iftttwall

After nearly a year of contentious and high-profile debate from concerned parties, the worldwide human-rights organization Amnesty International has released its official policy paper on sex-worker rights, which calls for the global decriminalization of adult prostitution. The main focus of the document is identifying “the most prominent barriers to the realization of sex workers’ human rights and underlin[ing] states’ obligations to address them.” Among these obligations: 

• Repeal existing laws and refrain from introducing new laws that criminalize or penalize directly or in practice the consensual exchange of sexual services between adults for remuneration;
• Refrain from the discriminatory enforcement against sex workers of other laws, such as those on vagrancy, loitering, and immigration requirements;
• Ensure the meaningful participation of sex workers in the development of law and policies that directly affect their lives and safety; 
• Refocus laws away from catch-all offences that criminalize most or all aspects of sex work and towards laws and policies that protect sex workers’ health and safety and that oppose all acts of exploitation and trafficking in commercial sex (including of children); 
• Ensure that there are effective frameworks and services that allow people to leave sex work if and when they choose; and 
• Ensure that sex workers have equal access to justice, health care and other public services, and to equal protection under the law.

Read the whole policy here. It was “developed in recognition of the high rates of human rights abuses experienced globally by individuals who engage in sex work; a term that Amnesty International uses only in regard to consensual exchanges between adults,” states Amnesty at its start. And consent is emphasized throughout the document, with Amnesty pointing out that understandings of consent in the context of sex work must prioritize “the views, perspectives and experiences of individuals selling sex.” While that might not sound terribly radical, people engaged in prostitution have long been stereotyped by police, government agents, and clients as either “always consent[ing] to sex (because they may engage in sex frequently for their work) or, conversely, that sex workers can never consent to sex (because no one could rationally consent to selling sex).” 

Amnesty concludes that laws criminalizing commercial sex between consenting adults have “a foreseeably negative impact on a range of human rights,” including “the rights to life, liberty, autonomy and security of person; the right to equality and non-discrimination; the right to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; the right to privacy… [and] the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Furthermore, criminalization “creates an environment where law enforcement officers and other officials can perpetrate violence, harassment and extortion against sex workers with impunity.” And because sex workers fear violence and arrest by police, they are leery of reporting crimes against themselves or others in their community, offering “impunity to perpetrators of violence and abuse.” 

The response in media and among activists has been predictably mixed (and heated). 

The group formerly known as Morality in Media put out a press release accusing Amnesty of “defending pimps and sex traffickers,” despite Amnesty’s strong condemnation of any forms of sex work that involve violence or non-consent. Socialist feminist Laurie Penny called Amnesty’s decision “great news,” but also complained that instead of focusing on sex work as a specific entity, we should be focusing on “the abolition of work in general.” Professor Allison Bass, author of the 2015 book Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, wrote at the Huffington Post that “my hat’s off to Amnesty for having the guts to stand up and shout the truth. I hope that some day the state and federal governments in this country will listen.” As for the word on Twitter… 

Thank you @amnesty for supporting the human rights, dignity, and autonomy of sex workers. #sexwork #humanrights https://t.co/19Tczy3N5m

— Alex S. Morgan (@Alex_S_Morgan) May 26, 2016

Women’s rights group @genderhealth applauds @amnesty policy on #sexworker rights https://t.co/JV7Dq8fP4P #BreakBarriers #Decrim #HumanRights

— Serra Sippel (@SerraSippel) May 26, 2016

This is an important & powerful statement. Thank you @amnesty for making data-driven, harm reduction recommendations https://t.co/6BTn7bRSus

— Mike Crawford (@BringMeTheAx) May 26, 2016

Prostitution Is Sexploitation; Decriminalizing Helps Pimps & Sex Buyers! #NoAmnestyForPimps #AmnestyInternational https://t.co/gLLHhVNn8u

— Rachel Moran (@RachelRMoran) May 26, 2016

NSWP Welcomes Amnesty International’s Policy on Protecting the Human Rights of Sex Workers https://t.co/PO8lVf6scn via @GlobalSexWork

— Kate (@KateDAdamo) May 26, 2016

@amnesty well done for listening to what #Sexworkers want not their detractors, #decriminalisation is the best way forward! @Maggie_McNeill

— Queens Of The Realm (@QueensofRealm) May 26, 2016

.@amnesty You’re a fake agency run by #pimps who want to legalize #pimps right to sell our children as sex slaves & men’s right to buy them!

