Back in 2021 we interviewed Jean Bruggeman, the Executive Director of Freedom Network USA, about her organisation's decision to get off the fence and explicitly support the decriminalisation of sex work in the United States. She was a bit nervous. Two years on, we checked back in with Jean to find out if she, and the organisation she leads, are still standing.
Spoiler alert: they are.
Joel Quirk (BTS): Freedom Network USA came out in 2021 in support of the decriminalisation of sex work. At the time you were hopeful, but also had some concerns. Remind us what they were.
Jean Bruggeman (Freedom Network USA): We were worried that we might disrupt our members’ relationships with their local communities. Direct service providers in the US have no choice but to collaborate with law enforcement – it’s the only way they can secure immigration status for trafficking survivors. But those same law enforcement officers often engage in tactics hostile to sex work. That creates a delicate relationship that we have to be sensitive to, or we can cause harm.
We also didn’t want to sound more certain than we were. The fact is, we don’t know how decriminalisation would play out in the US given our legal and social service landscape. Our social safety nets, unemployment schemes, and relationships with law enforcement are all very different to what you see in Europe. So in our position paper, we acknowledged that other countries’ experiences wouldn’t necessarily be reflected here. And we called for rigorous research before and after the fact to fill in that knowledge gap.
To be clear: we think it will be wonderful. But explicitly acknowledging our uncertainty really helped our members take the leap. It allowed them to say that, based on everything we know and the beliefs underlying human rights work, this is the sort of stance that makes sense until something changes.
Joel: So what happened? Did getting off the fence have the impact that you were hoping to achieve? Or were your fears realised?
Jean: There wasn’t really any pushback, and two years on we still haven’t heard of our members having problems either.
There was, of course, the expected denunciation on social media. People called us out, tagged Congress in posts, and suggested we lose federal funding. But we didn’t. And in retrospect I do ask myself: was losing funding ever really on the cards? Performative trolling is part of the social media age. You can’t escape it, but it doesn’t change institutions and practices as much as people fear.
We would have been more worried under the Trump administration, but we were already at risk of losing our funding back then. Trump had plenty of fodder to blackball us if he had wanted to. But our position paper came out after he left office, and we’re now nearly three years into the Biden administration and our funding is still there. So that fear isn’t really there anymore.
The Twitter trolls said that by supporting decriminalisation we’d broken the anti-prostitution pledge in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and therefore the government should stop funding us. But we’d done our homework. A legal team did the research, and we firmly believe that the law as written is unconstitutional and unenforceable.
Besides that, the law is much narrower than people think. It says that you cannot support prostitution with federal funds, and we don’t. We’re not encouraging people to engage in sex work. We’re advocating for people to be safe regardless of their workplace and to know their legal rights. That’s very different.
Joel: Have you shared your good experience with others, and has it given them courage to follow suit?
Jean: We haven’t intentionally reached out to other organisations to share our experience. But I can say that our membership has increased, and I think clearly articulating our support for decriminalisation helped that happen.
When we speak to new members, we tell them that our three big policy positions are pro-choice, pro-comprehensive immigration reform, and pro-decriminalisation of sex work. These positions are not universally promoted in the US, and certainly not by trafficking organisations. So we are very clear about where we stand. These are the fault lines, and we don’t want anyone joining us who isn’t 100% on our side.
The response has generally been, “I’ve finally found my people.” They’re individuals who have been looking for an organisation that shares their views and are surprised to have finally found one. I think decriminalisation is a position that many people working in the field hold, but they’ve struggled to find support for it within their organisations. Now they’ve found a home with us. So any fear that our membership would suffer because of our stance on sex work hasn’t been born out. Quite the opposite.
I have heard of a few professionals elsewhere using our position paper to move this conversation forward in their own workplaces. It gives me hope that more organisations will soon feel empowered to take this position and openly support the decriminalisation of sex work in the United States.
Joel: Is there a chance of this actually happening in a country that seems to becoming more conservative rather than less? Given that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade not too long ago, it’s hard to imagine that the decriminalisation of sex work could be on the cards anytime soon.
Jean: American politics is a mess, but I’m hopeful. The upside of having a federal system is that we don’t have to convince the whole country all at once. Some bits of federal law will need changing, but most sex work laws are at the state and local level.
That works to our advantage, as progressive jurisdictions across the US are starting to think much more broadly about anti-racism in public policy. This is a huge entry point for talking about sex work. If we can connect decriminalisation to the anti-racism conversation in the minds of policymakers, that can lead to change.
