 My name is Bettina Munster. I work in the president's office. I coordinate these types of series. I just want to say a few words about the series that we've done in the past. We've, last year, we've had a massive initiative on immigration and deportation reform that went the entire semester. We had about twice as many events in that initiative that we have this time, and we've learned that we're not going to do that again because it was way too much, but it was very successful. So the reason why we do these initiatives is because we think that once in a while we come across a topic that is really of such national importance that goes beyond what we care about at John Jay College in terms of justice, social justice, criminal justice, that we think you can't just go out and do a lot of research and write a lot of papers. You really need to discuss it intensely, and we try to approach these particular topics that we choose from various perspectives and angles, and we want to engage the entire John Jay College community in this endeavor, so that means students and you're here, which is great. Faculty, administrative departments, and we aim to also have a co-sponsorship of these initiatives, which also include a number of faculties, the President's Office is a co-sponsor, the Office for the Advancement of Research, Anthony Carpy is here today, he's gonna speak shortly, and then also Student Council, so we've been partnering up with Student Council and they've actually actively participated in these initiatives and made them happen. So we have a number of events coming up under this umbrella, and my colleague, Anna Paratus, who is one of our presidential interns, will tell you a little bit more about what's coming up, and then we'll also pass around some flyers for you, okay? Good afternoon everybody, my name is Anna Paratus, and I work with Bettina in the President's Office. First off, I would like to thank you for coming to our kickoff event, and mainly the professors for requiring your students are giving extra credit. As you may know, this initiative endeavors to approach the sex work industry from a variety of perspectives, as Bettina already said. With this in mind, we hope, well, we will have different panel discussions with sex workers, law enforcement, employees, as well as advocates in nonprofit agencies that are looking to advocate and actually decriminalize the sex work industry. I invite you all to take a look at the flyers and look at our future events. On the 29th, we will have, well actually on the 22nd, which is in a few weeks, we'll have a panel discussion wherein we look to discuss the system responses to the sex work industry. On the 29th, we'll have a panel discussion with workers in the sex industry, and they will give narratives of their own lived experiences. We will also have another panel discussion on November 12th with our faculty and hopefully future funders that are also interested in this work and research that it entails. And lastly, on November 24th, we will have our last event, and hopefully we plan on screening a documentary clip from the documentary Buying Sex, and we hope to follow it with a student debate regarding the legality of sex work. Should we decriminalize or should we continue to see it as an offense in the criminal justice system? I invite you all to attend these future events, and like I said, thank you for coming. Thank you, let me make, I'm Anthony Carpy. I'm Dean of Research at the college. Let me give you one more advertisement before I introduce our speaker today. This event is one in our series of book events that the Office for the Advancement of Research sponsors. We've got two other events this year. On October 30th, that's a Thursday in this room at the same time, 4.15. Dr. Elise Waterston will be presenting her book My Father's Wars, Migration Memory and the Violence of a Country. And on November 13th, at 4.15, Jay Gates and Nicole Marafiati will be presenting their book Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England. So again, I invite you all to those events as well. So let me move on to our main event. Professor Samantha Magic is a professor in government department, she, I'm sorry, she obtained a PhD in government from Cornell University. Samantha's research lies in gender and American politics with specific interests in sex work, civic engagement, institutionalism, and the nonprofit sector. She's the author of Sex Work Politics from Protest to Service Provision and the co-editor of Negotiating Sex Work, Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Perspectives and Politics and Policy, New Political Science, the Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, and Gender in Society. Professor Magic also serves on the editorial board of the Journal Perspectives and Politics. She is one of the American Political Science Association, I'm sorry, which is one of the American Political Science Association's flagship journals. Locally, she's a board member of the Red Umbrella Project which amplifies the voices of people in the sex trade through peer mentoring, storytelling, and public advocacy skills development programs. Please help me welcome Professor Samantha Matcha. Thank you very much for that kind introduction and I'd also like to thank the Office for the Advancement of Research and President Travis's Office for supporting this initiative, which I hope that you'll all attend the other events of. So as you know today, I'm here to talk about my book, Sex Work Politics. You also have a flyer on your seat for that. And if you purchase a book, you will help me become a very rich woman. Probably not. So I'm gonna talk about my book today and I'm gonna start actually with a story. And I wanna introduce you, I feel like this is a ritual. So anyway, I want to introduce you to my friend, Gloria Lockett. And this is a picture of Gloria in the 1970s when she was working as a prostitute. And Gloria worked for about 17 years as a prostitute with her boyfriend, Ralph Washington. And they managed about eight to 10 women. They worked in Alaska, Nevada, Hawaii, and California. And they worked in hotels, out of apartments, and in bars. And together they pooled their money. They ran a number of legitimate businesses like a wig shop and a boutique. And they helped raise each other's children. But there were many challenges to what Gloria was doing. She was arrested many times for prostitution offenses. And she was also often physically and sexually assaulted on the job. But in 1992, or 82, excuse me, there was a really big arrest. She and Ralph were arrested and as she said to me, they were charged with every felony there ever was. And so she actually won her case in court. But in the process, she and all of the women that she worked with lost everything they had to pay their legal bills. So all of this made Gloria an activist. She decided to get involved with a group called Coyote or Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, which is the country's first prostitutes rights group. Coyote was started in 1973 by a woman named Margo St. James who's in the picture with her on my right. And Coyote made a very radical claim. They said that prostitution should be acknowledged as work, like any form of work under the law. And so Coyote, Gloria Lockett, with Margo and her other sisters in Coyote, they started to go to Coyote's protests and demonstrations. Gloria was also on the Geraldo show talking about the need to decriminalize prostitution. And she went to a number of meetings of international prostitutes rights activists. But then in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic emerged. And this made it really hard to gain support for prostitutes rights because many people thought wrongly that prostitutes were responsible for the appearance of HIV-AIDS in the heterosexual community. So Gloria and her other Coyote sisters started to hand out condoms because they knew that other sex workers would be skeptical of mainstream health authorities. And so the