This National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, Woodhull Calls on Jacksonville Mayor to Listen to the Experts: Fight for Sex Work Decriminalization over Ineffective and Harmful Punitive Anti-Trafficking Approaches
January 28, 2025
In 2010, by presidential proclamation, President Obama declared January National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. For the past 15 years, every presidential administration has continued this tradition, which seeks to raise awareness of the issue and highlight domestic and international efforts to stop human trafficking. Many nonprofit organizations, businesses, and local, state, and federal policymakers use this month to focus on their efforts to end trafficking within their communities.
Since our founding in 2003, Woodhull Freedom Foundation has joined our allies in calling attention to the disturbing and decades-long trend that conflates trafficked people with people whose work is consensual. This harmful conflation is one we see reiterated throughout this month intended to be about preventing trafficking but which is too often used to reinforce the false narrative that to end trafficking in the sex industry, the industry must be eradicated entirely. This blurred distinction between sex work and human trafficking also means that we frequently see policymakers and law enforcement make statements that focus on a “moral” stance against the sex trade. Such statements impact legislation and society’s attitude toward both consensual adult sex workers and sex trafficking survivors, putting both groups at risk.
This was the case with a recent announcement from Jacksonville, Florida Mayor Donna Deegan, who, in an email to her constituents, reported that she would be partnering with an organization to develop “No Trafficking Zones.” First of all, trafficking is illegal in this country. Period. Does this “No Trafficking Zone” make it okay to traffic humans outside of the zone? Of course it doesn’t, any more than establishing a “bank robbery-free zone” would make it okay to rob banks elsewhere. But we never hear about a “bank robbery-free zone” because bank robberies aren’t about a sexual act, and sex work is.
For over two decades, Woodhull has opposed such zones, from Washington, DC to Seattle, Washington, because they are not only ineffective at stopping human trafficking but impede efforts to address the root causes of this abuse. Rather than focusing on fixing these punitive anti-trafficking measures that disproportionately lead to Black, trans and gender expansive, disabled, unhoused, and migrant sex workers and trafficking survivors being victims of harmful police interventions, Woodhull calls on Mayor Deegan and other lawmakers to push for long-term, effective policy solutions.
Most urgently, we call on state lawmakers to fully decriminalize sex work. For local and federal lawmakers like Mayor Deegan, we call on them to vocally support such efforts by their colleagues in state capitals as House Congressional Member Representative Shri Thanedar (D-Michigan) recently did. Representative Thaneder called for decriminalization throughout the United States, explaining, “We should decriminalize sex work to maximize sex workers’ legal protection and their ability to exercise other rights, including unionization, justice, and health care. Decriminalization and regulation would prevent trafficking and exploitation of minors.”
The decriminalization of all consensual sexual labor is necessary to protect the health and rights of all people involved in the sex trade, including those experiencing human trafficking. For decades, Woodhull has called for decriminalization as a fundamental first step to make the sex trade safer and prevent human trafficking. We are joined in this effort by many human rights organization, including sex worker rights and anti-trafficking groups, such as the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom Network USA, UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, among several other sex worker-led groups working to keep their communities safe from exploitation.