The Police Don’t Protect Us

When I was twenty, I was a junior in college. My recent ex-boyfriend, who was thirty-eight at the time, tried to rape me. I had understood instinctively that I was in danger, suddenly alone with a man trying to reestablish possession of my body against my will. He was not trying to connect with me. He was trying to hurt me. And he did. I grabbed a kitchen knife, which startled him, and so I was able to flee.

I called the police almost immediately. I had written papers articulating my hard-won right to decide with whom, and for what reasons, I had sex. I knew, for example, that marital rape in this country had been illegal in all states since 1993. His assault was not my fault, and reporting it to law enforcement was the first step I should take to pursue justice. I felt confident that the law was on my side.

Part of my confidence came from the fact that I am a white, cis citizen of the United States. I come from a comfortable middle-class family. I was raised to believe that the police were there to protect me.

I was wrong.

Two cops arrived at the cheap apartment I shared with five other people in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, and took a statement from me. A detective arrived the next morning. I repeated my statement. I confirmed the details: “Yes, he put his fingers inside me.” “Yes, I told him to stop.” “Yes, we had been intimate before.” The detective took some notes, but he wasn’t anything like the D.A.R.E. officer who had come to my school in the second grade, or the cops on Law & Order. He said, “Look, if you really want to do this—I can go pick this guy up right now. But in my experience, these ‘he said, she said’ situations, they never get prosecuted.”

I kept expecting this detective to have more options for me. But there were only two—insist on having my ex arrested, handcuffed, and prosecuted for criminal rape, or pretend that nothing had happened. Hold his secret and make it mine. I decided not to prosecute. Nothing I have learned about our criminal legal system in the last decade has led me to believe that I should have done any different.

I worked as a full-service hourly escort in Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2004 to 2005. I returned to sex work ten years later to supplement my sporadic income as a writer and performer in New York City. I started talking about my experiences in the sex industry when I was working as a stand-up comic, and that is how I met Ceyenne Doroshow. Ceyenne is an activist, organizer, community-based researcher, and public figure in the trans and sex worker–rights movements. As the founder and executive director of Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (G.L.I.T.S), she provides holistic care to LGBTQ sex workers while serving on the boards of Sex Worker Outreach Project (SWOP-USA), Caribbean Equality Project, Sharmus Outlaw Advocacy and Rights (SOAR) Institute, and New York Transgender Advocacy Group (NYTAG). She also works with Decriminalize Sex Work (DSW), a national advocacy organization.

Ceyenne introduced me to a network of organizers who were working to change laws to protect sex workers and their communities from police violence. They inspired my own activism. In 2017 I startedThe Oldest Profession Podcast. Each episode of the podcast tells the story of a different sex worker from the past. Through my work on the podcast, I developed an appreciation for our history of multigenerational resistance. I transitioned from telling my own story in comedy clubs to sharing at conferences and public hearings. I became the director of communications for Decriminalize Sex Work, and in 2020 founded Old Pros, a nonprofit media organization working to change the status of sex workers in society.

On July 30, 2019, Ceyenne, three other sex workers, and I sat around Ceyenne’s kitchen table in Queens to record a conversation about the police, the criminal legal system, and victims’ services in the United States. The five of us had all worked in different parts of the industry. I introduced myself as a thirty-two-year-old, white, cis woman. When I worked as an escort, I saw clients primarily in hotel rooms and occasionally at their homes. Ceyenne is a Black trans woman in her mid-fifties. When asked about the details of her work, she replied simply, “I am a whore.” Madeline, twenty-three, who is white and identifies as nonbinary with no sexual preference, works primarily as a “camgirl” from their home. Scout, thirty-one, is white, gender-nonconforming, and identifies as queer. They primarily do out-calls. Danielle, forty-four, is a straight Black cis woman. She identifies not as a sex worker but as an entrepreneur. During the conversation, she also identified as “a proud Black girl from the inner city who worked her way up.” She continued, “I am the child of slaves. My great-grandmother was the first free slave in my family.”

Everyone in the room knew someone who had been raped or robbed by a law enforcement officer. Danielle felt that most of her interactions with cops were “just the way poor, Black people are policed.” At any given moment, she has five or six friends or family members who were incarcerated, which makes dealing with the criminal legal system a daily ordeal. Scout and Madeline chimed in, guessing that people they know—a friend, a family member, an acquaintance—get arrested at a rate of about three a month. “It’s a culture,” explained Danielle. Scout, Ceyenne, and Danielle all reported unnecessarily rough treatment, tight handcuffs, and name-calling during their arrests.

Traumatic experiences such as these reinforce the belief that law enforcement perpetuate more violence than they prevent. Almost everyone had been a victim—assaulted, raped, or robbed outside of sex work. Anyone who did call the police regretted that choice. They all echoed the sentiment that no matter what was happening to them, the police would make it worse.

Ceyenne described a violent assault by an ex-boyfriend that occurred in her own home. Her neighbors called the police and when they arrived, Ceyenne was arrested and they called her “that thing.” She spent seventeen hours shackled, alone at the police station, with shards of glass in her head and body. She attributed this treatment to her race, gender identity, and known status as a sex worker. Her ex-boyfriend got to go home. After hearing her story, I asked, “Is this a common experience?” All four immediately nodded. “We could be 100 percent right. The justice system is not designed to take care of us,” Ceyenne explained.