Centers for Disease Control actually saw what they were doing and wanted to study them. So Gloria created the California Prostitutes Education Project, or CALPEP. And Gloria became its executive director and they incorporated it as a nonprofit. So this is Gloria now in 2014. And if you come to the November 5th panel, you'll have a chance to meet her in person. She's now run CALPEP for over 25 years. CALPEP is about a $1 million a year operation. They get most of their money for the Centers for Disease Control. And they do HIV-AIDS prevention activities to mainly African-American street-based populations in the Oakland area. So now you don't find Gloria out on the streets protesting. But instead she's often like this in her office, meeting with her staff and meeting with city officials. So you could say that Gloria really has come a long way. But what really happened to Gloria, the sex worker rights advocate? And this story, her story, really raises the central question in my book. And that is, when activists formalize their activities, do they abandon their radical politics? And by radical, here I mean challenging or opposing very deeply held state or societal beliefs, excuse me, and very deeply entrenched state policies. So when activists like Gloria form nonprofit service organizations, do they lose their radical political commitments, in this case, to prostitutes' rights? And I would say the short answer to this question is no. However, a lot of scholars would really disagree with me. If we look at the social movement scholarship, for example, which focuses on many of the very visible disruptive movements of the 1960s and 70s, they show that when members of protest organizations formalize their efforts like Gloria did, they lose their radical edge. In short, they become scared of biting the hand that feeds them. Similarly, in nonprofit sector scholarship, they come to a similar conclusion. And that is, when individuals, activists or otherwise, create nonprofits, they actually avoid politics because they don't wanna lose their nonprofit status, and that allows them to fundraise. Similarly, when we turn to civic engagement scholarship, they also have a fairly dim view of nonprofits. So nonprofits, as some of you probably know, are a massive part of the American civic universe. But scholars at the same time, especially in political science, don't think that they do a lot to promote civic engagement. They're too focused on service provision, they're too hierarchical, and they don't involve their constituents in a way that helps them develop civic skills. But in the rest of the talk, I'm gonna show why I think we need to challenge this conventional wisdom, why it might be wrong in some ways. And in my book, I make the argument that activists actually can maintain and advance very radical political positions even when they formalize their activities. And they do this in the book through a process that I've labeled as resistance maintenance. So they use this process of building and sustaining nonprofits to continue opposing state policy, minimizing co-optation, and pursuing bigger social change goals. And this process of resistance maintenance, as I detail in the book, has three elements that I'm gonna talk about today. I call them oppositional implementation, community engagement, and claims-making activities. So let's just step back for a second just to make sure we're on the same page about a few terms. And some of you actually might be wondering, what is a sex worker? So if we read any mainstream news publication today, sex work and sex workers are often characterized in one way. I call this the Nicholas Kristoff narrative after the New York Times columnist. And as he and others like him often write, all sex workers are tricked and forced into the work that they're doing against their will. And so this effectively conflates all sex work with sex trafficking and casts all sex workers as victims. The reality is that not all sex work is sex trafficking. These are not the same things. Under federal law, sex trafficking requires evidence of force, fraud, or coercion, usually by a third party. But the term sex work is not talking about coercion. And this was a term that was actually coined by another coyote activist named Carol Lee. And it describes the exchange of sexual services for cash or other trade. And this includes legal forms, like dancing and pornography, but it also includes illegal forms like prostitution, which is the focus in my book. And sex workers are actually a very diverse group of people. They're men, women, and transgender persons. And the main reason that they do sex work is the same reason that all of us have jobs. They do this for economic reasons. But in the United States, and even in liberal San Francisco where I did my research for this book, prostitution is not acknowledged as work under the law. The United States is actually the only Western industrialized nation that almost universally criminalizes prostitution. And as a result of this criminalization, we don't know that much about sex work and sex workers. So from a scholarly perspective, criminalization actually creates knowledge barriers. So it's hard for sex workers, particularly prostitutes, to express their concerns publicly. And it's hard for researchers to do research about them or with them. So because prostitution is illegal, it's hard to find representative samples of people in the sex industry. And also, a lot of researchers have not been good to sex workers. So they often don't involve them in the research process. And in many cases, when sex workers have refused to identify as victims, researchers have written them off as having false consciousness. So as a result, there's a lot of very bad, very biased research about sex workers. But from some good research, including that which has been done with sex worker communities, we do know a few things. And that is criminalization makes sex workers' lives very difficult and very dangerous. So criminalization forces sex workers to work in very out-of-the-way locations. They hide what they do often from their family and their friends. They won't call the police in danger if they're in danger because they don't wanna be charged. And they're not likely to be honest with their healthcare providers or to seek healthcare at all for fear of being exposed. And so as a result, law enforcement has also been very biased against sex workers. Women of color, transgender, or cisgender are often the most likely to be arrested. Men are arrested in far smaller numbers. And also persons on the street, working on the street, are the most likely to be arrested, even though they only make up about two to 20% of sex workers. And those working on the street are also the most likely to be suffering from homelessness and substance abuse issues, et cetera. And ironically, with all of the anti-trafficking efforts that we've read so much about, this has resulted in more police on the street and more arrests of sex workers, not traffickers. So if we step back and think about the political participation literature, so I'm calling out to any of you who's taken my 101 class, that shows white educated, upper income males are the most likely to participate in politics and advocate for their interests, then by this definition, sex workers are some of the least likely people, you would think, to act politically and particularly to act in any radical political way. But despite these formidable odds, I'm gonna show you that sex workers have organized. And one of the first ways that they did this was in the 70s, as I talked about earlier, through coyote or call off your old tired ethics. And since coyote, sex workers have gone on to create other organizations. Some of them do protests like coyote, but others that I'm gonna focus on today are what I call social movement-born nonprofits. And the two cases I'm looking at are the California Prostitutes Education Project, which was Gloria's organization, and it was formed by Gloria and her coyote peers