Six Democratic 2020 presidential candidates have publicly announced their support for some type of sex work decriminalization, but one of those candidates now admits he does not have an answer to the question of how to define the difference between sex work and sex “trafficking.” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was asked the question twice at a campaign stop in Nevada on Saturday, according to a CNN report—both times simply declining to give a clear answer.
After initially stating earlier this week that his position on sex work decriminalization was “a good question” for which he had no answer, Sanders three weeks ago became just the sixth in the field of 24 Democratic candidates to state his support for decriminalization, as AVN.com reported, following Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren by just hours.
California Senator Kamala Harris and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker earlier declared their support for decriminalization, as AVN.com reported.
The other two candidates to take a pro-decriminalization stance are Hawaii congressional rep Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently polling at 1.1 percent in an average of all polls compiled by Real Clear Politics, and 89-year-old former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, whose poll numbers appear to be somewhere below 0.1 percent.
Sanders was appearing July 6 in Nevada, the only current state in which sex work is legal in some counties, under specific conditions. He was asked by an audience member, “How are you going to proceed with not conflating sex work with human trafficking?” according to The Nevada Independent. He was also asked about the FOSTA/SESTA law that took effect last year, supposedly designed to curb online sex trafficking.
But as AVN.com has covered, sex workers say that the FOSTA law has made their occupations both less financially adequate, and more dangerous. Like all of the current members of the Senate or House now running for president, Sanders voted in favor of FOSTA/SESTA last year.
“The answer is we’re going to take a hard look at it, but I’m not going to give you a definitive answer now,” Sanders answered when pressed on the question, after taking a pass the first time it was asked. “It’s a complicated issue but there are two sides to it and I promise you we will take a hard look at it.”
Sanders added that, “what you don’t want, and I don’t want, is an increase in sex trafficking.”
In a later interview with the Nevada Independent, Sanders said that he had been “busy running around the country,” and therefore had not had the time to “study” the issue of how sex work differs from sex trafficking.
Photo By Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