— Diana f/k/a (@desifoxx) May 26, 2016

With @amnesty‘s report on human rights violations visited on sex workers, will its decriminalization mainstream into the #CJReform movement?

— Meretricious Lobby (@MerryMissLissie) May 26, 2016

In addition to the policy reccomendation, Amnesty International released four location-specific sex work reports on Wednesday: 

• The human cost of criminalising sex work in Buenos Aires
• Criminalising sex work in Hong Kong
• Criminalisation of sex work in Norway
• Criminalising sex work in Papua New Guinea

The Norway report has been getting the most attention, due the fact that Norway’s model of punishing prostitution clients more harshly than those selling sex (also known as the Swedish model) has become popular far outside Scandinavia. Canada adopted a similar model in 2014, and perversions of the model have made their way to various parts of the U.S. as well. 

“The legal model adopted by the Norwegian government is promoted as one that encourages protection of people who sell sex, shields them from criminalization and instead shifts the criminal burden of blame to buyers of sex,” states the Amnesty report on Norway. But this isn’t how things work in practice found researchers after interviewing an array of Norwegian sex workers, lawyers, government officials, and social -ervices workers. In fact, human rights abuses against people who sell sex in Norway “are compounded by and, in some cases, directly caused by the legal framework” there. 

“The claims that individual sex workers are not criminalized or penalized under the ‘Nordic Model,'” are simply untrue, according to the organization’s research. “Oslo police have over the last decade adopted a ‘preventative policing’ approach to sex work which involves the enforcement of lower level offences as ‘stress methods’ to disrupt, destabilize and increase the pressure on those operating in the sex sector. One academic researcher describes how police sources ‘in Oslo often use terms like they are going to ‘crush’ or ‘choke’ the [prostitution] market, and unsettle, pressure and stress the people in the market’. Amnesty International has also found that many sex workers remain subject to a high level of surveillance by police,” in part so police can identify sex buyers in order to fine them.

The conventional wisdom among staunch Democrats and much of the elite liberal commentariat is that the once-lovable insurgent campaign run by Vermont’s most famous democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is well past its sell-by date, and that it’s time for him to embrace “party unity” and convince his supporters to vote for Hillary Clinton. 

The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson says he “shares much of Sanders’ political philosophy” but that by keeping his word to his supporters that he will stay in the race until the nomination is clinched by someone (which means until the Democratic National Convention in July, because superdelegates don’t cast their votes until then), Sanders is playing a “dangerous game.”

Like Robinson, Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie describes Sanders’ bucking of the establishment as a “scorched earth” endeavor. Also in the Post, Dana Milbank compares Sanders to that all-time Democratic boogeyman who had the audacity to challenge the two-party system: Ralph Nader.

The anxiety of mainstream Democrats will surely be exacerbated by Sanders’ full-court press in California, where he continues to draw huge crowds, and where a primary victory for Sanders still wouldn’t put him in reach of the nomination but would provide all the argument he needs to continue his efforts to radically transform the Democratic Party.

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that Sanders’ “newly resolute attitude” is “the cumulative result of months of anger at the national Democratic Party over a debate schedule that his campaign said favored Mrs. Clinton; a fund-raising arrangement between the party and the Clinton campaign; the appointment of fierce Clinton partisans as leaders of important convention committees,” among other things.

Sanders’ deliberately outside-the-party-mainstream campaign intends to wring every last drop of legitimacy it can squeeze out of the primary process. Which is why in Kentucky the secretary of state agreed to his campaign’s request for a recanvass of all the voting machines and absentee ballots in the state. In the best case scenario for Sanders, all this effort will net him is a single additional pledged delegate. 

It’s no secret that Sanders, his staff, and many of his supporters feel no sense of loyalty to a party he is only nominally (maybe?) a part of. Unsurprisingly, this makes party loyalists both angry and uncomfortable, because they need Sanders’ legion of voters to stay within the party’s tent and turn out on Election Day in November.