in 1984. They're located in Oakland and they do mobile peer led HIV AIDS prevention work. And the second case that I'm gonna talk about is the St. James Infirmary, which was formed in 1999 and it's an occupational health and safety clinic that's run by and for sex workers. And so I'm gonna use these cases to talk about today how for political activists, formalizing their activities does not always de-radicalize them. So just a word briefly about my methods. So to study these two cases, I did multi-method qualitative research in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2006 to 2010. So this involved over 140 interviews with CalPEP and St. James Infirmary staff and their clients, as well as individuals who are engaged with sex work issues in the Bay Area, whether that's activists, the police, the health department, any of those people. I did participant observation as well at CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary. So I was there for clinic nights, stuffing baskets with condoms, sitting at the needle exchange, handing out food and clothes at the clothing bank. And I also went on a number of street outreach outings where we would hand out condoms and do awareness about HIV AIDS testing. And so with that, of course, I reviewed many documents, whether it was reports from the cities, from CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary, excuse me, or newspaper articles. And so just briefly to think about the research and the data that I collected, I use a framework called new institutionalism. And briefly, new institutional theory looks at the interactions between institutions and actors and how they shape each other. And so I used work by Stephen Rathkeb Smith and Kristen Gronberg, who posit this idea of what's called mutual synergism. And they look at nonprofits' capacity as political interest groups. And they argue that there is this mutual synergism between governments and nonprofits. That just because nonprofits are often funded by government, it doesn't mean they can't be political. And they argue that actually we need to specify what we mean by mutual synergism a bit more. And so my argument that I'm going to present today about this idea of resistance maintenance is one way to specify this. So let's get to the cases then. If we recall again about many of the studies of social movements, it presumes again that once activists formalize what they're doing, so once they stop protesting on the streets, they're reluctant to make radical claims. And CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary, I think, really show something different. And they show that radical politics can continue in less obvious places through this mechanism of resistance maintenance that I call oppositional implementation. And so here they implement their opposition to criminalization in a physical space that promotes prostitutes' rights. So this is this idea of what scholar Mary Katzenstein calls a habitat, a space where people can gather and support a very marginalized political position. So one way they do this oppositional implementation is through their names and their mission statements. So I'm gonna start here with an example at the St. James Infirmary. So the St. James Infirmary is funded by the San Francisco Department of Public Health and also by the state of California, which criminalizes prostitution. But the St. James Infirmary very explicitly supports prostitutes' rights in their space. So it's named after Margot St. James, who was the first openly vocal prostitutes' rights activist. And they have a mission statement, which is, and I quote, to offer free, compassionate, and not judgmental healthcare and social services for sex workers of all genders and sexual orientations while preventing occupational illnesses and injuries through a comprehensive continuum of services. So they're looking at sex work as a work issue as opposed to a criminal issue. Also, if you can see here, and probably not, inside the St. James Infirmary, they have a big sign on the wall in their community room that says, outlaw poverty, not prostitutes. And inside the community room, as I observed on many occasions, people speak very freely about the sex work that they're doing. They talked about their clients, they talked about how much money they were making, they were very open about the challenges that they were facing. And this really radically challenges this regime of criminalization. And I think one of the St. James Infirmary's founders put it best to me. She said, and I quote, the fact that people can sit and talk openly about prostitution in a state where two or more prostitutes can be arrested for conspiracy to promote is in itself a radical political act. So, turning then to CalPAP, they're very different from the St. James Infirmary because they don't work in a clinical space. And as you can see here, they operate mostly through a mobile van. So they drive this van and they park it in communities where people don't have access to healthcare. And they also challenge the practice of criminalization in these spaces out on the streets. So similarly, their mission is, and I quote, to provide accessible health education, disease prevention, risk reduction, and support services to people at high risk for or currently living with HIV AIDS, using cultural relevance, humility, excuse me, and grace as our guiding principles. So even though they don't specifically mention sex workers in their mission, this is still a major population that they serve, about 40% of their clients are sex workers. And so, similar to the St. James Infirmary, when they're out on the streets like this, they create these spaces where people can speak very openly about what they're doing. So they talk about their sex work. And this allows them to be open with their healthcare providers and seek the services that they need. At the same time, though, doing oppositional implementation this way is really not very easy. And I'm gonna give you an example with CalPEP's name, which has changed a number of times over the years. So the original name was the California Prostitutes Education Project. But during the second Bush administration, they were having some trouble with this name. Many funders, including federal government agencies, but also other foundations like United Way, thought from their name that they were teaching people to be prostitutes. I know. So CalPEP was having some trouble in the 90s getting grants. And so in about, in the early 2000s, they decided to change their name to the California Prevention and Education Project. And actually, many of their founders were very angry about this name change. They thought that they were abandoning their commitment to prostitutes' rights. But at the same time, this helped them sustain funding to serve a very underserved population. Then in 2010, I was at CalPEP and Gloria called me into her office and she said, Sam, I have something really exciting to tell you, you're gonna love this. And I said, oh, what's that, Gloria? And she said, we're actually gonna change our name back to the California Prostitutes Education Project. I said, oh, that's neat. Why are you doing that? And she said, well, they found that Obama administration was friendlier to what they were doing. And she said, having prostitutes in their name actually helped them stand out among applicants for funding. So as she said to me, we're never going back. So some of you might say that this back and forth shows some kind of what we call institutional co-optation, where they're kind of selling out just to get something and then selling back. But you could also show that it shows this mutual synergism between nonprofits and government. So CalPET made a name change that does look like they're selling out, but the name change helped them keep offering services to people that nobody wants to serve, which is, I think, a very radical political challenge. So again, it's one thing though to create a space that sex worker rights friendly, but how do you