Barricades won’t stop world’s oldest profession

On Monday, news broke that San Francisco officials planned to install barriers along four blocks of Capp Street in the Mission, a stretch frequented by sex workers. The goal: to end the bumperto-bumper cruising of the street late at night, as customers look to pay for sex.

The narrative that has emerged in the aftermath is that of a street out of control, of a situation that’s worse than it’s ever been.

But none of this is new.

In 2018, Congress pushed forth FOSTA-SESTA, a misguided law enacted to reduce trafficking by limiting online sex work. San Franciscans who lost their income online hit the streets, and the population of visible sex workers exploded.

So did a very heated conversation. Police from Mission Station created a prostitution abatement team, sending rookie officers to Ca pp and Shot well streets to make arrests. There were heated community meetings, sex workers held protests outside Mission Station. Eventually, it all died down.

Until this week.

That physical barriers were the city’s chosen solution this time around reflects a bureaucracy that is too exhausted to be creative. You’d think at some point, San Francisco would learn that you need to address people’s needs if you want to keep them off the street.

When fences were put up around the Mission BART Station plaza last year to deter street vending, for example, sellers just set up their blankets on nearby streets. Protesters repeatedly removed the fences, frustrated with the loss of public spaces. Today, street vendors across the city are still doing what they’ve always done and no doubt will continue to do.

So long as there are economic reasons for an activity to exist, it will continue. Sex work is one of the best examples. “The world’s oldest profession” is not going to be defeated by a few barriers on four blocks of one street.

Or, in the case of Capp Street, by a horde of motorcycle police on patrol.

On Tuesday night, Celestina Pearl, outreach director for the sex worker advocacy organization St. James Infirmary, drove up to Capp Street. It was fairly quiet, she told me. Not many women were out. But cops were everywhere.

“It’s like psychological warfare,” she told me. “They yell at (sex workers) from the car with their bullhorn. They were driving really slowly and flashing yellow lights. It was very strange.”

Some of these tactics may be novel but the approach is as familiar as ever, Pearl said.

“The police let up a little bit, and then the population goes up. Police get involved again, then the population decreases. COVID and extreme poverty happens and then the population goes back up.”

What has changed is public perception.

“I heard one of the neighbors saying, ‘Oh, it’s never been like this out here.’ I think when they say that what they mean is, ‘It’s never been like this out here since I moved here in 2019.’ This is a situation that’s been happening on Capp for like 40 or 50 years.”

Advocates aren’t the only ones frustrated; the women on the street aren’t feeling understood. Pearl shared a recording with me from a sex worker she met with on Tuesday night.

“I feel like residents don’t know what really goes on,” said Queen, the woman Pearl recorded. “They will go by what they see on TV or the rumors they hear. If we are not harming anyone or doing anything besides making money we should have the right to loiter. And if someone wants to pick us up while we are loitering, that should be our choice.”

In the week since news of the barricades broke, the conversation has quickly moved from enforcement to the possible legalization of sex work and the establishment of a red-light district.

Moving away from a crackdown is a step in the right direction, but contrary to popular belief, decriminalization, not legalization, is the path many sex workers favor. Decriminalization would change the law so that prostitutes could no longer be charged with a crime for working, but it would also leave it unregulated.

Pearl argued legalization can lead to people in power exploiting those who are vulnerable. Legal brothels in Nevada are prime examples; owners have been accused of sexual assault and trafficking.

That ability to make one’s own decisions is, Pearl believes, a vital path to safety for the women on Capp Street. Criminalization drives sex work underground and into dangerous places, where women are more vulnerable to rape, abuse and trafficking.

“If sex work is decriminalized, then we can focus more on the real issue, which is consent,” she told me.

US PROStitutes Collective founder Rachel West was on the San Francisco Task Force for Prostitution in the 1990s.

“Back then, the same thing was going on,” she told me. “A controversy goes on, police come in, women are driven out into unsafe areas. And then the whole thing dies down and starts again. There’s no solution in that.”

For solutions to be effective, they have to involve the communities they’re created to serve. And while the privacy of sex workers is important for their protection, San Francisco has the means to safely solicit input. Anonymous comments at public meetings can give workers a voice in influencing policy. Surveys could be distributed by organizations and people workers trust.

“I think it’s just really unfair to make decisions about people’s lives without including any input from them,” Pearl said.