Whether in an exclusive apartment in Manhattan where the figures charged for sexual services justify the executive profile of clients, to the affordable market where Mexican, Central American or European victims of kidnapping are exploited by criminal organizations, the sexual offer in New York is It moves between demands from activists for total decriminalization and discreet arrests of traffickers who have always regarded the Big Apple as a lucrative market.
Sx Noir is the social media profile of a sex worker committed to promoting the concept of Sex Tech Crypto, which she explains as a “safer, shame-free space to explore the future of sex, culture, and technology.” which includes payments in cryptocurrencies or in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT for its acronym in English).
Event organizer that seeks to explain this cutting-edge model of sex work, SX Noir supports brands like Decrim NY (DNY), a national non-profit organization, which is pursuing a strategy to end the ban on consensual adult prostitution in the US. USA. A first step for DNY is to stop prostitution-related arrests while advocating the evidence-based idea that it will “help end human trafficking, improve public health, and promote community safety.” .
“Sex work is criminalized throughout the state of New York and some district attorneys have announced that they will not prosecute sex workers for prostitution,” Ariela Moscowitz, Communications Director for Decrim NY, told The New York Daily. However, because these policies are informal, “they could change at any time in the absence of a uniform state law that supports and protects sex workers,” she claimed.
Being the United States the fifth country where men spend more money on sex with an estimated $14,000 million a year, according to figures handled by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), this relevant sector of buyers, on the one hand, maintains active the finances of those who view sex work as one that should deserve the same rights as other workers. Although, on the other, it promotes the “sex trafficking machine” full of violations of the law, according to the conclusion reached by the report “From Impunity to Responsibility: Deter buyers of sexual services in the state of New York and more there”, published by CATW.
“As the fourth most populous state in the country, New York is home to New York City, one of the largest in the world and an important center for trafficking and the sex trade,” observes the text released in mid-2022 in which they recall that the prohibition mentioned by Moscowitz applies to any place where sexual services are provided in the city, except for strip clubs authorized by the state.
A somewhat malleable prohibition according to a recent study commissioned by the city authorities and cited in the same CATW report where they release the figure of 629 illegal “massage parlors” (or brothels) in New York City, where Queens is the leader of the five neighborhoods, since there were at least 269 establishments (42%) of this type.
When browsing pages where sexual services are offered such as SexAdult or Bedpage, it is discovered that many of the active workers in the city traveled from Eastern Europe, South America, and a few from other states in the American Union.
Profiles offered in a catalog where all skin tones and cultural diversity appear, with rates ranging from $60 per half hour, up to $500 in the same amount of time. The services are provided in apartments or hotels scattered throughout the city or, in the case of some Mexican women exploited by their partners, under the modality of home service.
On other pages such as Eros.com, the rates start at a thousand dollars an hour for “accompaniment”, and likewise the profile of the women changes and it seems that they were taken from a modeling agency. At another site called Tryst.lynk, prices go up to $1,500 an hour or up to $9,000 overnight.
Decriminalize, the best option
The culture of sexual services in the state of New York has generated the opening of internet forums where buyers, lacking in empathy, openly show how, when contracting services, they resort to practices such as objectification, commodification and pornification of women; exploitation of pregnant women; indifference to a woman’s visible discomfort and dissimulation after understanding and not reporting when dealing with human trafficking, among other harmful practices detailed in the CATW report.
That is why decriminalizing is the best option according to Moscowitz who insists that “where sex work has been decriminalized, sex workers and survivors of trafficking enjoy human rights, in addition to reducing trafficking, exploitation and violence against women.” Another argument supported by Decrim NY is that by ceasing to operate in the shadows “sex workers can seek help and become less dependent on potential exploiters” in addition to moving away “from violence and exploitation caused by stigma.”
They point to New Zealand as an example, where sex work was decriminalized in 2003, successfully empowering people in the sex industry who can now report violence against sex workers. With this model, at least in that country, trafficking ended abruptly and for this reason “institutions such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNAIDS, the Global Alliance against Trafficking in Women, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, the World Health Organization and many other human rights groups have come out in support of decriminalizing consensual sex work,” illustrates Ariela Moscowitz.
Currently the Stop Violence in the Sex Commerce Act (SVSTA) has been filed and referred to the New York State Congressional Code Committee. The same bill to combat trafficking by decriminalizing consensual adult sex work that has been introduced in the New York Senate every year since 2019. In addition to decriminalizing prostitution crimes, the bill, whose main sponsor is the Democratic senator, Julia Salazar, would modify the provisions related to the prosecution of such crimes and the annulment of sentences.
Fight stigma and discrimination
At the Sex Workers Project (SWP), a branch of the Urban Justice Center dedicated to the defense of sex workers, they agree that this sector “deserves the same rights and protections as any other worker.” With their position that promotes regulation, they seek to combat stigma and discrimination, “so that sex workers are respected and valued.”
RJ Thompson-Rodríguez, general director of SWP clarifies that prohibiting sex work “is hypocritical and obsolete” and describes that this attempt is only intended to seek “to control our bodies and disrespect our inherent human rights to sex work.”
And while congressmen decide to discuss and vote on the law, organizations like Decrim NY continue to “seek evidence, data and testimony from sex workers and survivors of trafficking to guide us,” according to Moscowitz who ends by saying that this organization will insist that the immunity of sex workers and survivors is guaranteed when they come forward to report crimes against them.
And it details one of the biggest challenges for any activist in “the confusion between consensual adult sex work and trafficking” when the laws address them in the same way. “The effort to untangle them to increase security for everyone is a great challenge,” he concludes.