go to the next level then and get the people involved there engaged in your cause? And so if we recall again, a lot of the civic engagement scholarship presumes nonprofit spaces really won't help people get politically involved. Nonprofits are too hierarchical, they're too focused on services, and so people don't develop civic skills here. But I think CalPET and the St. James Infirmary really challenge these ideas. And they do this through a second element of resistance maintenance that I call community engagement. And here they involve their constituents in organizational management and service provision. So most people who work at CalPET and the St. James Infirmary are current former or transitioning sex workers. And in CalPET's case, they also hire ex-offenders and former drug users and other people, similarly on the margins of society. So this is actually very, very radical. If we look at the history, sex workers have often not been treated well by mainstream health organizations. So during the progressive era, for example, they were often rounded up and forced into cordoned off clinical areas to be tested, while of course, their clients were not similarly tested. So as they say at the St. James Infirmary, and this is to quote from their annual report, putting ourselves in charge of healthcare delivery is a powerful revolution in the way American clinics are run. So the question then becomes, how do they do this at CalPET and the St. James Infirmary? And again, here we see this mutual synergism between government and nonprofits at play. So these organizations, CalPET and the St. James, they partner with mainstream government agencies, whether it's the local health department or the Centers for Disease Control, and they make sure that their staff has the proper credentials. So everybody who works at these places is certified as a phlebotomist or as a harm reduction counselor. And you could argue again that this represents some kind of selling out or co-optation because they're adopting professional standards, they're submitting to government scrutiny. But I would argue again, this isn't really the case if we look closely because sex workers here are engaged in these organizations, they're empowered, they develop civic skills, and they become more active and engaged in their community. So I have two stories that I wanna share briefly to illustrate how this happens. And the first is Naomi, Naomi Akers. And she was the first executive director at the St. James Infirmary. So Naomi was a white female who worked in the Nevada brothels and on the streets of California. And she was arrested many times for prostitution offenses. She also struggled with addiction, she was homeless. And after completing a rehabilitation program, she became a volunteer at the St. James Infirmary. So here she served food on clinic nights, helped with the clothing bank, and she also got her healthcare. Eventually Naomi went back to college, she got a master's degree and became the executive director at the St. James Infirmary. So using all of the various civic skills that she learned there, like organizational skills, communication skills, management skills, she went on to advocate for sex worker rights globally. And she's actually a member of the UN AIDS Global Working Group now on sex work issues. In another case then, over at CalPAP there was Grant. And Grant was an African American male who spent a lot of time in prison for weapons and drug dealing offenses. And when he came out of prison the last time, he had a hard time finding a job. And he saw CalPAP was in his neighborhood handing out condoms, doing what they do, but he was really suspicious of them. He thought they were getting in the way of his business. So at the same time, he needed a job and CalPAP was hiring. So he started working for them doing outreach. And I went out with Grant a number of times on these outings. So he would go to different Oakland neighborhoods, he'd tell people about what CalPAP was doing, he'd tell them where they could get an HIV test, and he was documenting all of his activities for CalPAP's granting agencies. And so he actually told me that because of what he was doing, he became more politically involved. So again, if you look at political science literature, it shows that people like Grant, incarcerated men of color who've had a hard time finding work are some of the least likely people to be politically engaged. But through CalPAP, Grant actually became very engaged. He developed civic skills like communication skills, organizational skills, and these helped him to get involved in politics. So every year in California, the state legislature has what's called AIDS Lobby Day. And they invite all of the different HIV aid service organizations to come and advocate. So Grant went to HIV to AIDS Lobby Day in San Francisco and he met with legislators, he told them his story and he advocated for more funding for HIV AIDS prevention. And so in the book and in a series of papers, I share a lot of other stories like this where people like Grant and Naomi who face what scholars call intersectional stigmas actually are engaged in the organizations they serve, offer services to their peers and develop civic skills and get involved in politics. And they do this even though they lack the time, money and civic skills at least initially that scholars say facilitate political participation. At the same time though, community engagement like this is not easy. To run a nonprofit or any organization, you have to have your staff there on a regular basis. People have to show up on time. But many of the staff that these organizations hire lack quote unquote straight work experience. So for example, many sex workers are used to keeping their own schedules, not being told when to show up. Also at these organizations, they've had issues with sobriety. A lot of the people that they hire have substance abuse issues. So for example, at the St. James Infirmary, they had to implement a policy where you couldn't use within two hours of coming to work. But even though there are these challenges which are arguably great, we can't deny that CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary not only hire sex workers, but they also keep resisting the beliefs and practices that sex workers are criminals or victims who don't care about themselves or their communities. So you might say it's great that these places gather and empower a very marginalized community which reflects a radical commitment to prostitutes rights inside their organizations. But what do they do outside of their organizations? So can CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary actually challenge laws and policies that criminalize sex workers? And as I noted again, a lot of the mainstream scholarship would say no, they can't. Non-profit organizations like them are often too formal and they're too focused on providing services and they don't wanna risk losing their 501c3 non-profit status. But again, showing this synergy between non-profits and government, we can see with CalPEP and the St. James how they might advance more radical claims. So in the book, I label that the way CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary do this as what I call claims making activities. So here they make claims that challenge government institutions and public discourse. And I identify two types of these activities that I call knowledge production and policy advocacy. So let's talk for a minute about knowledge production. Does anyone here work at a non-profit? Nobody, okay, some of you do. So in general, as you might have seen, non-profits have to collect a lot of data about what they're doing to satisfy their funders, especially as government funding has become a bigger part of non-profit's budget. And so these accountability requirements have increased and this takes a lot of time. And it also requires more professionally-oriented staff. So you could say there's less time for advocacy. But I think CalPEP and the St. James