I was arrested in 2011 after engaging in sex work to survive and later forced to register as a sex offender. Since then, social stigma, footage laws, and crushing monthly court debts have made it difficult to get back on my own two feet and succeed after prison.
Prosecutors across the country have begun declining low-level cases in an effort to reduce racial inequity and to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After organizing to repeal the “walking while trans” ban, advocates in the state—and around the country—are looking ahead to the next fight.
The Doe Fund says it pays homeless and formerly incarcerated people New York City’s minimum wage of $15 per hour. But the nonprofit charges weekly fees that can drive their wages below the federal minimum of $7.25.
Advocates say the “progressive” city has left them to die.
67% of people arrested under state laws that criminalize HIV exposure and transmission are sex workers. But new legislation meant to modernize these laws would retain harsh penalties against them.
In 1976, New York criminalized “loitering for the purpose of engaging in a prostitution offense,” a law that has allowed for policing that targets LGBTQ and immigrant New Yorkers of color. Now, a broad coalition is hoping to repeal the law, as a step towards broader decriminalization.
Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister’s stings, conducted under the guise of targeting human trafficking, netted the largest number of arrests there since 2008. Sex workers say the operations put them at risk.
The incumbent in the race, Jones’s former boss Kim Ogg, will not support a blanket refusal to prosecute sex workers, her office says.
Offices across the state conduct operations under the guise of saving victims of human trafficking. But the vast majority of people detained, including sex workers, are charged with prostitution.
When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was interviewed this week on a local news network, he was asked about Layleen Polanco, the 27-year-old transgender woman who was recently found dead in her cell at Rikers Island. The specific cause of her death is not known, but why was she held for two months […]
Though little is known about how Layleen Polanco died, advocates say her story highlights New York City’s flawed approach to criminal justice.
Andrew Mitchell, a former officer in Ohio who was recently indicted on charges he kidnapped women and forced them to have sex for their freedom, will soon face a grand jury for killing Donna Dalton during a prostitution arrest.
A scandal of falsified drug arrests is spreading at a Florida sheriff’s office that has also spent more than $1.33 million settling excessive force lawsuits and is at the center of the increasingly troubled Robert Kraft case.
A new coalition of people in the sex trades wants New York to become the first state to fully decriminalize their work.
Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam just granted clemency to Brown, who was forced to trade sex for money, but Ohio’s governor declined this week to do the same for Martin.
Our staff picks 12 stories worth reading (or rereading) before the new year.
Advocates say these charges endanger sex workers and urge the police to stop using them.
The women, who were arrested alongside Stormy Daniels in July, allege that they were smeared by arresting officers, but they’re just the latest to raise concerns.
Two new reports challenge the efficacy and ethics of prostitution diversion programs in New York City and nationwide.
State Senate candidate Julia Salazar explains how sex workers’ rights is a key part of reforming criminal justice in New York.
Community outrage mounts over Officer Andrew Mitchell’s killing of Dalton during an attempted prostitution arrest.
Human rights groups, sex worker rights activists, a digital archive and others say they are already facing censorship.
As anticipated, district attorney finds no misconduct in raid that led to Yang Song’s fatal fall.
Surveillance video sheds some light on the police raid that killed Yang Song last year while, advocates say, the raids continue.
As part of International Whores’ Day, hundreds gathered in New York City to protest new anti-sex work laws.
Our debut episodes feature Josie Duffy Rice on prosecutors and Melissa Gira Grant on criminalizing sex work.
With Melissa Gira Grant, senior staff reporter at The Appeal.
From local charities, to the editorial pages, to city politicians, New Orleans strip clubs were blamed for human trafficking, leading to abusive police raids – harming the dancers they claimed they were protecting, and pushing the dancers to fight back.
When veteran San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis announced her resignation during the spring of 2017 to run for a spot on the county’s Board of Supervisors, she was clear about who she wanted to finish her term and ultimately serve as San Diego’s next DA: her Chief Deputy Summer Stephan. Indeed, another former deputy […]
On April 11, President Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), legislation that would make it possible to hold the operators of websites criminally and civilly liable if third parties were found to have posted advertisements for prostitution. Days before the legislation was enacted, however, federal authorities seized Backpage.com, essentially locking sex […]
On Friday, April 6, the same day that Congress sent FOSTA — the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act — to President Donald Trump for his signature, the Department of Justice seized Backpage.com, the website FOSTA was meant to take down. After weeks of arguments about why this legislation was necessary […]
This week, the Senate is expected to vote on a bill that could shutter websites that host sex-for-sale ads. The bill, known as SESTA — the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act — has been described by its supporters as a way to provide justice to victims of human trafficking by making it easier for them to file civil suits against the sites. However, a growing coalition of survivors of trafficking, sex workers, and women’s and LGBT rights groups oppose SESTA, saying it will endanger those it is meant to help.
Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization best known for operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, says it has located a new front in the fight against human trafficking: what it describes as “illicit massage businesses,” or IMBs. The nonprofit, which brought in $10 million in 2016 (of which $2.1 million is government funding, according to IRS […]
Last week, days after dancers took to the streets of New Orleans to protest recent police raids on the city’s strip clubs, the state agency that led them was in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals fending off a challenge to a Louisiana law barring 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds from working as strip club dancers. In 2016, long before the raids, […]
The New Orleans Police Department, the Louisiana State Police, and the Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control (ATC) have raided eight French Quarter strip clubs in the past 10 days. At a Monday press conference, both NOPD and ATC claimed the raids were the result of a multi-month, ongoing “human trafficking” operation, yet they also admitted they made no trafficking arrests, nor did they identify any victims of trafficking.
It looked like a flyer promoting Bourbon Street strip clubs: purple, magenta and black, with neon light-styled letters spelling out the name of then-New Orleans mayoral candidate, Desiree Charbonnet. But it wasn’t a flyer. It was an opposition mailer, sent just before the hotly-contested November election. Under a photograph of Charbonnet, the mailer stated, “In December […]
Yang Song fell four stories onto a sidewalk in Flushing, Queens on the night of November 25th. An officer with the New York City Police Department accompanied her, unconscious, to New York Presbyterian Hospital where doctors placed her on a respirator. They worked for hours: the 35 units of blood they transfused did not take, given the severity of her injuries from the thirty foot fall.
A 38-year-old woman, Yang Song of Queens, New York, died at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Sunday, one day after falling three stories from an apartment window in nearby Flushing. Little has been reported about Song beyond the New York Police Department’s assertion that she was a sex worker, and fell while officers from the Queens […]
A proposal to curb strip clubs on Bourbon Street was introduced last Thursday by a New Orleans city council member, “citing recent reports from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on unfettered sex trafficking at the adult venues.” Just a few days after the paper’s first story appeared, Mayor Mitch Landrieu had already hired an attorney to investigate the clubs. It’s not surprising that a […]