Back in February, as AVN.com reported, a group of New York state lawmakers announced that they planned to introduce landmark measures to roll back laws against sex work in that state, putting New York in the vanguard of what appears to be a burgeoning movement to decriminalize prostitution.
On Monday, the lawmakers followed through on their promise, introducing a 13-page bill that would abolish criminal penalties for selling and purchasing sexual services, as well as changing laws that, advocates say, unfairly target sex workers.
Among the laws that would be rolled back under what has been titled the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act are laws against public “loitering for prostitution,” and those against “promoting prostitution,” which, according to a New Republic analaysis of the bill, “can be used to criminalize any group of sex workers who work together, whether that is in the same workplace or remotely by helping each other advertise or screen potential clients.”
Audacia Ray, a former sex worker who now serves on the Decrim NY steering committee, which helped spearhead the bill, told the New Republic, “This is not just about decriminalizing workers or the absence of criminal codes. It’s about making sure people who work in the sex trades have access to making a living in the sex industry in a way that is not a crime.”
The bill also allows sex workers and their customers who have previously been convicted of a crime that would now be reclassified as legal by the bill to potentially have those convictions vacated, according to a BuzzFeed account. The bill also revises language in the New York state code to make references to those who purchase and peddle sexual services gender-neutral.
The New York bill would become the most comprehensive sex work decriminalization law in the country, though Washington, D.C., has introduced a similar local bill. As AVN.com has reported, prostitution was, in fact, legal in the state of Rhode Island from 1980 to 2009—but that legalization was due to a loophole in legislation that lawmakers mistakenly failed to close. The state is now considering a “study” to explore decriminalizing sex work once again, but for real this time.
Photo by Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons
