When New York’s Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman debuted the state’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts a year ago, he called them “a great leap forward” for the state, promising a new “just and compassionate” national model for those arrested for prostitution by “treating these defendants as trafficking victims.”
But in these courtrooms, defendants charged with prostitution continue to cycle through, their cases shuffled along with a minimum of words. Some of these “victims” appear in handcuffs. Defendants — almost all women, and overwhelmingly women of color — are given hearings that last just minutes, and are regularly admonished by judges for their presumed life choices and for not taking prosecutors’ offers.
“Criminal, Victim, or Worker?” — a report out Wednesday by Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), a peer-led organization of people engaged in the sex trades — highlights the problem with treating all sex workers as victims, and those victims as criminal defendants. “No other charge,” it notes, “calls for the person being exploited to be arrested.”
What’s more, some of the same racial profiling patterns that have plagued the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy seem to be mirrored in prostitution arrests and proceedings, according to RedUP’s report, the first to investigate the trafficking courts.
Nearly 70% of defendants facing prostitution charges in the Brooklyn trafficking courts are black. For loitering charges, 94% appear to be black. (The group sent monitors and used open records to track 364 cases in Brooklyn and Queens, where 58% of defendants are Asian, over nine months.)
“People engaged in the sex trades are studied by the criminal justice system and profiled by media and police all the time,” said Audacia Ray, RedUP’s executive director. “It’s really valuable for us to turn that around and examine the systems that are criminalizing us.”
Given the racial disparities in the courts, RedUP wants to spotlight how anti-prostitution policing has become akin to stop-and-frisk for black women in Brooklyn. “From what we’ve observed, it definitely seems like the extreme numbers of black defendants is due to policing,” Ray told me.
There’s profiling in some neighborhoods, she said, with “folks who have been previously arrested or who are hanging out with other folks who are ‘known prostitutes’ — people who have been arrested before.”
Though supporters of the courts say the defendants are victims of trafficking, that’s an unfounded assumption.
“There’s no investigation on the part of the DA’s office or the police or of the courts that are marking these cases as to whether this person is a potential victim of trafficking,” said Jillian Modzeleski, an attorney with Brooklyn Defender Services, who represents defendants in the Brooklyn trafficking court. Just being arrested for prostitution is enough to end up in the trafficking court, apparently.
And because defendants are assumed to be victims in need of services, not due process, each is typically before the judge for just two to three minutes, said Modzeleski.
“Oftentimes,” she said, “I think it’s frowned upon if we talk to our client, and we somehow recognize that there’s more to what’s going on that we want to explore, (if) our client isn’t automatically saying yes to this program, or yes to the offer.”
The numbers bear that out. In 94% of cases in Queens and 97% of those in Brooklyn, defendants took the DA’s offers of mandated counseling sessions run by nonprofits and the courts to provide services like trauma-based psychotherapy, life skills workshops and yoga classes.
Taking the deal — adjournment in contemplation of dismissal and charges sealed after six months if the defendant completes the sessions and is not rearrested for any crime — is supposed to keep people engaged in sex work from being revictimized.
But it’s unclear what impact, if any, those programs have on sex workers who want to leave the industry, let alone on those who do not. And being arrested is itself victimizing, and increases one’s chances of rearrest, especially in the months that pass before the charge is sealed. Those open charges, the report notes, also “limit a person’s ability to obtain employment outside of the sex trade, receive public benefits and maintain custody of their children.”
Even a sealed charge is no guarantee someone won’t again be profiled by police based on past arrests, race, gender, what they wear, who they’re with or where they are. The new “compassionate” courts cannot address, and may even exacerbate, the obstacles people face when trying to leave the sex trades.
“What they need,” says Ray, “is the actual financial means to do that — which is a living wage job.”
There is a choice beyond treating sex workers as criminals or victims. We can treat them as members of our communities, with the same rights as any other New Yorker — and the same demands for justice.
Gira Grant, a journalist, is the author of “Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.”