show how non-profits can actually use these data collection activities, which you'd say is something fairly mainstream to advance a more radical political position. And so they use the data that they collect to oppose criminalization and support prostitutes' rights. And I'm gonna give the example here of CalPEP, which is the older organization and has a really long history of research. So here's just a list of some of CalPEP's publications, many of them peer-reviewed. As academics, as some of you know, we do peer-reviewed research to get our work out and to secure tenure and promotion. We don't think of this as something radical. But CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary use peer-reviewed research in the publication process to support non-criminalizing approaches to prostitution. And so I'm gonna share one example of this research. So CalPEP ran what was called a day treatment center for female prostitutes. And they developed this center to serve what were the most inaccessible and least likely of their clients to seek drug treatment. So these were African-American women and other women of color who actively use drugs and traded sex and for money or other resources to support themselves. So to help these women, CalPEP got a grant from the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment to develop and provide and study this day treatment center. And they did this from April 2001 to March 2006. And so from the start, the day treatment center reflected this belief that sex workers were more likely to be healthy and least likely to relapse into drug use if they were not forced to leave prostitution and if they were treated as workers with legitimate health and safety needs. And so the day treatment center they created was a judgment-free space. It was open during the day. If you came to day treatment, you could get case management, HIV and drug risk reduction sessions, group discussions, one-on-one psychological counseling. You could also take a shower, do your laundry and have a meal. And so they brought women into day treatment in cohorts of 50 who they recruited from the streets in Oakland and they studied the program and it was incredibly successful. The program effectively demonstrated that treating sex workers non-judgmentally as workers helped them lead healthier lives and work more safely. So the women that came through day treatment were more likely to be homeless, to spend time in jail, less likely, excuse me, to be homeless, spend time in jail and use drugs. They were also more likely to attain full-time legal employment and they were more likely to engage in safe sex practices when they did do sex work. And so overall this research which they published in 2008 supports the value of non-criminalizing approaches to prostitution, especially with very, very hard to reach women. So CalPAP reported their results to their funder and they published them. But despite this knowledge, a lack of funding forced them to actually discontinue the day treatment program. The local health department was skeptical about what they were doing. They weren't too excited about harm reduction. And also African-American women who use drugs and trade sex are not a politically popular or active constituency. There was not the political will to help these women. But when I left CalPAP, they were trying to get funding to restart this program and they used their research as evidence. And today as you can see, they have started another clinical service with a similar philosophy where they offer a range of health services. And here you can see it's expanded to family planning to sex workers and other underserved communities. So the next thing I wanna talk about is policy advocacy. So in addition to publishing their research, like they just did there, CalPAP and the St. James Infirmary, I think, really indicate how social movement for nonprofits can engage in more direct political institutional challenges. So they can advocate for legal or discursive reforms without compromising their nonprofit status. So they can use again, mainstream political actions to make more radical political claims. And one way they do this are through public awareness activities. And the example that I'm gonna give you today is the St. James Infirmary's campaign called Someone You Know Is a Sex Worker. So to develop this campaign, the St. James Infirmary interviewed and photographed 27 adult sex workers, their family members, their partners, and their health service providers. And I'm just gonna show you some of the ads. So if you can see on this one, it says some of us are sex workers, some of us provide healthcare to sex workers, some of us are family members of sex workers. Someone you know is a sex worker. In another case, it says the St. James Infirmary is like a lighthouse. They don't look down on you. They treat you like a person and give you options, choices. Sex worker rights are human rights. And then in a third example, sex workers go out to work, come home, take care of their children, just like everybody else does. Someone you know is a sex worker. So these ads, I think, made a very important and arguably a very radical political claim that sex workers are not invisible and that they care about each other in their community. But these ads were actually very, very controversial, even in so-called liberal San Francisco. So two major advertising firms, CBS Outdoor and Clear Channel Outdoor, who provide all the outdoor billboards in the city, actually rejected the ads for placement. CBS said, and I quote, sex workers is not a family-friendly term, end quote, and the company said that it would reconsider the ads, but only if they didn't use the term sex worker in them. Similarly, Clear Channel said, and I quote, local managers review all content to make sure it meets standards of the local community. They did not think these ads met those standards. But again, showing this mutual synergism between governments and nonprofits, the ads did run, but this time they ran on the San Francisco city buses. And so it's hard to say what effect these ads had, but they did generate a lot of discussions. And I think more broadly, these ads indicate and the struggle to get these ads up indicate how activists can still challenge very dominant discourses about the communities that they serve and make radical claims, even when they depend on government institutions. So just to sum up briefly, this book I think looks at a big question, does formalization lead to de-radicalization? So in this case, can activists move from protest into more formal, nonprofit service provision and stay radically politically active? And I think with CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary, I show that, yes, they can actually do this through this process of resistance maintenance, which involves, as I've shown, oppositional implementation, community engagement, and claims-making activities. So where do we go from here? I think this book, in my opinion, and you can challenge me on this, makes some important contributions. And one is to policy. I think this adds to what we already know, that criminalization of prostitution does not work. And in fact, it's counterproductive. There are actually better ways to treat sex workers and CalPEP and the St. James Infirmary, I think, really provide excellent examples of this. They use harm reduction, which basically does not force people to leave sex work or drug use as a condition of receiving services unless they're ready to do that. And so they help people stay safe and healthy where they're at in what they do. Despite this evidence, as some of you may know, harm reduction and decriminalizing prostitution are not politically popular in the United States. But they are growing more accepted, a little bit, in some circles. And hopefully this research will help to make that case a little bit further. In terms of scholarship, I think this book fills some gaps by providing insights into communities and spaces that are highly politicized, but