 Hi, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Life in the Law. It must be Wednesday at one. We're here with Life in the Law. We're here with Tracy Ryan. Tracy is the leader of Apple, and I'll let you tell the viewers what Apple stands for, so I don't flub it, Tracy. It just stands for Arresting Prostitutes is Legal Exploitation. And we're going to discuss that. We're going to discuss the rights of sex workers today, and this is a very, I think, a hot topic, an interesting topic, and I'm delighted to have you on, Tracy. Thank you. So explain to the audience, I guess what sex work is, but what sex workers' rights are really more importantly. Well, sex workers are often in areas in different parts of the world where various aspects of sex work have become criminalized, particularly prostitution, although sex work can apply to working in pornography, it can apply to stripping. Anything where someone is using their sexual nature or their sexuality to earn a living can be called sex work. But mostly what we're talking about is prostitution, because that's what's typically illegal in most venues. And the sex workers' rights movement is, it doesn't have uniformity in the absolute details of everything, but generally what we want is what's called a decriminalization of prostitution. And by decriminalization, what they mean is we want to repeal the laws and not replace them with a lot of bureaucracy. They use the term legalization to refer to a system where the government has created a bureaucracy to regulate prostitution, which is also popular and has been adopted in various parts of the world. Sex workers have problems with that, because they have problems with a lot of the times that they're not really in the position of contributing to the discussion on what the regulations are. And a lot of the regulations are made for the benefit of others and not for their benefit. So there's controversies there as well. Right, right. That's interesting. I never thought about that, that sex workers wouldn't be at the table when laws are being designed, but I see that that's probably the case, although it shouldn't be the case. Well, it's widely been the case in all sorts of studies and task force and things that are done on the issue that sex workers are not at the table unless they're claiming victim status, in which case they're very welcome. But if they're not claiming victim status, they're basically not welcome in the discussion. Right. And I think we should talk about that with the audience about the choice of being a sex worker, that it is a volitional choice in many instances. I won't say in 100% of instances, but in many instances. And many single mothers depend on this kind of work. A lot of women that don't have the kind, a lot of women that have the education, but certainly that don't have the education depend on this kind of work. And I think I imagine the laws are not enforced fairly for one thing. I don't think there are any laws on the books which are enforced fairly. So I don't think prostitution can be singled out for that. I do feel that you know, there are probably several million people in the world who work either full time or part time selling sex. And there's no typical sex worker, there's no typical prostitute in the world. And we deal with a lot of, you know, studies and experts who come forward and saying, this is the face of prostitution. And this is this is a face, perhaps. But there's no such thing as a typical face. Right. And, you know, in Hawaii, we have a lot of trans women who do sex work traditionally here, which is common among trans women worldwide. Prostitution is probably the single largest employer of trans women in the world. Fascinating. And it's not a smaller percentage of trans women do prostitution now than 30 years ago, because they're more accepted in other ways of life. Then you have the the teenagers, the runaways, survival stacks. And by UN definition, anyone who's under the age of majority who's selling sex as a trafficking victim, okay, that's by definition, it doesn't matter if there's anyone who's controlling or exploiting just because they're underage, they're called a trafficking victim, which is a great way to pump up the numbers of alleged victims. There are a lot of people on the streets who are full time or part time often selling sex and doing other things. Very, very few of these people have a PIMP or a controller. A New York study said it was probably 10% right. Then you've got adult consensual sex workers, which is you know, a large group of people, men, women, transgendered people all doing selling sex and in different types of ways you know, off the internet. In the old days, you might work for a an escort service and you had all the ads in the yellow pages, the internet largely replaced that. There are people working in brothels and massage parlors, people working in legal, legal areas in various parts of the world. Would you say that the internet has broadened is the number of people that, let's say part timers that I mean, because you can, you're, you have direct access to the market, you it's, you know, you put an ad on Craigslist one, two, three, and you're in business. I mean, Well, you work as much as you want to or need to. And, you know, there are pitfalls that you can get into into prostitution, which you can get into other things such as addiction, which, which happens. And if you get into that situation, then you're no longer working as much as you want to, you're working as much as you need to, which is bad. And I would argue it's almost not a volitional choice at that point, you know, Well, it's, it's, it's the only way to pay the bills because drugs are illegal and that makes them expensive. So what would you say to people and