The hard part is finding a district to go first. A place willing to hold the great experiment to show that the boogey man does not come – that we’re all going to be fine. For better or worse, that’s the way our system is designed in the US. But if it works out as we believe it will, I think decriminalisation will spread to other districts. Walls, once they start to crumble, fall quickly. Marriage equality showed us that.
Sex workers have asked us to stop worrying about them. Instead, they want us to concentrate on shifting the conversation, because it’s causing harm
You’ll never create that momentum without an evidence base though, so it’s crucial that researchers document every bit of it. They need to start now in the places where decriminalisation is most likely to happen, so we have baseline data from which we can demonstrate (and explain) change.
They need to record sex workers’ perceptions of safety. Their willingness to reach out for services and support. The obstacles preventing them from getting the help they need. The amount of violence they experience. We need to know the answers to these and many other questions before policies change, because post-decriminalisation I would expect to see an increase in reports of harm to law enforcement. Opponents will latch onto that. They’ll say, “See! Decriminalisation leads to more abuse of sex workers, just like we said. We told you it was a bad idea.”
We will need really good data to disprove that theory, and to show instead that an increase in reports means that the policy is working. Just like with sexual assault: the better the response becomes, the more people you have reporting it. Does that mean sexual assault is increasing? No. It means people are willing to come forward because they believe it will actually help them.
Joel: Sex workers’ rights are now a central concern of your organisation, and decriminalisation is one of your three big policy asks. What are the next steps?
Jean: We have a working group with sex worker advocates, where we present what we perceive the issues to be and what we think should be done about them, and then invite a conversation. What do you see? What do you think? What do you wish we were doing?
We fully admit that, while we’re trying to share sex worker advocates’ space, it’s their space. It’s their lives and their workspace that we are encroaching upon. So given that, we want to know: what do they need from us? What do they want our role to be, and what is theirs?
What they’ve asked us to do is stop worrying about them. Instead, they want us to concentrate our energies on shifting the conversation in trafficking spaces, because the current dialogue is harmful. It's causing physical harm to people every day. They’ve asked us to get our own people – the anti-trafficking professionals of this world, as well as the general public – in line.
So we are doing just that, and today our working group is very proud to release new guidance on working with sex worker rights’ groups for human trafficking programmes.
Joel: Where do you think are the best places to start when it comes to minimising harms?
Jean: One has to innovate on the narrative. We’ve known for years that mainstream messaging around human trafficking is harmful: it’s all chains and white girls being abducted off the street. These days, it also includes the crap that QAnon has been putting out.
It’s an incredibly successful style of messaging. The public really eats it up. And as a result, you have racial profiling of mixed-race families at the airport. You have people calling hotlines asking them to come save the sex worker on the corner. All this nonsense.
Nobody has found an effective response to it yet. We’ve tried human rights-based language, but it goes over most people’s heads. They don’t know what we’re talking about and can’t see themselves in the picture we’re drawing for them. It’s a picture in which they have no role to play, in which they don’t exist. So they don’t engage with it.
QAnon does the opposite: it enlists its audience straight into active duty. It tells people to look for ribbons on car doors in parking lots, for example, claiming they are signals for traffickers. And in contrast to human rights, people know what ribbons are, people know what car doors are. They spend a lot of time in these parking lots. QAnon gives them something concrete to relate to, something they can do. And so people are picking up on it, and they're diving in.
Operation Underground Railroad is similar. They’ve raised millions by slapping the worst victim stereotypes possible onto their marketing and saying “send us money to go save them.” The film released this year based on the dramatization of this narrative was embraced by the public, it was even screened for members of Congress. It’s all a bunch of lies, but it offers a solution in which people can play an active role.
Anti-trafficking is a battle over political messaging as much as it is anything else. The human rights side has done a terrible job of talking about human trafficking in ways that the public can engage with and understand.
Joel: Time to try something new then.
Jean: Yup. We've gotten some initial funding to research, test, and produce a communications strategy around trafficking that results in real impact with our target audiences. Now we just need to find additional financial support to raise the momentum and support on-going messaging guidance and production.
Communication professionals have told us that our message can’t just be that the other side’s wrong – something we’ve said a lot over the years. Far more effective is to start by agreeing with our opponents that the violence found in sex work is intolerable and something must be done. We then follow with the suggestion that there is an even more effective way to address our shared concern than what they’ve been doing so far. This dodges the confrontation of saying they’re wrong, while allowing us to take control of the narrative, shift the frame, and replace one message with another with a whole lot less friction.