political scientists don't actually know very much about. So when we're thinking about communities, again, when civic engagement and political participation scholars think about and study political actors, they're not thinking of people like Gloria Lockett or Grant or Naomi or many of the other transgender people of color who use drugs and trade sex that I interviewed. And if they do think of these people, they think of them as the least likely people to participate in politics. But I think my research shows that if we look and listen closely, these quote unquote least likely people will get involved in politics and nonprofits like Calpep and the St. James Infirmary can facilitate this. Similarly, when we're thinking about spaces, a lot of political science scholarship does not think about nonprofits, whether they're born from social movements or otherwise. And they don't think of them as political or politicizing spaces. They're too bureaucratic, they're too focused on service provision. But again, I think a closer fine grain analysis shows us something different. And they show how they can use very conventional political means, gathering people, publishing research, doing public awareness to promote radical positions like sex worker rights. And they have some influence. In many cases, I interviewed city officials who work with Calpep and the St. James Infirmary and the city officials would routinely say that these organizations are the real experts, that they learn a lot from these organizations. It doesn't necessarily translate into tons of money for Calpep and the St. James Infirmary, but again, it shows that very mutual reciprocal relationship. So I think going forward, it would be interesting to see whether and how resistance maintenance might appear in other like organizations. There are actually many social movement-born nonprofits like Calpep and the St. James Infirmary that offer services to sex workers, by sex workers, engage their community, and support sex worker rights. But there are also a lot of nonprofits that serve similarly marginalized communities like homeless people, undocumented immigrants, and drug users, and they involve them in their operations. So it's indeed possible that these organizations could also employ resistance maintenance in the process. And I think we need to study them to see how they institutionalize these resistance practices in their own organizations and power their communities and promote social change. Thank you. Thank you. The book sounds just fascinating. I can't wait to read it. I study undocumented immigrants, particularly the organizations that represent them. Yep. An analogous situation that you highlight right at the end. When I talk to the leaders of those organizations, one of the things they say is we'd like to get involved in advocacy, but our community is simply not interested. They may recognize the issues, they may support the agenda, but they're just not comfortable with advocacy. The level of political efficacy in the community just doesn't understand or just doesn't accept that political acts, lobbying, it's gonna be effective. And they would suggest to the organizational leaders, let's just keep our heads down. Let's provide services, but much beyond that is really just not in the mindset of the community. And so the organizational leaders will say, to do my job well, I don't do advocacy because if not, the community is gonna reject me. For the community you study, is there any evidence to suggest that sex workers want more advocacy or are interested in nonprofits being much more active or are they satisfied with the types of services that are being provided and would be more content with them expanding those services rather than spending money on lobbying, for instance? So that's a great question. And undocumented immigrants are in a way an excellent kind of an analogous community. One of the major reasons for communities like undocumented immigrants and sex workers is that political activity sometimes is not the first thing on their mind because they have more pressing concerns in their life. Also, they're scared to be visible, right? You don't wanna come out and be in a street protest and say, I'm a sex worker, I'm a prostitute and because you think you might get arrested for this. Similarly with undocumented immigrants. Sex workers, I think, like the organizations and people you talked about are a diverse community and they have diverse opinions about the services that are available to them and whether or not these service providers should be more politically engaged. I know when I was at the St. James Infirmary I asked a lot of the service providers there about that. And some of them said, you know what? We should just be like a church basement and provide a space where people can just be there but we don't wanna do anything that compromises our nonprofit status. Others thought they should be much more politically involved. And when you look at larger scale studies of nonprofits, most nonprofits, and I think probably even the ones you're talking about are more political than they think. So whether they're going to meet with city officials to inform them about their funding needs, right? That's definitely political. I think there's a spectrum of activity but there definitely is a diversity of opinions about that. Absolutely. So I'm definitely think though that they should be more active. Thank you so much for your presentation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Many years ago when I was in law school there were numerous categories of what were then called victimless crimes. And it seems to me over time that they had become fewer in number. So for example, one might think of what was called at one point a consensual sodomy which was a common offense in most states that it was targeted primarily against gay men to harass them in effect, a marginalized group. And over time that was decriminalized. In fact through an action of the United States Supreme Court ultimately. Much more recently there has been I think significant decriminalization of personal possession and use of marijuana which has long been a criminalized act. Even it still technically is under federal law but many local jurisdictions have criminalization. And I wonder if you see an examples like this of this diminution of the numbers of these so-called victimless offenses. Any hope with regard to the same thing ultimately happening for prostitution? My idealistic side is hopeful. My realistic side, not so hopeful. So prostitution laws and the enforcement of them is a very local matter. So some jurisdictions will kind of turn a blind eye to prostitution. Others will police it much more heavily. Often it's driven by property concerns. So newly gentrifying neighborhood, people don't want people out on the streets making a commotion, suddenly tons of police, tons of arrests, right? In terms of decriminalizing, I think if you surveyed Americans, you'd find that yes, they support decriminalizing consensual sexual exchanges for cash or whatever else amongst adults. But in popular discourse, it's very hard to communicate that idea in reality because sex work has become so heavily conflated with sex trafficking. So now anytime you mention sex work, you are thinking of, or many of us might think of, a young girl trapped in the back of a van unable to get out, which is actually a tiny minority of cases. So I think the reality is for most local police departments, they don't have the resources to police prostitution all the time, especially as more and more prostitution has moved indoors, which is more time consuming to police. But given the circulation of trafficking discourse, it's very hard for people to think of this as a victimless crime. And I think that's the major block, is this idea that all sex work is sex trafficking. Actually, my question is related, but a little different. I'm old enough to remember, well, Coyote to have met Margot St. James and to have been involved in groups here