At one time, there weren’t a lot of sex workers writing solid, substantive analyses of prohibition; that is no longer true. Every year I see greater numbers of sex workers writing strong, convincing articles on why the War on Whores is horrible for everybody, and not just in blogs or “zines” or other small-audience venues, oh no; just last week saw two powerful, in-depth articles on how prohibitionism is nothing but camouflage for the reality that the sexual abuse of children is nearly always perpetrated by people the victim knows, often inside the nuclear family worshipped as a cultic totem by those who publicly fantasize the most vociferously about imaginary pimps with magical ninja powers pulling screaming children through the internet and confining them in dog crates to be raped by 100 men a day in truck stops. Both are well worth reading in their entirety, but here’s a sample to get you started. The first one is from Reese Piper:
…One study…found that 82% of abuse was organized by a direct family member…despite all the warnings about strange men lurking in vans, only 4% of the abuse occurred by strangers when the child was being victimized by one person; 2% when the child was abused by multiple people. The rest were biological fathers, stepfathers, acquaintances of the family, mothers, stepmothers, brothers, sisters, grandmas, aunts, uncles, and trusted members of the community such as clergy, police officers, teachers, counselors, and babysitters…Projecting [sexual abuse] outside the home relieves the pressure of the cognitive dissonance, allowing people to accept the darker shades of our world without disrupting their understanding of normal. To protect the pillars that surround the Family, we need a scapegoat. Women who work outside the home have always been considered a threat. Just as daycare workers encountered vitriol and baseless allegations of harm against children in the ’80s and ‘90s, sex workers are now the vessels society empties its anguish and anger into…Often when…bills like SISEA are introduced they seem altruistic. An average person not schooled in sex work politics won’t understand how much harm censorship can cause in a profession that survives on visibility. But other times politicians are blatant about their plans to push “fallen women” back into the shadows where they can remain the other…
The other is from my friend Cathy Reisenwitz:
…Though evangelicals tend to oppose any sexual norm they believe might threaten the stability and fecundity of the Christian nuclear family—including premarital sex, interracial dating, gay marriage, trans rights, immigration, and abortion—the purity culture [politician Matt] Gaetz and other evangelicals promote may actually exacerbate sexual abuse. A recent report from the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence found that certain norms embedded in religious teachings, in particular, are associated with high levels of sexual abuse; these include gender essentialism, limited autonomy for women, limited gender egalitarianism, a view of masculinity as dominant and aggressive, and male sexual entitlement. So while it might seem counterintuitive that sexual abuse allegations proliferate in a movement that emphasizes sexual restraint and propriety, evangelical purity culture shares troubling overlaps with other cultures in which sexual abuse is common…There’s no epidemic of sex trafficking that requires the federal government to censor online pornography or arrest, deport, or incarcerate Americans for buying or selling sex. Nevertheless, evangelicals have forged a vast network of organizations meant to “raise awareness” and lobby the U.S. government to use state violence to enforce sexual purity standards…Perhaps these organizations rely on anecdotes and flawed data year after year because it has always been vanishingly rare for a stranger to successfully kidnap someone in the United States and force them into sex slavery. The most cursory analysis reveals that nearly every case of “sex trafficking” turns out to be one of two things: It’s either actually adult, consensual sex work or it’s an instance of intimate-partner violence… The real sexual abuse epidemic isn’t men in vans holding women at gunpoint. It’s…men like Gaetz, and the ideologies of abuse that they promote.