While Scout was attempting to report a sexual assault, the police began grilling them about a separate Child Protective Services (CPS) report showing up on their screen that mentioned sex work and an incident of being a victim of sexual assault from their childhood. Scout had later chosen to withdraw the report and was surprised that this old information was still available to officers. Scout understood immediately that now the police saw them as an unreliable witness to their own rape. Police never investigated or processed the rape kit. Scout never again reached out to law enforcement, even after suffering further assaults. The suspect in their rape was later arrested for an unrelated attempted murder.

In Revolving Door, a 2003 study conducted by the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, 80 percent of sex workers interviewed had experienced or been threatened with violence; the overwhelming majority of respondents also reported choosing not to report violence to the police. The police themselves had victimized 27 percent of the sex workers interviewed. “Sex worker, queer, Black, Black woman, all of our communities have told us our whole lives ‘don’t trust the police.’ And they were right,” explained Scout.

In the U.S. nonprofit and legal advocacy space, sex work is often linked to human trafficking, with sex workers being portrayed as victims needing rescue. But sexual and labor exploitation is rarely a simple story of victims and villains. While intended to help those coerced to sell sex, this approach shifts services toward punishing offenders rather than assisting sex workers and those who are coerced. In the end this reduces their agency, autonomy, and ability to advocate. Mirroring nineteenth-century “white slavery” panics, the current trafficking hysteria justifies violent policing of minority communities to “protect” white women. Nonprofits see arresting “helpless” sex workers as necessary to ensure that they exit the industry. Some services require a victim to cooperate with prosecutors and depend on labeling arrested workers as “victims” to keep their funding. This interdependence between social services and law enforcement creates a widespread fear of institutional authority among sex workers.

I asked the group at the table: “Do sex workers who have been raped, trafficked, or experienced domestic violence have access to victims’ services?” In unison, everyone said, “No.” The most often reported reason is that doing so would put them in contact with police. Even if not affiliated with police, many services are financially inaccessible despite sliding-scale pricing. Ceyenne and Scout observed that victim services frequently shame sex workers.

Many jurisdictions across the United States have created human trafficking diversion courts intended as alternatives to incarceration, sentencing an offender to programs and classes. These courts only address prostitution, ignoring other forms of coerced labor in agriculture, domestic labor, hospitality, and construction. The services are funded by law enforcement; police are gatekeepers to them. A Yale University and Sex Workers Project analysis found that these courts rarely addressed sex workers’ structural needs. Programs monitor personal relationships, prioritize quitting sex work over basic needs like housing and health care, and often require free labor or involvement in religious organizations that operate like gay conversion camps. These punitive approaches hurt the very people that services claim they want to help.

The best example of this dichotomy is the suite of laws referred to as FOSTA–SESTA (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act). Framed as an anti–sex trafficking effort, these 2018 laws hold platforms criminally and civilly liable for user posts seen as promoting sex trafficking. As a result, online services broadly began to censor all sexual content, fearing it might be misconstrued as supporting trafficking. The online spaces that sex workers used to use to connect with clients and with each other immediately disappeared. These laws destabilized sex workers, exacerbated anti-trafficking hysteria, and further empowered criminal legal systems, immigration detention centers, and an increasingly militarized police force. All over the country, sex workers are scared.

Everyone at Ceyenne’s table believed that labor conditions have worsened, and that violence and deaths have increased after FOSTA–SESTA. Ceyenne said: “You haven’t seen numbers like this in a generation. But after FOSTA/SESTA, the rapists, the pimps, and predators came back out. Trans deaths large, rapes large, abuse large, domestic violence large.” She feels everything is getting worse for every marginalized community all at once: sex workers, immigrants, Indigenous people, racial and religious minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. Everyone.

I aspire to live in a healthy, free society where everyone has access to rights and opportunities to determine their own future. I seek the full decriminalization of sex work, where individuals are not arrested and cannot be evicted, fired, or lose custody of their children because of their participation in sex work. All people, whether they have ever participated in sex work or not, should have access to services and support to avoid exploitation, stay safe, and make choices about their own lives. Sex workers have a right to unencumbered access to the building blocks we all need to move our lives forward.

When I was assaulted by my ex-boyfriend, I knew that what had happened to me was wrong, and I also knew that law enforcement could not help me. I was lucky that I was only met with indifference instead of hostility, but hundreds of thousands of people who do this work cannot report crimes committed against them while at work or at home and cannot advocate for their own safety because they fear arrest and punishment. Sex workers spend a significant amount of time negotiating sexual boundaries with strangers. We are adept at sensing malicious intent and sexual and physical threats. Our lives depend on it. If we are free to advocate for our own safety and health, we will. That is the future sex workers want.

Excerpted from Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bernadette Barton, Barbara G. Brents, and Angela Jones, reprinted with permission from NYU Press.

_{Image: Colin Lloyd / Unsplash (edited by Inquest)}

Contributors

Kaytlin Bailey Kaytlin Bailey is a sex worker rights advocate, comedian, writer, and founder of Old Pros, a nonprofit that uses storytelling to advocate for sex worker rights. Host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, she is also the creator of Whore’s Eye View, a comedic mad dash through 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective.

Topics

• Culture & Politics

Tags

• police violence
• policing
• sex workers
• sexual policing
• sexual violence