But what really makes Democrats nervous is that Sanders has revealed something they don’t want to admit: Hillary Clinton is bad at political campaigning. 

This is the fourth political campaign Clinton has run, but only the second time she’s faced a challenger backed by a significant constituency. In 2000, she ran for Senate against Rep. Rick Lazio, who had to scramble his bid together rather late in the process after then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani aborted his prospective run due to prostate cancer. Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer was the sacrificial lamb thrown to the wolves by the state Republican Party in 2006, when he lost to Clinton by 36 percentage points. And we all know how Clinton’s “inevitable” run for the presidential nomination went in 2008.

But at least in 2008 defeated Clinton supporters could comfort themselves in the knowledge that they lost to Barack Obama — a young, handsome, gifted orator with the chance to make history as the first African-American president. This time around, the fact that their candidate has had to vigorously compete with a gruff and unkempt protest politician — one with no record of success getting legislation passed, a history of praising communist dictators, and a disquieting lack of interest in foreign policy — is truly infuriating to Team Clinton. 

Recent polling puts Clinton’s unfavorables at near-Trump levels, and she was also perceived as not “honest and trustworthy” by 64 percent of those polled by CBS News and the Times. It’s really a stretch to pin those kind of numbers on Sanders, who has only been on the national scene for about a year. Clinton, on the other hand, has been a national figure for 25 years, and during that time she has made her own legacy, which most people clearly do not view with the same rose-colored glasses donned by her supporters.

Moreover, for all the recent rancor between the two Democratic candidates’ campaigns, Sanders hasn’t been especially hard on Clinton directly. He could have gone after her “damn emails,” but early on stated he wouldn’t and has kept that promise. A “scorched earth” candidate would surely make an issue out his opponent’s ongoing FBI investigation, and you can be sure Donald Trump will not be so deferential.

All the hand-wringing over a protracted primary fight that will supposedly damage the party’s prospects in the general election appears to be much ado about nothing. 

The Times‘ polling shows 72 percent of Sanders’ supporters say they’ll vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee, and that number that will almost certainly continue to rise once the bloodletting of the general election begins. The Times also reports, “fewer than half of Democratic voters say their party is divided, and eight in 10 are hopeful about its future. More than eight in 10 think Mrs. Clinton can unite the party after the primaries end next month.”

The political horserace often turns otherwise rational thinkers into superfans, and the civil wars of party primaries are almost always the bloodiest battles. But for all the bluster of the #ImWithHer and #BernieorBust crowds, it’s not a prolonged nomination process that’s likely to hurt the party in November, it’s the fact that Hillary Clinton’s biggest liability on the campaign trail is always Hillary Clinton.

Exactly how many Americans identify as a different gender than the one they were labeled as at birth? In fact, no one knows.

Both government and private-sector researchers have been trying to improve their methods of measuring the number of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people—not to mention the increasing cadre of mostly young people who identify as something else altogether, like “genderfluid” or “non-binary.” But it’s tough, in part because the language isn’t always established enough to allow pollsters to craft a question that will clearly convey to survey respondents what is being asked.

GfK, a big German market research firm, has been working with its web survey platform, Knowledge Panel, to try to get at the answer, explained Frances M. Barlas a couple of weeks ago at the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) annual conference in Austin. What GfK’s research team has found is that some people appear not to be clear on what the word transgender even means.

In 2010, the company conducted an online survey in which 1.1 percent of respondents answered that they were trans. That seemed high compared to previous estimates; the leading expert on measuring the GLBT community, UCLA’s Gary Gates, for example, guesses that trans people make up more like one-third of a percent of the population.

Indeed, Barlas’ colleagues found that when they followed up with the group who initially identified that way, just 30 percent re-confirmed their response. “That’s troubling,” she said during the panel: Generally, a confirmation rate of even 80 percent suggests a question isn’t doing a good job of measuring what it’s supposed to.

When the researchers dug further, asking the respondents who initially answered that they were transgender how they would define the term, quite a few of them gave answers that Barlas and her team deemed “incorrect.” Some knew, of course, that it signifies that a person’s gender identity differs from the sex on their original birth certificate. (That’s more or less right.) But a lot of the people who had initially said they were trans replied to the definition question by saying they didn’t know what the word meant. Still others conflated it with different concepts.

