The Movement to Criminalize Sex Work in the United States
| Author | Ronald Weitzer |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00495.x |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2010
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 61±84
The Movement to Criminalize Sex Work in the United States
Ronald Weitzer*
Until recently, prostitution was not a prominent public issue in the
United States. Law and public policy were relatively settled. The past
decade, however, has witnessed a growing debate over the sex trade
and the growth of an organized campaign committed to expanding
criminalization. A powerful moral crusade has been successful in
reshaping American government policy toward sex work ± enhancing
penalties for existing offences and creating new crimes. Crusade
organizations have advocated a strict abolitionist orientation toward
all forms of commercialized sex, which are increasingly conflated with
sex trafficking. This paper examines the impact of this movement on
legal norms and government policies. I argue that the moral crusade,
and its government allies, are responding to the growth of the sex
industry in recent years and to fears of its normalization in American
society.
In November 2008, residents of San Francisco, California, voted on a ballot
measure that would have de facto decriminalized prostitution in the city. The
measure stipulated that the police would discontinue enforcing the law
against prostitution. The measure failed, but was endorsed by a sizeable
minority of voters ± 42 per cent. Four years earlier, Berkeley, California
voters had considered a similar proposal, with 36 per cent supporting it. As
this paper will demonstrate, the San Francisco and Berkeley cases are
entirely exceptional in contemporary America ± where liberalization of
prostitution policy is rarely discussed by political leaders let alone voted on
by the public.
1
As a 1999 commission in Buffalo, New York, reasoned,
`since it is unlikely that city or state officials could ever be convinced to
61
ß2010 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2010 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Department of Sociology, George Washington University, Washington DC
20052, United States of America
weitzer@gwu.edu
1Anexception is a bill in the Hawaii State Legislature in 2007, which would have
decriminalized indoor prostitution and zoned street prostitution. The bill failed.
decriminalise or legalise prostitution in Buffalo, there is nothing to be gained
by debating the merits of either'.
2
Although some observers have documented a growing `mainstreaming'
or `normalization' of the sex industry ± especially regarding pornography
and stripping, where there has been some spillover into mainstream media
coupled with sheer abundance on the Internet
3
± prostitution remains beyond
the pale in the United States. Indeed, prostitution is being increasingly
demonized, marginalized, and criminalized as a result of the efforts of a
robust moral crusade. The crusade initially targeted sex trafficking, but then
expanded its targets to prostitution, pornography, stripping, and all other
types of commercial sex.
The punitive trend may be viewed as a reaction to the increasing
availability and mass marketing of sexual services and to what crusade and
political leaders view as an alarming normalization of sex for sale. In other
words, with the help of the Internet, the neo-liberal deregulation of
commerce and flourishing of free markets has allowed the sex industry to
expand as never before and on a global scale. Neo-liberalism also implies
that individuals have the `right' to engage in sexual commerce. I suggest that
it is precisely this loosening of traditional sexual mores coupled with the
unprecedented availability of a growing variety of sexual services that has
created a huge backlash ± in the form of a moral crusade that is attempting to
stem the tide by pressing for laws that outlaw commercial sex work. This is
part of a broader symbolic politics in which certain social forces have fought
other signs of alarming `permissiveness',
4
and have tried to impose a `new
respectability', one dimension of which Hunt describes as follows:
`New respectability' reflects the aspiring role of upwardly mobile women
concerned to exhibit [independence from men which] produces a renewed
sense of sex and sexuality as risk and danger . . . It finds expression in a
preoccupation with the external danger of sex in general and male sexuality in
particular . . . This in turn leads to a stress on women's stance as victim . . . The
new respectability manifests itself most distinctively in preoccupation with
sexual imagery and representation.
5
Iwould extend the latter point to sexual commerce in general. In the United
States, crusade efforts were latent in the 1990s but gained renewed vigour in
62
2 Prostitution Task Force, Workable Solutions to the Problem of Street Prostitution in
Buffalo, New York (1999).
3B.Brentsand T. Sanders, `Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and
Social Ambivalence', this volume, pp. 40±60; L. Comella, `Remaking the Sex
Industry: The Adult Expo as a Microcosm' in Se x for Sale: Prostitution,
Pornography, and the Sex Industry, ed. R. Weitzer (2010, 2nd edn.); E. Jost,
`Making it Mainstream: Sexworkers as Characters' Spread Magazine, Winter 2008,
54±7.
4D.Wagner, The New Temperance: The American Obsession with Sin and Vice
(1997).
5A.Hunt, `The Purity Wars' (1999) 3 Theoretical Criminology 409, at 430.
ß2010 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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