The day after lawmakers in New York state announced new legislation that would decriminalize sex work there, as AVN.com reported, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in an interview that she supports sex work decriminalization.
Harris, like all of the United States senators and House reps now running for president, voted in favor of the FOSTA/SESTA law, which sex workers say has made their occupations more dangerous and less sustainable, in the supposed cause of curtailing “sex trafficking.”
Her support for decriminalizing sex work would appear to mark a departure for Harris, who as California attorney general in 2015 fought to quash a lawsuit against the state that brought by sex worker advocacy groups that sought to end laws against prostitution on privacy and freedom of expression grounds, according to the LA Weekly.
In an interview with The Root, Harris offered her support for sex work decriminalization—albeit with the qualification that to be considered non-criminal, sex work in her view must be fully consensual.
"I think that we have to understand, though, that it is not as simple as that. There's an ecosystem around (sex work), that involves crimes that harm people. And for those issues, I do not believe that anybody who hurts another human being or profits off of their exploitation should be free of criminal prosecution,” Harris said in the Root interview.
"But when you're talking about consenting adults? Yes, we should really consider that we can't criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed," the 54-year-old first-term California senator concluded.
Harris also said that as far back as “15 years ago” she opposed “criminalizing the women” involved in sex work, and supported instead prosecuting “the johns and the pimps.”
She also explained her support for shutting down the classified ad site Backpage.com, saying, "Backpage was providing advertisements for the sale of children. Of minors. So I called for them to be shut down. And I have no regrets about that."
In the same interview, Harris branded Donald Trump, “a racist,” something that some others in the Democratic field of presidential candidates have been reluctant to do.
She also stated her support of reparations granted to African-Americans for the effects of slavery, which among the Democratic candidates only Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has also addressed.
Photo by Office of the Attorney General of California / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