when there was really hope for decriminalization of prostitution. And so you've answered the part about decriminalization in general, it doesn't look likely. But I was very hopeful and interested in the organizations you're studying. And do you think at least at the local level outside of somewhere like San Francisco, these type of groups are forming, that there's at least local involvement of sex workers and services for them, even if we can't say at the higher political level there's gonna be change? Oh, absolutely. So CalPyb and the St. James Infirmary were kind of the first two of this kind. And since then, there have actually been a number of organizations that have emerged across the United States that serve sex workers in a similar way that these organizations do. And one of the most notable examples is in Washington, D.C., it's called HIPPS, or Helping Individual Prostitute Survive, is the acronym and they do similar harm reduction oriented work where they engage the community they serve. And there are many other examples like this across the country. And the reason that they're so effective or they can be so effective is because they involve sex workers. So when you're going out to do things like hand out condoms as a sex worker, other sex workers are more likely to listen to you because you could understand their experience, you're not going to judge them. And so I think that accounts in large part for their success. But HIPPS is one of the other most notable examples of that on the East Coast. Do you think this is kind of growing since let's say 2000 or since, because there was this problem with HIV AIDS that suddenly the wind went out of the whole movement to decriminalize prostitution. So do you think there's a kind of relationship between the increasing ability to treat HIV AIDS and the possibility of organizations for sex workers? I mean, they can't necessarily be blamed as much anymore. This is one of the interesting things is Calpep was initially funded and still gets most of its funding for HIV AIDS prevention and so does the St. James Infirmary. And this actually created a lot of conflict for the people who run these organizations because they thought taking money for HIV AIDS prevention would reinforce that connection people have in their head that prostitutes are quote unquote vectors of disease. And this is not true. Actually sex workers have higher rates of condom use than the general population, including college students. So this is something that we've seen but that's been a lot of the funding. A lot of the funding has been for HIV AIDS prevention and that's one way they're able to get around this but there is a lot of hesitation to take that money because you don't wanna reinforce that connection. And sex workers have a lot of other occupational health and safety needs beyond worrying about HIV AIDS transmission. And actually if you come to the November 5th panel you can hear all about those things. So absolutely, any other questions? Someone on my side of the room has to have a question. How about one of my students here for extra credit? Dorothy. Is there any suspicion having you as a researcher and this work is illegal, so? So that's a great question. If those, if for people couldn't hear it how did these organizations come to trust me as a researcher since prostitution is illegal? One of the challenges if any of you are interested in going on to do community based research is I don't think it's so much you have to show that you're politically aligned with the group that you're working with, although that certainly helps but I think you have to show that you're open minded to what they're doing and that you're willing to help them in some way. So a common complaint about researchers who've done work with sex workers as Gloria put it to me is she hated it when and as she said and I quote, white researchers come into the community take what they need and leave. So the ways that you can overcome this distrust of you as a researcher is volunteer to give something back to the community and the major way I did that was through my participant observation work and the major thing that I did for these organizations was write grants. These organizations are constantly writing grants and so because I was willing to do that we developed a relationship. I wanted to have actually a third case study in my book and this third case study was an organization also formed by a coyote member but she went the other way politically and she formed a very anti-prostitution, anti-trafficking organization and I went and met with this organization, the SAGE Project, it actually just closed recently and I said to them I'm interested in doing this research, I'm studying sex worker politics and the fact that I use the word sex work set them off and so then it became I had more meetings with them, I had more meetings and I sent them my IRB materials and the day before I was leaving for California I got an email from them saying you know what, we're actually too worried about our clients and we don't want you to come and do any research with us so sometimes I think it's easy to give yourself away but it also very much depends on the culture of the organization for how open they are to working with you. Good afternoon. Was your research centered only in California or did you conduct any of it here in the East Coast? This project was only based in California but I have started to do research on the East Coast so I'm looking now actually I'm on the policy side of things so I'm looking at policies that target men that try to end their demand for prostitution so has anyone heard of John schools? Is anyone familiar or some of my students have? So these are, there's one in Brooklyn and so if you are a male who is arrested for solicitation in Brooklyn and you don't have any priors you will have the option to attend a John school so you pay a fine and you attend an evening of classes so I've studied those programs in Arizona, here in Brooklyn and in San Francisco, I have a paper out on the San Francisco program and I've also started to look at public awareness campaigns also that target men telling them how bad it is if they solicit sex workers so that research is kind of more all over the US but this one was in California. So you mentioned that these organizations hire people in the field of sex work and who have addictions and how challenging it is for them to come in at a certain time because they have their own schedule. Do you know how the organization gets around that so that they can effectively work towards their goals and how, sorry, and then how many staff does each have? So the staff, numbers of staff is an ever fluctuating number and it doesn't fluctuate because people don't show up for work and fluctuates based on grant funding. So some grants come in and can fund staff for longer periods than others. So that's an all fluctuating number. I think CalPAP when I was there had about 25 people working. The St. James was maybe a bit smaller and had about 17 or so full time or part time but I know those numbers did shrink and then they expanded. As for getting people to show up on time, this is kind of the process and part and parcel to running these organizations. So what a lot of people do who come to work at St. James Infirmary or at CalPAP is they use this as a way to get straight work experience so that they can transition on to something else and so part of it is that skills development of following schedules and making sure your paperwork is in on time. And they have a lot of patience, that's how they do it. And they have a lot of amazing workers and so people start to do these things and a lot of people, especially the St. James have gone on to work for the Public Health Department or they've gone on to do master's degrees in public health and so it has provided that kind of stepping stone. I have a question. What were some of the other responsibilities that these non-profit organizations had besides giving out condoms? Okay, so at