California Law Making Sex Workers ‘Immune’ From Arrest Nears Vote

The California State Assembly this week is expected to take up a new bill that, while not decriminalizing sex work, is designed to make the lives of sex workers safer and more free of worry about experiencing arrest. The bill would give “immunity” to sex workers to come forward to police reporting violent crimes or other serious offenses, according to Capitol Weekly. The bill, SB-233, which was already approved by the California Senate on May 2, was sponsored by San Francisco and San Mateo Democrat Scott Weiner, who cited statistics indicating that sex workers suffer violent crime at a far higher rate than the general population. In fact, those statistics show that 60 percent of sex workers say that they have suffered some sort of violence in the course of their work, with 32 percent saying that they were victims of a violent physical attack, and 29 percent reporting that they have been sexually assaulted while doing their jobs. But sex workers often fear reporting these crimes to police, due to the strong possibility that they will be arrested simply for taking part in sex work activities, arrests which are permitted under current California law. Wiener’s bill, which passed the Senate on a 28-10 vote, would “protect sex workers from arrest for sex work after they report a serious and violent crime, such as rape,” a statement from Winer’s office said. The bill also prohibits police from using the possession of condoms as criminal evidence against sex workers. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, police in Los Angeles—as well as San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C.—regularly use condoms found during on-street searches as evidence of prostitution that can be used to arrest the sex worker who was carrying them. SB-233 would put a stop to that police practice in California. “Carrying condoms to protect one’s health should never be criminalized,” Wiener said in a statement, adding that sex workers are at 13 times greater risk of contracting HIV than others in the population. “Treating condoms as evidence of sex work exacerbates an already unsafe work environment because it will discourage sex workers from practicing safer sex,” Wiener’s statement said, adding that, “California is experiencing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases at record high rates. Our policies need to promote safer sex and not deter it.”  Photo By David Monniaux / Wikimedia Commons