Dec. 17th article for Direkte Actione, German union newspaper

[Read article translated into German:www.direkteaktion.org]

“I killed so many woman I have a hard time keeping them straight…My plan was I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could…I picked prostitutes as my victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed.”[1] –

The “Green River Killer,” Gary Ridgewood, Seattle Washington, 11/05/2003

In November 2001, serial killer Gary Ridgewood was arrested while leaving the Kenworth Truck Factory, in Renton, Washington, where he had worked quietly for over 30 years. During that time, he murdered over 49 women, almost all of whom were prostitutes or runaways, and buried their bodies in forested areas around Kings County. “I killed most of them in my house near Military Road,” Ridgewood confessed, “I placed most of the bodies in groups which I call clusters. I like to drive by the clusters and think about the women I placed there.” He bragged that he had strangled more than ninety women in total to death and having “sex” with their dead bodies.

On December 17^th, 2003, Dr. Annie Sprinkle, founder of the U.S. Sex Workers Outreach Project, organized the first International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, in order to honor the 49 or more deaths caused by this merciless Green River Killer.

“I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex,” Ridgewood told reporters at the Seattle Staff and News Services. The fact that all of these murders went undiscovered for over twenty years reveals that Ridgewood is not the only criminal in these vicious killings. The police and state’s callous attitude towards sex workers, and the hateful stigma that society at large places upon them, caused these deaths to go unpunished for an utterly injust and inhumane amount of time. Today, sex workers continue to suffer the greatest risk for violent assault and murder.

Though sex work is often called the world’s “oldest profession,” the laborers in this ancient trade do not benefit from the most long-lasting or cohesive labor unions. Successful collective organizing is still relatively rare, in spite of more than forty years of international activism. Due to the state’s criminal charge upon this activity, most sex workers in the world labor under unregulated and unprotected conditions, and suffer from a life of isolation and fear due to social stigma and lack of governmental protection from violent crime. Yet prostitution is as pervasive and old as civilization itself – it is a reality of the sexual life of our species, and there is little reason to believe it will ever disappear. Thus to persecute workers in this very human position, is a form of social injustice, directed at workers from the state and religious institutions, imposing upon workers an unnecessary violence.

It is indeed the state that creates the conditions of this violence. Though current human rights discourse rallies around the popular heart-wrenching calls against human trafficking and child slavery, this Puitan abolitionist movement that aims to end prostitution through government regulation is in fact creating the conditions for greater abuse. Greater criminalization pushes sex work  further underground, creating the perfect conditions for gangs and black market trading most dangerous to sex workers. Sex-positive thinkers on this issue, including global activists for the December 17^th International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, call for decriminalization[2] of sex work internationally, for allowing sex workers to come out into the open, and protecting their human rights, is the best way to prevent abuse, disease, and forced migration.

Today, December 17^th marks an important day for sex workers to organize all around the world, including Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, India, France, England, Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands. However, this is not the first occasion for international sex worker organizing. In 1985 and 1986, the two World Whores Congresses convened in Amsterdam and Brussels. In 1985, the International Committee for Prostitutes’ Rights created the World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights, demanding the “decriminalization of all aspects of adult prostitution resulting from individual decisions,” and the guarantee of “all human rights and civil liberties, including freedom of speech, travel, immigration, work, marriage, and motherland, and the right to unemployment insurance, health insurance and housing,” as well as “work standards” including freedom to chose place of work and residents, abolition of zoning, and the payment of taxes with receiving of benefits “on the same basis as other independent contractors and employees.” [3]

From the early efforts in 1975 of the French Collective of Prostitutes, in which 150 sex workers took over a church in Lyon, France; the cries of the English Collective of Prostitutes to “outlaw poverty not prostitution;”[4] the founding of CAYOTE by U.S. activist Margot St. James in 1973, the Berlin HYDRA in 1980, Geneva’s ASPASIE in 1982, Australia and Canada’s APC and CORP in 1983, “De Rode Draad” and “De Roze Draad” in the Netherlands in 1984; to the broadening of the sex worker movement in the 1990’s to include transgender, homosexuals, and migrant workers; to the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour, and Migration in Brussels, October 15-17, 2005, which gave birth to a new international consciousness of “trafficking” as very often a form of voluntary labor migration[5]; to the October 2007 strike of 35,000 sex workers in El Alto, Bolivia – It appears that the consciousness of the sex worker movement in the general media, and under institutions for international human rights is growing faster now, after a lull during the 1980’s and early 90s.

According to an August 2010 study by ProCon.org, a nonprofit for researching and publishing debates on controversial issues, about 50% of 100 researched (27% by population) have legalized prostitution. The remaining 50% of countries (73% by population) are split between criminalization of prostitution (40% of countries, or 60% by population) and limited legality, such as prosecuting pimps and clients but not sex workers (10% of countries, or 13% by population).[6]  These statistics indicate a trend towards partial or full legalization in the past forty years.

However, in spite of the seeming liberalization of the sex trade through legalization, complications involving the restrictive and stigmatizing governmental policies imposed upon legalized sex workers, including zoning, heavy taxation and licensing fees, and often overly intrusive and degrading STD testing[7], causes a new suite of problems. In countries where prostitution is legalized, there is also often a growth of forced migration of sex workers from poorer countries as underpaid sex slaves, often working in an illegal sector that persists in spite of the existence of legal outlets. Greater harm is imposed upon sex workers by social stigma, even in countries where being a prostitute is ostensibly legal. The public attitude of disgrace and hatefulness towards sex work is deeply ingrained in the Patriarchal and religious values, which are not easily persuaded to change. Therefore, legalization alone will not solve the problems of human abuse in the sex industry; rather, a greater public campaign of destigmatization is necessary, along with general decriminalization, rather than government-controlled legalization.

In most countries today, the labor organizing of sex workers outside of legal unions and state-sanctioned protections, must occur underground in the form of mutual aid networks outside of law. This kind of collective organizing falls well under the Anarcho-Syndicalist vision, and the increased participation of labor activists theorists on the radical left in this discourse is invited.

(Dec. 14, 2010 by Annabelle X., Anarchafeminist from Brooklyn, NYC, U.S.A.)