I don't agree with this, but what would you say to people that, you know, we can't decriminalize prostitution or we can't decriminalize sex work, please excuse me for using the term prostitution. We can't decriminalize sex work because it will lead to an uptick in, you know, illegal drug use. Well, there's no, there's no logical association between that. You could say we can't decriminalize sex work because it will lead to more gun violence or more revolutions or nuclear war, you can say all those things, but you'd actually have to provide some concrete evidence as to why someone having sex implies that they have to, they have to use drugs. I think that you're, you've get two completely different problems. And I think that the problem with drugs and addiction needs to be dealt with as a drug and addiction problem, not a problem because sex workers are doing it or plumbers are doing it. Right, right, right, right. I agree. I, I, you know, it's funny you mentioned gun violence. I imagine if sex workers decriminalized, there'd be a reduction in violence against sex workers. Well, it would be, one of the, people don't, people are so hearing so much of this propaganda about pimps and traffickers that they think this is the real cause of harm to trip to prostitution. But prostitutes, people who are selling sex, people in the sex industry are much more likely to be a victim of violence from police officers than from a pimp. Really? Yes. That's fascinating. That's because very few prostitutes have pimps. Right. But they all in the United States, except in some places in Nevada or on the, on the receiving end of, of law enforcement. And we've had a whole study in the paper this, this past week about, you know, misadventures of our police department here. And our police department here is really not that bad compared to others, despite all these reports. Really? Because it seems to, if you read the paper, it's. I know girls who worked in the 70s, trans women, who worked in John Town in the 70s. And they hardly ever got arrested in the 70s. But what they got was called dirty licking. Oh, really? They just get beat up. Yeah. Wow. They just get beat up. The police, your, your acting up, you just get beat up. Well, it's such a disparity in power. They don't do that anymore. You know, now, if it's, if that happens, it's a big, it's a rogue cop. But it didn't used to be, used to be commonplace. Right, right, right. How do we empower sex workers? I mean, how do you, how do you propose we empower sex workers? Well, you have to deal with the statutes. I mean, we right now, we're there, the anti-prostitution people are doing the best they can to set up a two-tiered system for people doing the same thing. If you claim that you are a trafficking victim, then you don't get arrested, you don't get to jail, you get all sorts of social services, you get education, you get support, you can get all those things. If you don't, but if you, if you don't claim trafficking victim status, then you get jail, a criminal record that follows you around for years, harassment by the police, and a bad reputation, which may keep you from getting a job or getting married. So you're creating a system where you, you're encouraged to make up a victim's story. I was going to say, there is a, right. Most of the victim's stories, as far as the ones that I've heard are at least, at least partly fabricated and some of them are just made up. Right. But in order to be a sex trafficking victim, do you have to be under a certain age? No, no, that's, no, no. If you're under 18, you're a sex trafficking victim by definition, no matter what happened to you. If you're over 18, you have to have a victimizer, an exploiter who forced you or coerced you in a prostitution. So it's two different, two different things which are lumped in, badly lumped in under the same definition, I think. But the point is that if we want to hear the voices of sex workers, we have to give them the freedom to speak and to advocate without being threatened with going to jail for doing so. We have to get rid of the gag rules. When the Bush administration started this war on trafficking, one of the first thing they did is said that if you're a non-government organization getting US foreign aid money, you have to sign a pledge saying you will never advocate for legalized or decriminalized prostitution. Or you won't get any of our federal money. Well, that's a lot of pressure. So all these groups like groups in South Asia which have big sex worker groups which are fighting AIDS, all of a sudden they're cut off from US AIDS money because they wouldn't sign this because they're all sex worker groups. Right, right. Then it had a shilling effect on the United States. An example is Barbara Brents, UNLV, did a study of the brothels in Nevada. But it wasn't a negative study. So look, they're basically safe places to work. So she gave it to the Nevada Anti-Trafficking Task Force. The Nevada Anti-Trafficking Task Force says if we circulate this to our members, we'll lose our federal funding because it doesn't fit the agenda. Well, that doesn't seem right. I mean, to be, I mean. So even the university research is being suppressed by the government if it conflicts with the anti-trafficking goals of the government. Well, I have to tell you that I'm old enough to remember the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And I have noticed that among, in media, a very, very favorite story to tell is the sex trafficking story. These middle European, you know, Europeans bring girls in containers and keep them, you know, I mean, this is a very, this is a really common trope now. This wasn't always the trope. I mean, in the 70s and 80s, to some extent, the sex workers were empowered. They were sort