That’s the basic theory. Now we have to work out exactly what that new message should contain.
Joel: What sort of picture are you imagining, given that your instinct so far – to talk about human rights – hasn’t born fruit?
The centre of gravity in anti-trafficking discourse is the idea that people are helpless and need to be rescued. But we know that the people who are trafficked are not, by and large, helpless. They’ve been pushed out of safety and into risk by policies on immigration, housing, labour, child welfare, etc. This is very different.
But people like to feel like they're the hero. That’s what draws them to rescue organisations, to QAnon, and even to law enforcement. There are exceptions, but most people sign up out of a desire to help. And once inside, they get taught that saving even one victim is worth it, regardless of the collateral damage.
This is the dangerous narrative that we need to find a replacement for. We need a new story that gets people motivated, gets people seeing themselves as part of a solution, but which isn’t based on the desire to be a saviour.
They think, “If I arrest you, you're going to get the services you need. That makes me a good guy.” It’s intoxicating.
This is made doubly tricky by the fact that some prominent survivors of sex trafficking in the United States are advocates of rescue through arrest. They go on stages and say that, “When I was put into jail, I was forced to detox and to disengage with my trafficker. And that's what saved me.” This feeds people’s self-belief. It tells them that their training is helping people, and they latch onto that. They think, “If I arrest you, you're going to get the services you need. If I arrest you, you're going to get connected to helpers. If I arrest you, I'm going to be able to tell you that you're a victim and that you need help. That makes me a good guy.” It’s intoxicating.
We have to acknowledge these survivors’ truth, while also arguing that overall more people are harmed than helped. And we have to push the idea that an alternative approach would help more people while causing less harm.
It must be possible to engage the public on these topics in new, more productive ways. It’s something we've failed at for 20 years now, and nothing is going to be successful until we get this part right. We need to replace the crappy picture that has been put into people’s heads about trafficking with a better one, so that people can engage with and direct their money toward better solutions.
Joel: You said earlier that you think a key opening in all this is connecting decriminalisation with anti-racism. Could you expand on that?
Jean: In the US there’s a real reckoning going on. The anti-racism conversation is having a lot of repercussions. Terminology has been problematised, with people asking, for example, how appropriate it is to use the term ‘modern slavery’ in a country with such a history of chattel slavery. Slavery means something to the general public: it’s catchy, impactful, and useful for marketing in the US. But it’s deeply offensive to many communities, certainly Black American communities. That’s one tension we’re working through.
Activists are also pointing out the clear relationship between America’s history of racism and enslavement and contemporary trafficking. This is because, after the civil war, industries with high numbers of formerly enslaved people were intentionally excluded from worker protections. They were effectively given special dispensation to continue exploiting Black people, and it’s in those same industries that we find the most trafficking today. Added to that, immigration programmes were later created to bring primarily Black and Brown immigrants into the country to do that same exploitative labour. These, needless to say, did not give those immigrants a path to long-term legal status in the US, the right to change employers, or access to the social safety net.
This is where the conversation has shifted, and how we talk about sex work has moved with it. Even the end-demand people are now talking about sex work as a legacy of racism. And I think both sides would agree that the systemic racism experienced by people of colour, Black women and Black trans women especially, pushes them out of safe housing and safe employment. This makes it more likely that they will end up engaging in sex work because they lack other options.
Where we diverge is on what should be done about that. The end-demand folks say you have to eliminate the industry. We’re less convinced that removing these folks’ one and only source of income will bring them out of poverty, but we agree there’s a problem that must be solved here. Our solution is to attack racist policies and programmes that push individuals out of other forms of safety and income. Nobody should be forced into sex work because they have nowhere else to turn.
Joel: How do you do that?
Jean: Prevention is not a billboard campaign. It is not blaming the victim or telling women not to wear a short skirt to the bar. Prevention is about changing the social situation. It’s about increasing the minimum wage, expanding access to safe housing, bolstering labour protections, etc. Harms, including trafficking, happen because of deprivations in these human rights. And they have a have a hugely disproportionate effect on people who are not white.
Who is most likely to be arrested, prosecuted, or imprisoned when we crack down on sex work? Who's suffering the consequences? As you progress through the different stages of the criminal legal system, you see the percentages of BIPOC people increasing. White people may get swept up in the stings, but they’re not being prosecuted or going to jail in the same numbers as non-white customers and workers are.
I think that's the entry point for a really important conversation about the racist impact of the criminalisation approach to sex work. There's appetite for that right now. There is appetite for change.
