NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill De Blasio announced on Tuesday that his administration would look into the efforts to decriminalize consensual sex work. If he is successful, New York would be the largest U.S. city to implement evidence-based policies meant to protect legitimate sex workers within the law enforcement purview of the city. In addition, he’s working to ask the administration of embattled (and creepy) Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Democrat-controlled state legislature to advance reforms to end criminal penalties for sex workers.
“It’s time to decriminalize sex workers and focus our enforcement on those who exploit and profit off a broken system,” said De Blasio in a press release. “We are calling on the State to end criminal penalties for sex workers and help us reach those in need without requiring involvement with the criminal justice system.”
Chirlane McCray, De Blasio’s spouse and the First Lady of New York City, added that modernizing sex work policies is a crucial step in eliminating the systemic oppression of sex workers and adult entertainment professionals.
“The communities hit hardest by the continued criminalization of sex work and human trafficking are overwhelmingly LGBTQ, they are people of color, and they are undocumented immigrants,” said McCray in the same press statement as De Blasio’s remarks.
“Sex work is a means of survival for many in these marginalized groups. Instead of handcuffs they need services, housing and support, and these reforms will enable them to come forward without fear,” McCray added.
According to De Blasio’s office, the city will move to establish a legislative framework for decriminalization and develop it for use by other New York localities, the state government, and other states across the country. The intention is to support people who are victims of human trafficking, while still protecting the rights of performers who enter performance and sex work voluntarily. De Blasio also wants to expand access for sex workers to safety-net and social policy programs.
Through collaboration with the New York Police Department (NYPD), the proposed approach would also rely on community-oriented services that sex workers can access without having to be arrested and detained. To change this standard to pre-arrest support services, the law enforcement community will be less inclined to officially charge someone on some trumped up sex work charge. Post-arrest services are available, but those can’t be accessed unless those services are only offered as a condition of release from arrest or incarceration. Pre-arrest instantly expands options of support for sex workers and lays the foundation to approach the regulation of sex work with a pro-health, pro-person, pro-justice, and pro-science perspective.
Photo of Bill de Blasio by Gage Skidmore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. It has been resized and padded.
