John Oliver addressed the issue of sex work and how it’s treated within the US on his weekly HBO show Last Week Tonight.
The host started by saying that sex is “a topic that historically we’ve not been very good at talking about” but that sex work is poorly handled in America as a result of local, state and federal laws.
“Everything about the way we regulate sex work in this country is confusing and counter-productive,” he said. It’s either “demonising, patronising or just plain wrong”.
Sex work has “always been a part of society” and sex workers “are not a monolith” but that’s often not taken into consideration.
While police “position themselves as saviours for sex workers”, they are mostly “arresting and jailing them”. He then showed footage of an interview that implied that sex workers should be thankful for police intervention but “there isn’t a thank you section in Hallmark called ‘for your arresting officer’”.
He used examples of police who have had sex with sex workers during sex operations and said that between 2016 and 2020, almost everyone arrested by the NYPD for selling sex was a person of color.
Police often use loitering for the purpose of prostitution as a reason to arrest which is “basically a stop and frisk policy for sex workers” and based on vague judgments. Cops have also seized condoms as evidence and criminalising condoms has led them to go without. “It’s a crime to carry condoms sounds like the name of a Christian boy band’s self-released album,” he joked.
Sex workers have also had to register as sex offenders.
“I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture here,” he said. “Sex work can be dangerous and we need to be talking constructively about how to make it safer in every possible way.” But too often it’s conflated with sex trafficking and “the implicit suggestion is that no sex worker has ever entered the trade by choice”.
One woman was charged with trafficking herself, while shutting down sex workers on sites like Craigslist and Backpage has removed a much safer route to get clients. “It is no surprise that many workers who have been robbed or abused by clients report that they feel they can’t turn to the police for help,” he said.
While the Nordic model, used in Sweden, Norway and France, criminalises the buying of sex but not the selling, it makes it difficult to vet clients.
Legalisation, used in Amsterdam and some counties in Nevada, turn sex workers into independent contractors but they have to work at regulated brothels that often take as much as 60% of earnings.
He believes the solution is decriminalisation, used in New Zealand, which gives sex workers fundamental rights and is a direction for the US to strive toward.
There is always the concern that some people feel economically pushed into sex work but “the only way to make sure people have a choice in how they earn money is to make housing affordable, healthcare accessible and to not burden marginalised people.”
• This article was amended on 1 March 2022 to remove Finland from a list of some of the countries that have adopted “the Nordic model” approach to sex work.
