A History of Kamala Harris’ Positions on Sex Work

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris will not say whether she supports decriminalizing prostitution, according to Axios. I don’t think there’s much mystery here — Harris has a long history of hostility toward sex workers and anything that enables sex work. But when asked during her 2019 presidential campaign whether sex work should be decriminalized, Harris said, “I think so, I do it.”

Harris’ apparent U-turn on sex work is what led Axios‘ Alex Thompson tries to determine her current position.It’s one of many progressive positions Harris has abandoned or stopped talking about as she moves more to the center in her shortened race for the White House,” he wrote.

The truth is, however, that Harris never… Real supported the decriminalization of prostitution. Even when you look at her full statements on the issue from 2019, it is clear that she still supported punishing prostitution customersShe had just adopted a “Nordic model” position, in which sex workers are treated as victims (and thus can avoid arrest for selling sex), but anyone who tries to pay them is still criminally guilty.

In today’s newsletter, we look back at some of Harris’s historic statements and actions regarding sex work.

May-June 2004: With Harris as district attorney, San Francisco officers are beginning to crack down on strip club prostitution by conducting more raids, sting operations and arrests. (“The attention is a departure from former District Attorney Terence Hallinan,” noted The San Francisco Examiner.) District Attorney Harris “is concerned about the exploitation of women — that’s one of her biggest concerns,” a spokesperson told The examiner in May. “She wants to make sure she talks to the dancers and fully understands their concerns, but she also wants to make sure no laws are broken.” Harris ultimately declined to file charges against arrested dancers, saying her office was developing a more “coordinated and comprehensive approach” and convening a task force to look into “potential violations of municipal, building and criminal laws” by the clubs.

January 2005: Harris said she “supported and agreed with the spirit” of the legislation to impound the cars of people believed to be offering prostitution because it was about holding accountable “the real perpetrators of prostitution: the Johns, the pimps and the traffickers.” (“John” is an old-fashioned slang term for sex work clients that cops still like to use.)

2007–2009: Harris and Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, joined forces to shut down massage parlors where prostitution takes place. The crackdown has led to the closure of “36 massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution” in the past three years, Newsom told the Associated Press in January 2010.

2008: Harris criticized a San Francisco ballot initiative (Proposition K) that would have decriminalized prostitution and pushed for regulation of prostitution in public health services. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous, in case there’s any ambiguity about where I stand,” said Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney. “It would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come to San Francisco.” While sex worker rights advocates like Carol Leigh touted Proposition K as a matter of protecting the safety of women in sex work, Harris complained that prostitution “endangers the quality of life in a community.”

2012: Harris began targeting the online classifieds platform Backpage because of its section that allows ads for escorts, strippers and other types of “adult” work. “Backpage.com should shut itself down,” then-California Attorney General Harris said, calling its business model “profiting from the sale of people and the purchase of people.”

May 2015: A federal lawsuit filed by the Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project (ESPLERP) sought to decriminalize prostitution in California. “ESPLERP’s lawsuit argues that California’s prostitution law violates both our rights to privacy and our freedom of speech,” LA weekly was reported at the time. Harris’ office filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that criminalizing prostitution was necessary to deter “human trafficking and coercion, violence against prostitutes, the spread of AIDS and venereal disease, and crimes connected with prostitution,” as well as the “commodification of sex.” Harris’ motion made clear that criminalizing sex work was not just about preventing perceived associations of harm, but also about upholding a particular moral vision of sexual relations, citing a case that had argued “that restrictions on prostitution are driven by ‘an objection to their inherent commodification tendencies — to the buying and selling of things and activities integral to a robust concept of personhood.'” The motion also mocked the idea that sex work could be a protected form of expressive association, noting that “prostitutes are not hired for their conversational skills.” And it argued that people have no personal right to use their bodies as they see fit, noting that there is no “property interest in working as a prostitute.… There is also no protectable freedom interest in working as a prostitute.”

2016: Harris’ office declined to intervene or investigate a corruption and sexual misconduct scandal involving several Bay Area police departments, in which officers were accused of having relationships with an underage girl, extorting sex from her, tipping her off about prostitution schemes and covering up for each other.

Around the same time, Harris’ office launched a program to encourage truck drivers to report prostitution at truck stops as part of the fight against human trafficking.

This was also the year that Harris really went after Backpage. In October, while running for the U.S. Senate, Harris filed pimping charges against Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and Backpage co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin, alleging that Backpage was guilty of illegally profiting from prostitution because Backpage provided a forum for escorts to advertise, and the escort ads (which are legal) led to the exchange of sex for money (which is illegal). A judge dismissed the case.

In December 2016, Harris again filed pimping charges against Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin. A judge again dismissed the charges.

November 2017: Harris is a co-sponsor of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), the Senate version of a House of Representatives (FOSTA) bill that would eventually become law and would target online sex work advertisements.

2019: Harris said The root in February that “we really have to consider that we cannot criminalize consensual behavior” and says she believes prostitution should be decriminalized. However, she also adds that “we have to understand that it’s not that simple” and points out that as San Francisco’s district attorney she supported ramping up targeting of johns.

When asked about decriminalizing sex work during an April 2019 meeting with CNN, Harris said she disagreed with “criminalizing these women,” but that she would still prosecute clients.

Today?

Whether Harris’s position on sex work has changed since 2019 is anyone’s guess. But based on the bulk of the evidence, I think it’s safe to say that Harris does not hold a “sex work is work” position — that is, a position rooted in the ideas that sex workers have agency and bodily autonomy, and that decriminalization is a work matter, in which sex workers need rights, not salvation. It seems pretty clear that sex workers, according to Harris, are largely victims in need of government protection. They shouldn’t be arrested for the same reason you wouldn’t arrest rape victims, but she seems to think that entities that enable prostitution — whether they’re clients, massage parlors, or tech companies — deserve to be treated like criminals.

Some people see this as a liberal or compassionate position. But it’s a world in which almost all the harms of criminalization would still exist. Sex workers still couldn’t advertise and screen clients openly, still couldn’t band together for protection, still couldn’t hire bouncers or other people to help keep them safe, and so on.

The bottom line is that supporting a system that continues to criminalize prostitution clients, not supports decriminalization. Harris has never publicly supported decriminalization, so I don’t think we really need answers from her campaign to know where she stands.

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