isaacsapphire:

funereal-disease:

glorious-spoon:

theunitofcaring:

Immigrants, who can be deported for committing a crime, absolutely do not benefit from the criminalization of the work they’re doing to survive. 

I agree that sex workers who have access to tumblr are not a representative sample of sex workers, but they’re definitely not all upper-class, many of them are immigrants, many of them are disabled, many have been assaulted, some did survival sex work while underage and homeless, and I still think they’re more credible than non-sex-workers on the question of whether sex work being illegal makes them safer. 

If you know of surveys of survival sex workers I’d obviously be very interested in seeing them.

Also, not to be a blunt asshole about this, but do you know how many women I knew as a housekeeper who were sexually assaulted by customers? Spoiler alert: it was all of them!! We had protocols in place to prevent guests from trapping us in a room while we were trying to clean, it was all very matter of fact, because housekeepers being assaulted by guests is just like. Extremely normal.

I had more than one strange man masturbate in front of me while I was trying to scrub toilets. Fun times. 

This was a Fairfield Inn, BTW; a nice, mid-grade franchise that caters to businesspeople in a pokey little rural college town. We’re not talking about Vegas, here, not that it would be okay if we were. 

Housekeepers, like survival sex workers, are mostly poor immigrants. It’s one of the few legal customer service jobs you can get without speaking much English, so there’s that, too.

The place I worked was actually really great about supporting their staff and making sure that the non-Anglophone workers had avenues to report issues. A lot of places are fucking terrible and exploitative, and immigrants–especially undocumented immigrants, especially people who don’t speak much, or any, English–are easy as hell to exploit. So, to return to the point, the problem isn’t that people are doing survival sex work. The problem is that some groups of people are really vulnerable to exploitation, and making their only means of earning money illegal does exactly fuck-all to prevent that. Making sex work illegal doesn’t suddenly mean that these people have other options; it just makes the shitty options they do have even more dangerous.

In that vein, there are many, many more trafficked domestic and agricultural workers than sex workers. I have rarely, if ever, heard calls to dismantle the hospitality industry.

Yuuuup. The most exciting thing to happen in the small town I grew up in was when it turned out that the South Americans who could barely speak English who made up all of the workers at the local Dunkin Doughnuts franchise had been lied to, trafficked, and held hostage and forced to work by the owner. They were all shipped back by ICE with marks against them if they ever try to immigrate legally, which seemed unfair because they hadn’t meant to enter the country illigally.

Anyway, there’s very little talk about Dunkin Donuts or nail salons or vegetables as exploitive industries that use trafficked workers, but all the SWERFs and conservatives are sure that every sex worker is trafficked. It pisses me off that “caring about human trafficking” usually just means “anti sex workers” and not actually “anti human trafficking” because human trafficking is fucked up and the non sexy forms are a big problem too.