “I’ll supply the clients, u just gimme something off the top.” If I mentioned I was a sex worker on a conventional dating site, I began getting messages from other wannabe pimps: “Babe, ya know I was thinkin’, I really need a new car. What do u think about me getting u some work and u buy me a new car?”

Punishing the vulnerable
If sex work had become so precarious, why didn’t I get a “real” job? I tried. I worked at a pizza parlor and a fast-food restaurant. I became a housekeeper, cleaning palatial mansion after mansion for $10 an hour. Anyone who thinks sex work is demeaning clearly hasn’t vacuumed a luxurious rug for pocket change or mopped the sticky floors of a pizza joint.

I worked briefly for a string of local Seattle nonprofits, including one that offers services for sex trafficking victims who reminded me of my former self. But there was always a moment when a colleague googled my name and discovered articles I’d written about my life as a sex worker, which made some managers uneasy. Sex workers aren’t a protected class under federal employment law, so these jobs never lasted as long as I hoped. Many sex workers also have criminal charges on their records, which can make it hard to secure a legal job.

The elusiveness of legal, well-paid work made me more reliant on my escort income, which was a problem when the bottom dropped out. In December 2019 I got a call that seemed like a gift. Inquiries from potential clients had dwindled to maybe a couple a month, if I was lucky, so this man’s request and the sum he offered seemed too good to be true. He found me on a tiny local escort site, which had otherwise proven too small and poorly funded to attract potential customers in meaningful numbers. I wondered if I was being played, but my financial desperation meant I had to risk it.

Against my better judgment, I met this client at a hotel I booked and paid for. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and looked like it hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s. When I heard the knock at the door, I thought about escaping through the window, if it even opened.

This man was clearly drunk. He offered me some cocaine before shuffling to the bathroom, where I heard loud banging noises and then quiet snorts. I’m sober and usually avoided high or drunk clients, but these preferences had become luxuries I couldn’t afford. I didn’t feel safe with him, but I didn’t feel safe trying to escape either. Because sex work is illegal, I felt compromised calling for help. It seemed safest to simply submit, to give him what he wanted, so that he would just go away. He left without paying me, without saying anything at all.

I sat on the brown bedspread with tears streaming down my face, too scared to move. Too scared that he would come back and murder the worthless prostitute whose life obviously didn’t matter. When I finally dropped off the key to the front desk, the woman who had given it to me an hour or two earlier looked at me with disgust. When I got home I sat in a running tub, my pretty blue flowered dress still on, rocked back and forth and cried.

Some might see this story as confirmation that sex work should be banned given just how dangerous it can be. But deep sea fishing can be dangerous. Also farming and factory work. Over 1,000 construction workers died in the U.S. in 2022. Many jobs carry risks, but we don’t respond by criminalizing them; instead, we pass laws to make the work safer. There is nothing inherently dangerous about sex work. By stigmatizing this work and making the workers “criminals,” we compromise their safety by pushing it all into the shadows.

I feared for other sex workers who might come into contact with this man, but under SESTA any communication about sex work between sex workers can be classified as promoting trafficking. So nobody warned me, and I never warned anyone.

‘I’ve been told for decades that I’m being exploited, that by making sex work illegal, the government is trying to protect me. This presumes that I should find sex work demeaning, when in fact it can be lucrative and exhilarating.’
That client was my last. The experience was just too terrifying for me to continue. I survived by taking yet more odd jobs, and then I finally found an employer that doesn’t hold my former life against me. But many of my friends and peers haven’t been so lucky. Some are no longer around to say so.
My hope is that President-elect Trump will reconsider his past folly in light of growing evidence. Perhaps we will even see legislation that better serves the people lawmakers claim to want to help.

Right now, this looks like a long shot. The best way to limit sex trafficking is to address what makes people vulnerable to this kind of exploitation, such as poverty, housing instability, substance dependency and prejudice. Basically, it means helping those who feel they have no other option than to submit to a criminal who falsely promises a better life. Yet the policies pledged by the incoming administration, which include cuts to public programs, curbs on labor protections and threats of mass deportation, promise to increase the kind of economic desperation that can lead to sexual exploitation.

I hope I’m wrong. These are certainly problems without easy solutions. But the answer, surely, isn’t to make hard lives harder and hope for the best.

Laura LeMoon is a former sex worker, sex-trafficking survivor, advocate and writer in Seattle.