“A good number of folks thought it meant something along the lines of being straight or attracted to the opposite sex,” she said. “Some [said] bi-sexual or intersex. And then kind of a mix of other answers, like ‘someone who is content with their sex’ or ‘darned if I know but I assume it means my ability to work with both genders.'”

It’s just another reminder that trans issues aren’t just not a top priority for many Americans—in some cases, they’re not on the radar at all.

The federal government is trying to have it both ways. Either Title IX—a federal statutes prohibiting sex discrimination in schools—requires educational institutional to prevent sexual harassment on a subjective basis, or it doesn’t. 

Here’s the problem: the Obama administration has issued guidance to schools asserting that they should accommodate the needs of transgender students, and that said accommodations are required by Title IX. Schools must allow kids to use the facilities that correspond with their gender identity—their stated gender preference—rather than their biological sex. 

This is an obviously strained interpretation of Title IX. For reference, here’s what the statute says: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” 

Gender and sex are obviously not the same thing, so the fact the federal government is construing sex to mean gender strikes me as a straightforwardly incorrect interpretation of the statute. 

That’s not all. The government’s guidance on trans kids and bathrooms—which I would support, in some form, if the administration was not torturing the law to produce it—simply contradicts its guidance on sexual harassment. 

The Education Department has informed colleges that Title IX requires them to protect their students from sex-based discrimination, violence, and sexual harassment. It has also opined that harassment need not be objectionable to a reasonable person to qualify, and it need not be severe and pervasive. Harassment, the guidance suggests, is based on the subjective feelings of the victim. 

For example: sexually-suggestive jokes are routinely reported to college administrators as examples of sexual harassment. 

Here’s where the contradiction lies: If sexual jokes could be said to be a form of sexual harassment under Title IX, isn’t it obviously the case that forcing someone to share a locker room with a person of the opposite biological sex is also a form of sexual harassment? Remember, under the government’s guidance, harassment is in the eyes of harassed, even if it seems silly to an objective third-party. 

Harvard University Law Professor Jeannie Suk highlighted this inconsistency in a recent New Yorker piece: 

But there is also a growing sense that some females will not feel safe sharing bathrooms, shower rooms, or locker rooms with males. And if a female student claimed that a bathroom or locker room that her school had her share with male students caused her to feel sexually vulnerable and created a hostile environment, the complaint would be difficult to dismiss, particularly since the federal government has interpreted Title IX broadly and said that schools must try to prevent a hostile environment. This is not wholly hypothetical. Brandeis University found a male student responsible for sexual misconduct for looking at his boyfriend’s genitals while both were using a communal school shower. The disciplined student then sued the school for denying him basic fairness in its disciplinary process, and a federal court recently refused to dismiss the suit. 

Continuing to have segregated bathrooms could also put schools in a bind on Title IX compliance. According to the federal government, a transgender girl who is told to use the boys’ locker room, or even a separate and private stall, instead of the girls’ facility, has a claim that the school is violating Title IX. A non-transgender girl who’s told she must share a locker room with boys may also have a claim that the school is violating Title IX. But would she not have a similar claim about having to share with students who identify as girls but are biologically male? Well, not if her discomfort and “emotional strain” should be disregarded. But this week, in a letter, dozens of members of Congress asked the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education to explain why they should be disregarded. The federal government is putting schools in a position where they may be sued whichever route they choose. (Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, declined to comment on this issue.) 

I covered the Brandeis case that Suk is referring to here. Like Suk, I’m concerned that the government is putting schools in the impossible position of having to accommodate the mutually exclusive needs of students. 

But this is what happens when the executive branch ignores the legislative process and instead broadens the scope of an existing law without any input from the public or Congress. 

As my colleague Scott Shackford reports, several states are now suing the feds for forcing them to follow a strained interpretation of Title IX. I have no doubt that much of this opposition to following the law stems from societal animosity to trans people, who fully deserve equal rights, equal treatment, and dignity. I’m generally in favor of letting trans kids use the locker room that makes them more comfortable, as long as schools retain the ability to prevent genuine disruptions and misuse of the policy. But the uncomfortable truth is that the states are right: the federal government’s Title IX guidance is reckless, inconsistent, and legally flawed.