of glamorized and idolized. Yeah, but if you watch a television program on a cable station that says, has the word sex slaves in its title, you're almost certainly looking at manipulative propaganda. There's likely to be very little that's true in that story. And you can watch them for just a few minutes and whenever somebody who they're interviewing a sex person contradicts it, a narrator comes in and corrects what this blame is away, what they've said. Right, right, right. Every time. Right. And it's like, they had a girl who's, you know, sitting in jail in their pesting, or she's telling a trafficking story. This guy does all this harvest, blah, blah, blah. Everything they want to hear. And then they said, well, am I in arrest? They said, no, we're not gonna arrest you, but we can send you to be saved to arrest. She says, no, I want to leave with my boyfriend. As soon as she's not arrested, the whole story changes. Right, exactly. And they're saying, we don't understand out why she won't get away from this. Like, she just lied, she just played you. She just told you what you wanted to hear to get out of going to jail. But certainly there must be circumstances of people being exploited. There are. There certainly are. There's some Pam Vessels who worked in Waikiki for over 10 years working with us. And there are really some really bad pimps out there who do horrible, horrible things to people. These people should be the ones who are prosecuted. But they should be prosecuted for their acts, not because they are in a status which someone has to stop defining as pimp, which doesn't even mean anything. They should be prosecuted for their acts. Well, under the rules of evidence which are established in law, that's how you do that. Right. That's what we're in favor of, Amy. You can say, you know, argument, how big a sex trafficking problem is there in the United States? Well, if there's one victim, there's a problem. Right. And we can say that. But we don't need to have these people spinning the numbers saying there's thousands and thousands. I've noticed, as I said, I noticed myself this sort of spin. Yeah. It's an iron triangle between the rescue organization which has a vested financial interest in saying they're big numbers because that's where the funding comes from. The media who hypes it up and the politicians who hype it up. And so each time it goes around the circle, it increases. It's a bigger. The Guardian of London did a study where they had started with 63 foreign-born sex workers in London. Nobody interviewed them. But they all went, because they're foreign-born, they're trafficking victims. Oh, I see. Without interviewing. And it went from 63 to, we think it's bigger, to we think it's around this triangle. Media Paul. And it ended up being 50,000 in Britain after about five years from 63 actual cases which nobody even interviewed to determine if they're sex trafficking victims. We're gonna take a quick break and then we can go further explore this subject. I think that's a very eye-opening statistic that you just quoted there. It's like a game of telephone, you know. We need real honest data and to make good choices in this area. So we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute. Hi, my name is Aaron Wills. You are watching ThinkTekHawaii.com. I am the host of the show, Rehabilitation Coming Soon. You can watch us live at ThinkTekHawaii.com at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays. I will see you there. Hello, I'm Crystal from Quok Talk. I've got a new show here. You've gotta tune in, check out my topics on sensitive, provocative, female issues. So Tuesday mornings, 10 o'clock. Don't miss it. It's gonna be fun and dangerous. Aloha, everybody. My name is Mark Shklav. I'd like you to join me for my program, Law Across the Sea on ThinkTekHawaii.com. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Chantel Seville, host of The Savvy Chick Show on ThinkTekHawaii. This show is for you. It's all about inspiring and empowering girls of the future to do what they love, get out there and be healthy, fit and confident. If you're up for that, 11 a.m. every Wednesday, I'll see you there. Hi, you're watching Life in the Law. I'm Mary in Sasaki. I'm with Tracy Ryan. We were just agreeing that if there is a sex trafficking problem, not everybody should be lumped into under that category and arrested. Is that, did I say that in a 50 way? It is pretty much it. I mean, first of all, you should follow the basic rules of evidence. And right now, the advocates wanna punish people with what they call strict liability offenses for everything. So it's like, you don't actually have done anything, but if you cross this little line, we assume you've done all those other things. We don't need any evidence. The strict liability is very black and white. Yeah, it's very harmful. And that's the direction we're working on. So again, they're getting away with things like evidence. They don't want the evidence. In fact, when the Hawaii anti-trafficking task force made its report to the legislature a few years back, the anti-trafficking advocate had a minority opinion that went on for pages. And in there, she said, the whole problem is of convicting these people as it requires evidence. That was her duty. We have to show there was evidence of force. If we get rid of that and just throw anybody in jail, even without the evidence, then we can get the bad guys. Said, oh yeah, North Korea. Yeah, exactly. That's a little detail. This is the attitude because in their mind, everybody is a slave and being exploited. We don't need any stinking evidence. So what problems specifically in Hawaii, legal problems do prostitutes face here? Obviously there's a tremendous transient population of tourists and