Dear Rashida Jones, please stop

Deep sigh.

As Kate D’Adamo recently pointed out, at the same time online platforms like Facebook and Twitter blacklist, boot, and ban sex workers and *checks notes* nationally recognized child sexual abuse prevention organizations Rashida Jones, Meryl Streep, and Laverne Cox are executive producing a documentary about sex work that’s being “generously” funded by the Ford Foundation, SFFILM Invest, and The Harnisch Foundation and stars actor and non-sex worker Sarah Jones.

Rashida Jones allegedly doxxed sex workers and violated their consent while making her first concern-trolling documentary about porn. Meryl Streep advocated to keep sex work criminalized (and therefore much less safe). Laverne Cox is innocent until proven guilty but working with these two is not a good look.

I sincerely hope this documentary brings light to the ways criminalization makes sex work more dangerous.

FOSTA, for example, criminalized advertising sex work and screening clients by making website owners criminally liable if traffickers used their platforms. As a result, human trafficking increased and sex workers died.

According to “a wealth of academic research and community-based evidence,” laws prohibiting sex work directly harm the “safety, health and human rights of people who sell sex and directly contributes to human rights abuses,” write Belinda Brooks-Gordon, Marjan Wijers, and Alison Jobe in Social Sciences.

I hope the documentary points out that decriminalizing sex work makes it possible for trafficking victims and abused sex workers to seek help from police without fearing rape, arrest, trial, conviction, expensive and time-consuming diversion programs, and a criminal record. Or the fact that policing and criminalization of buying, selling, or facilitating the sale of sex is associated with three times more violence against sex workers.

I hope Jones speak to sex workers and activists like Molly Smith and Juno Mac who write in their book Revolting Prostitutes: “Decriminalizing sex work [makes] people who are selling sex, right now and tomorrow, safer while they are doing what they need to do in order to survive.”

I hope Jones explains how criminalization makes it far more difficult for sex workers to screen clients, warn each other about bad dates, check in on each other, share identifying information about clients, and otherwise keep each other safe.

I hope she talks to sex workers who have had their safe workplaces shut down by police and been forced back into the streets. Or sex workers who have been raped by police. Which is common. And in 2018, was legal in 35 states as long as the officer claimed it wasn’t rape.

I hope she explains that serial killers often target sex workers because they know police don’t consider sex workers humans and won’t investigate their murders. 

I hope she brings up the 2015 Lancet study showing that sex work decriminalization would avert 33–46% of HIV infections over the next decade. Or the 2018 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study of 33 countries showing sex workers in countries that criminalized sex work (including the Nordic Model) were two times more likely to have HIV or another STI compared with sex workers who lived in countries that decriminalized sex work. 

I hope she informs her audience that in some cities prosecutors use condoms as evidence in prostitution cases and police often harass and arrest people for carrying condoms. A recent Human Rights Watch report found that, unsurprisingly, this discouraged sex workers from carrying condoms and made it harder for public health outreach workers to effectively distribute condoms. 

But I bet she won’t.

And if you’re not going to talk about criminalization — by far the biggest threat to sex worker health and safety — you shouldn’t be talking about sex work. That Ford Foundation, SFFILM Invest, and The Harnisch Foundation money should be going to sex worker filmmakers. We are more than capable of telling our own stories, thank you very much. So please stop speaking for us, rescuers. We don’t need more concern-trolling sob stories that will lead to more laws that make our lives more dangerous. What we need are rights. So if you’re not supporting decriminalization, you’re not supporting us.