Kate D'Adamo is a sex worker rights advocate with a focus on economic justice, anti-policing and incarceration and public health. She works with Reframe Health and Justice , a queer, transgender and people of color consulting collective which takes on a variety of issues including harm reduction, healing, justice, and criminal and legal reform. There is little data on college students who are engaged in sex work in the U.
However, over the last decade there have been documented cases of members of the UNM community engaging in sex work former University President F. Daily Lobo : What laws would improve health and safety for sex workers? No one is protected when you are throwing people in prison for basic survival needs, when you're turning people into criminals for just living their lives and keeping themselves housed and fed.
That's really what criminalization does. If you're going to target someone, you're going to target the person who is economically vulnerable, who can't go to the police if they're being victimized, and when you do this you're really preying on vulnerabilities that are created through criminalization. We find that people are avoidant of law enforcement, and so when you are operating in more isolated ways, away from peer support, away from harm reduction tools, away from outreach and service providers and when people are physically in more isolated locations, they are more vulnerable to violence.
Daily Lobo : Why do you think college students become sex workers? If you think about the way that we structure college, you are talking about nontraditional working hours, you are talking about not that many available working hours, and so the idea that college students could get a living wage job, not to mention paying ridiculously high fees at completely random times in the year, seems unreasonable at best.
Daily Lobo : Is there a difference between sex trafficking and sex work, and could you talk more about how anti-trafficking laws can be detrimental? There is this false idea that the majority of people who have been trafficked feel that the most important thing to them is prosecution or that they really want to participate in that prosecution. That's false, and we know that from interviews with service providers, with trafficking victims and with law enforcement.