so on. So I imagine that makes certain unique problems and there have certainly been laws to address that. We have several different types of statutes and the primary statute that we have dates from the early 70s, prior to that, the prostitution law didn't involve the requirement that money changed hands. If a woman was promiscuous, she could be a common prostitute. Then they cleaned all that up. In the 1970s, they wrote some fairly clear and easily understood statutes. I don't agree with them, but at least people knew what was in and what was out. Right, right. Interesting thing in the commentary to the existing prostitution law, when the legislature said why they did it, they indicated that they didn't really have a very good reason. I have a copy of their commentary here, which I'm just gonna read briefly. Defining this public policy is a difficult task. Perhaps it more correctly ought to be considered in terms of public demand. A widespread community attitude which the penal law must take into account regardless of the questionable rationales upon which it is based. So that's what the legislature determined for the reason for the prostitution law. They couldn't find any good reason for it, but the people seem to want it. Under our state constitution, that's unconstitutional. People in the state of Hawaii have a right to liberty. It's right there in the article one. Right, right. So... Yeah, this is ambiguous. It goes on with this and it says these venereal diseases not prevented by laws. It doesn't stop people from being exploited. None of these laws do any of the things that we're saying there. We've looked at this as nonsense. But we're doing it anyway. But don't you think it just makes people feel virtual? You know, it's sort of why do people become evangelical? You know... Well, I had a long email back and forth with a friend of mine who said that this is contrary to the country's Judeo-Christian tradition if we legalize prostitution. Right. And that's the reason why we should send people to jail because of our religious beliefs. Right. That's contrary to our constitution. And they're not well-quits and we're getting told the constitution's based on the Bible regardless of what it says. I think it's just so deeply ingrained, you know. Although, you know, Christians might do well to remember that Mary Magdalene was this worker but people seem to forget that, right? Well, you know, it's... There's a racist component to it, you know. Black people are very heavily targeted under our prostitution laws. The conference I just came from, there were a lot of black sex workers there and they were telling this, you mean, they set up these zones for prostitution which are all in black neighborhoods and they'll just harass any black woman who's out in the neighborhood in high heels. You're gonna get arrested because you look like a prostitute. So there are class issues in prostitution as well. I'm sure that high-end prostitutes do not or sex workers aren't hassled in the same way that... They get stings. They get stings and I know a number of escorts who've been victims of stings here in Hawaii because the police are pressured by the... You know, the anti-prostitution people are pestering them to arrest these women, to save them. Right. And the women don't want to be saved but in the dialogue that just means they're too afraid of their pimp even though no one can find any pimp anywhere. Now, you know, I've heard this argument before and I wonder your opinion on this argument that prostitution, sex work, this kind of work is a manifestation of some childhood trauma and that the reason these women should be protected is because they're sort of acting out this childhood trauma, you know, through whether it's drug abuse or prostitution or I mean, they do need to be saved, you know, because there's... There's no work. No one's gonna get saved unless they wanna get saved. And people who try to run these, you know, Pam Vessels when she ran her home for people who were exiting prostitution. At the beginning, they took referrals from girls who've been arrested and then after a year or so, they just gave it up because this is a complete waste of time. When people are ready to exit the industry, that's when they're ready to be helped. Right. And that's one of the cornerstones of harm reduction and there are a lot of good organizations in Hawaii, the YO project, Youth Outreach, Shao project as needle exchange, Life Foundation does AIDS, good solid harm reduction organizations who practice these policies. They work with people. What is your current, what do you wanna change in your life? Like if you're a drug user, you wanna use clean needles so you don't get AIDS. So if you prostitute, you want condoms, whatever. So they work with people and build up relationships rather than working against them and trying to judge them. That's the harm reduction approach. And these are the people who are in the best position to know anything about this industry in Hawaii, but none of them are included on the anti-trafficking task force. They're afraid to go to the legislature on their own because they might lose funding for not saying the right thing politically. It's a very, very, very bad situation. So what can we do? Well, right now we're working with a new group of allies. Amnesty Internationalists, a lot of people have heard, has come out in favor of supporting the sex workers rights movement. In the local Amnesty chapter, the women there is very gung-ho in helping us. And recently we finally got a large group of the gay and lesbian political organizations that finally realized this is an issue that they should talk about. Lambda's been gone board. Two big transgender rights organizations of mainland have said, yes, we should