Last year, Houston, Texas, initiated an experimental effort to force sex workers and their customers out of a small area of the city known as “The Track.” The city sued 50 sex workers, as well as 23 of their customers and 13 pimps. The idea was to ban the individuals not from sex work itself, but from “prostitution-related activities.”
Those activities included sitting at a bus stop, walking on the street and using their cell phones within the half-mile-wide area along Bissonnet Street—an area heavily populated by immigrants and ethnic minorities. But according to a report by the online magazine Slate, the case is waiting to go to trial next February, and the injunction that would have heavily fined the sex workers and their customers remains “on hold.”
But sex worker rights advocates say that Harris County, where Houston is located and which filed the suit, has already endangered sex workers simply by filing the suit.
“When you make those lists public, whether it’s a mug shot or addresses, you put someone’s life in danger, but you also run the risk of having them lose a job they do have, or of harm to the small children that live with them,” one sex worker, identified only by her initials RK, told Slate. “It increases the danger not just to the sex worker, but to their families.”
RK added that by targeting customers, the lawsuit likely scares away the prospective clients who would be most safe for sex workers. High-risk, potentially violent clients are not as likely to be deterred by the prospect of a fine.
According to Houston Chronicle reporter Gabrielle Banks, who covers the lawsuit as party of her research into The Track, the suit is highly unusual in that it classifies the sex workers as a “nuisance.”
“There are nuisance injunctions, and they are usually against places that have nuisance conduct going on—either prostitution or violence or drug dens,” Banks told the Texas Standard. “This was an injunction on people.”
Those people are frequently victims of crime themselves, Banks said.
One of the sex workers named in the lawsuit had already been murdered by the time the lawsuit was filed. Another died two weeks later.
“These are people whose lives are really on the edge,” Banks said.
A similar legal injunction against sex workers was used by Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2002. But according to assistant Milwaukee city attorney Heather Hough, that injunction was a failure, mainly because the police force was already too overburdened to devote resources to fining sex workers for “loitering.”
“It just fizzled out. I believe the order still stands, but it doesn’t really have any teeth,” Hough said.
Photo By Anders Lagerås / Wikimedia Commons