CalPAP they give out condoms, they do HIV AIDS testing, rapid, it's called aura shirts, like a 20 minute oral HIV test. They do education and prevention sessions, they've opened a family planning clinic so a doctor comes in and you can have medical exams, they become a lot more comprehensive. The St. James Infirmary in their clinical space, you can come in for regular clinical medical services that you would at any other clinic and they also were very holistic. They had Reiki and acupuncture and you could get alternative services like that as well. And both of these organizations had food banks and clothing banks and things like that too. So how is it related to prostitutes? Just the prostitutes idea of what they called prostitute educational center? The one organization's called the Prostitutes Education Project. But if they're giving out condoms, how is that related I guess to prostitutes? Oh, is it to prevent more? So initially it was founded to help prostitutes prevent HIV AIDS transmission. So handing out condoms was part of that. My question is more, hi professor. Hi, really? My question is more of because in my opinion, pornography and dancers, they also are sex workers but they're legalized. And is it possible for the legalization of prostitution if they became more of a business sector versus like being like in street corners or in our hotel or housing? Like if they organized themselves just like how they're organizing themselves as far as nonprofits. If they organized themselves as far as businesses and they had let's say, I guess we can use Coyote business group. Could that be a way, a avenue of legalizing prostitution as far instead of having it like the taboo of the sex work industry because other people are doing it. They're already using it. Like isn't that possible also for like? So actually it is really not possible right now under criminalization because most states also have laws where if two or more people are in a space where they are believed to be engaging in prostitution you get charged with pimping or running a brothel, right? So however, there's been a lot of research which shows that sex workers who are able to work together are actually safer for very obvious reasons. You know that you can monitor what's going on. You can, if someone's gone on an out call you can be sure you know where the person is and when they're coming back. You know sex workers are also divided about how they like to work. Usually the research shows that sex workers who are more educated and have more autonomy in what they do because of those factors often are more likely to work indoors whereas individuals struggling with things like homelessness, other aspects of poverty, substance use are more likely to work on the streets. Right, so but still most prostitution is indoors especially with the internet and cell phones. So you know some sex workers there's a good argument to make that it is safer to work indoors and I've done a little bit of interviewing out in Nevada and I can see my colleague Crystal Jackson who has also done a lot of research on the sex industry in Nevada and those brothels which are legal in counties that are very rural. They actually provide, some people I talked to said they found that a very safe work environment in a lot of ways. They had problems with that work environment but it was very safe. They had security guards, they could make phone, they could call if they were in trouble. People knew when a client was coming and going so there are a lot of arguments to be made that working together in an indoor space is much safer but that's just illegal right now. Hi, my question is why do you think that well what are your thoughts on the fact that a lot of people have this perception of prostitutes as a stereotypical prostitute when that works on the streets and there's drug abusing and is constantly being abused which follows more of the oppression paradigm as opposed to the reality that there's a wide variety of prostitutes which follows more of the polymorphous paradigm? So the reason, I mean there are a number of reasons why people commonly associate the prostitute working on the street with all prostitution. One it's the most visible so you know this is the prostitute that is the easiest to see right and that was a number of years ago if you went to Times Square you would see a lot of street prostitution for example. Cleaning up the neighborhood means cleaning up street prostitution. So there's that reason also popular culture I mean how many movies have been made where this is how prostitution is portrayed in one particular way that's another misconception and then also one of the major problems is that it's very difficult for sex workers to advocate and articulate publicly what their working conditions are like where they work and what they do because a lot of them they're stigma they don't want to be arrested and so the less we hear from actual sex workers like I probably should not be updoing this talk we should be hearing from someone who's worked in the sex industry the less we hear from actual sex workers the more that we can kind of glom on to these stereotypes that we have. Good evening. My question is like how promising do you think the advocacy and the political movement is if you were in San Francisco a very liberal state and had encountered difficulties how promising is it like on a federal level and other states? It's very difficult and there are a lot of really amazing organizations doing wider state level and federal level advocacy for issues around decriminalizing prostitution occupational health and safety but they have a very uphill battle and actually if you come again to keep plugging the sex work initiative if you come to the event on I believe it's October 29th or November 5th we're gonna have representatives from the sex workers outreach project SWAP which is a national organization of sex worker advocates who do that kind of work that you do and they're gonna talk about the challenges of this and then another group sex work swing sex workers something New York anyway they also do similar work at the city level and so they really have an uphill battle because there is a very strong refusal to believe that people have non-victimizing experiences in the sex industry that don't fit that stereotype and it's a very they most politicians don't wanna hear this because also can you imagine a politician going out and saying let's decriminalize prostitution right not very politically popular so they do amazing work but their work is very difficult I know that you said that it doesn't look very promising but what do you think can what more can be done so that prostitution does become legalized so I think a number of things one having sessions like this and like we're doing here so just people become more aware of what is going on in the sex industry and hearing diverse perspectives not just hearing Nicholas Kristoff so hearing these diverse perspectives I think is a big part of it also thinking critically about the sources you're reading about sex work so there's this awareness raising piece but then also doing what you can to listen to and support sex workers when they speak in their own interests and for themselves I don't know you probably heard in Canada recently the Supreme Court overturned the nation's prostitution laws and they gave the Canadian legislature a year to rewrite them and so actually they've been having all of these hearings and I believe they just passed something which was bad but during these hearings the plaintiffs in the case the prostitutes who brought that case all the way to the Supreme Court were kicked out of the public hearings so there's this real resistance to listening to sex workers that don't conform to the victim narrative and so I think supporting diverse perspectives and of course not ignoring that many sex workers are victimized is in any way that you can is really important so you're all gonna go out and buy my book and then I can go shopping okay thank you