do this. So the alliance is growing. Plus magazines and newspapers are starting to challenge all the anti-trafficking stuff that's going on. Reason Magazine, which is a libertarian oriented magazine on the mainland, has written a number of stories challenging this whole trafficking paradigm and saying they're using this as the new war on drugs. I never thought to question it. I'm so glad you're on because you've opened my eyes to a whole new area of thought. I mean, I never thought, you know, I thought, oh, this is happening. This horrible scourge is happening and it's happening all over. It's happening in high schools. It's happening in cities. It's happening among women from Asia. It's happening from women from Europe. But you're saying it's not really happening as much as they say it's happening. But the numbers are bogus. And the, over, they rely heavily on anecdotal stories told by people who are under pressure to tell those stories. Nandita Sharma, who's a professor at the University of Hawaii, when she was with York University in Canada, went to Vancouver and interviewed 25 trafficking victims there. These weren't all sex trafficking. This was just general trafficking came in from China and they'd all try to get asylum as trafficking victims and all told whatever the story was. And she interviewed them after they'd been denied asylum. 25 said they lied about being a trafficking victim. 25 out of 25 had made up the story. That's, yeah, wow. That's serious. And this is a serious problem because we do want to be able to rely on witnesses to prosecute genuine armed people. But when we set up this entire system to punish all these people who aren't telling a trafficking story, so we can pump up our trafficking numbers and get all the money, that's a bad system. So are there, you know, I keep thinking, you know, unionize. Like are there unions? Are there groups? Are there workers groups? There have been different efforts to have prostitutes organized. There's, and on the mainland, there's a lot of swap chapters, sex workers outreach projects, which have both allies and sex workers involved in many places. The biggest organization is in India, in the Calcutta region. They've got 65,000 sex workers. Wow. In the union. And they work to try to keep the underaged girls off the street to identify traffickers, to deal with AIDS and do all these things themselves. But they're the kind of organization that's being fought by the United States. Really? Yeah, because that's pro-sex worker. So the federal government is trying to defund them, trying to marginalize them. And instead they've got these people from these different, you know, evangelical church groups who are coming in with the support from American churches to try and do all this stuff and push aside all the stuff that's being done locally by sex workers. That's unfortunate because that's really the right tactic to take is to keep at underage, you know, keep out children, keep out, you know, people that might be harmed. There was a story on some show about some place in India where some parents sold their 14-year-old girl to a brothel. And she had to work there till she paid off the debt. And so they didn't even start prostituting till she was 15. The first year she was just a maid. And the reason they did that is they didn't, they know there's not enough John's men to purchase underage girls to make it worthwhile. And if they hold her back, she'll be working longer into her adult world to pay off the debt. Oh, I see. I see. So it's a business decision. It's not like they're kind of children. But it's, you know, we listen to the anti-trafficking thing. And if you listen to them, they think that there's all these 13-year-old girls out there and all these men who are pedophile. That's what pedophiles are coming from. I mean, it's crazy. What I was thinking, I mean, that's what I believed. I think that these rings of people and they steal these girls. But I'm so glad that you're here and you're sort of, you're giving us the other side. Well, the Polaris Project, which is one of these anti-prost, puts out all this nonsense about this and rates all the states. You're getting a bad rating from Polaris because you haven't done all our laws, which they're listening to in our legislation. Why are you losing these men? They're the ones who are putting out the disease. The average age of prostitution is 13 years. They've been putting it out up for years. Finally, they start getting challenged and then the Washington Post took it up. This is the first time the mainstream, other than the libertarian press, has took it up. And then they had to answer it. Walking, looking, so we think it might be like 18. So for like 15 years, they've been saying 13. And now they say, well, maybe it's 18. Well, that's fascinating. But the 13 still circulates everywhere. It does, everybody. It's all 13 now. I want to thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming on and I'd love to have you on again. And I'd love to have you, if it's possible to have some sex workers who are, you know, happily ensconced in sex work and not ashamed to come forward or not afraid to come forward, come on the show. I'd love to talk to people. I'd love to bring more light to this issue because I do think this is an issue of oppression and Victorian morals and authoritarian oppression. It's very difficult when a friend of mine has a conviction from 1991. And as a result, she can't get student aid to go to HCC to improve herself. That's ridiculous. That's just ridiculous. So well, on that note, I want to thank you, Tracy. I hope to see you again. My name is Marianne Sasaki. You've been watching Life in the Lone. ThinkTechHawaii.com. Join us at one o'clock on Wednesday, every Wednesday. Okay.