WASHINGTON — A large coalition of social scientists have issued a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris asking the administration to support evidence-based sex work policies like decriminalization. The coalition, Scientists for Sex Worker Rights, released the letter and announced their organization’s formation on International Sex Worker Rights Day, on Mar. 3.

“Given your public commitment to science-driven policy, we are hopeful that this new administration will consider the wealth of empirical data that unequivocally shows that the criminalization of the consensual exchange of adult sexual services causes severe harms, the burden of which falls mainly on women, people of color, transgender and non-binary workers, people with disabilities, economically marginalized workers and community members, and does not prevent or minimize human trafficking,” the signors of the letter argue in the letter to the president and vice.

The core group of Scientists for Sex Worker Rights feature Dr. Barbara G. Brents and Dr. Kate Hausbeck Korgan of the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Dr. Angela Jones of the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York; and Dr. Ronald Weitzer of the Department of Sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The four organizers all have doctorates in sociology and have published several books and peer-review articles on the facets of consensual sex work and sex trafficking.

The letter continues: “The criminalization of sex work increases risk and makes it impossible for those who experience victimization and violence to safely come forward to seek meaningful help from law enforcement or other agencies. It also perpetuates stigma and prevents sex workers from equal access to institutions such as banking, finance, and housing. The result is systemic inequality and inequitable outcomes.”

“We decided to launch this campaign because, for too long, policies regarding sex work have been largely evidence-free, and we saw an urgent need to intervene in the debate by re-linking scientific research with public policy,” Weitzer said, according to reporting from Elizabeth Nolan-Brown of Reason.com.

In the letter, the coalition also askes the president and the vice to oppose specific policies outlined in the potentially unconstitutional FOSTA/SESTA legislation former President Donald Trump signed into law in 2018. Like many, the scientists argue that FOSTA/SESTA was “enacted with good intention to address the dangers of online sex trafficking.” However, the version of the bill that Trump signed into law came at the cost of further preventing trafficked women and children’s identifications. Plus, the legislation places consensual adult workers are placed at a “severely heightened risk.”

“This legislation essentially forces sex workers underground and into more risky transactions, making them more vulnerable to exploitation by pimps and other nefarious third parties and put consensual adult workers at severely heightened risk,” notes the letter. “So, while we agree that sex trafficking is a scourge, thwarting human trafficking must not come at the expense of hard-working Americans laboring in the multi-billion-dollar commercial sex industries.”

From the same point of view, the letter also asks Biden and Harris to “commit to protecting the First Amendment and free speech” by working to stop the passage of bills like the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act (SISEA) or the EARN IT Act. SISEA was introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, and Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, on Dec. 18, 2020.

The Free Speech Coalition released a policy statement opposing the bill on Dec. 23. YNOT reported then that the coalition found SISEA to be “wildly unconstitutional and, if implemented, would effectively silence sexual speech online.”

The EARN IT Act was proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, early last year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that the EARN IT Act “violates the Fourth Amendment by turning online platforms into government actors that search users’ accounts without a warrant based on probable cause.”

Instead, the scientists in the letter call for a pragmatic approach that considers the peer-reviewed and practical evidence of decriminalizing sex work. This includes the White House potentially backing the SESTA/FOSTA Examination of Secondary Effects for Sex Workers Study Act, or the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, to determine the impacts of the aggressive policy laid out in FOSTA.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, is the primary sponsor behind the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act. Khanna told other adult industry news organizations that the need to study the impacts of FOSTA is required to identify further a baseline of what’s considered evidence-based in the bill and what recommendations can be made to amend the law equitably.

“President Biden and his administration have [a] historic opportunity to create a commission comprised of leading social scientists, NGOs, and grass-roots sex worker-led organizations to partner with Congressional leaders and advance new science-informed policies that empower and support all individuals engaged in sex work,” Korgan, a primary organizer, said in a separate statement.

Scientist stock photo by Chokniti Khongchum from Pexels