Policy by the People: The OSWC Legal Mapping Guide

Imagine a roadmap that not only repeals bad laws affecting sex workers, but also fundamentally reshapes the landscape of safety, dignity, and rights for all people in the sex trade, workers and survivors of trafficking alike? And, what if, that project served as a best practice for policy change, led by people affected by those policies? This vision became reality last year when the Oregon Safer Workers Coalition (OSWC), led by co-founder Kate Marquez alongside a diverse team of lawyers, sex workers, and survivors, completed the groundbreaking Legal Mapping Guide. This guide is meant to ultimately help define ways to decriminalize sex work (decrim) in Oregon state and think about meaningful incremental reforms along the way. New Moon provided funding for this project because we see it as as providing an example for assessing policy strategies to advance sex workers rights in regions across the US.

Aside from a brief, accidental loophole that created decriminalization of indoor prostitution in Rhode Island, and the presence of legalized brothels in specific counties in Nevada, there has not before been clear policy choices (or even guidelines) that expressly revoke criminal penalties for adult consensual sex work (prostitution, specifically). Though the mapping guide is specific to Oregon, it serves as a template for other localities to think through what decriminalization, or even incremental reform, could look like. OSWC led a participatory process that included close to a dozen people with lived experience (as sex workers as survivors of trafficking and exploitation in the sex trade) to serve as advisors to and stewards of the process.

While implementing the Legal Mapping project, the OSWC team learned some critical lessons about the landscape for decrim legislation. First, there is no one way to decriminalize sex work. “This may have to look different in different places,” Kate said. Second, the criminal law is not the only place where reform needs to happen. “When we talk about decrim, we have all these models... But we think there are some issues that decrim alone doesn’t address, including [the right to] advertising, regulations around STIs, housing, discrimination, etc. Some of this will have to look to family law,” Kate said.

For context, sex workers’ rights organizations such as OSWC overwhelmingly support decriminalization, but the path to achieving it varies significantly by location. Unlike drug policy, which follows a federal framework based on substance classification, sex work lacks any overarching federal legal structure. While federal laws criminalize sex trafficking, the legality of prostitution itself is left to states, counties, and cities—resulting in a patchwork of highly localized laws that dictate how, and how severely, sex work is punished. For activists, this means efforts to legalize or decriminalize sex work must be tailored to each community’s specific legal landscape. Additionally, sex worker rights advocates must consider trends in policing and enforcement occuring in their jurisdiction. As an example, Oregon’s police force primarily target potential clients of sex workers in sting operations, while in certain districts in Florida, police conduct arrest “sweeps” of sex workers operating outside, despite prostitution being illegal in both states.

The vast majority of policies around the sex trade, regardless of state, are made without the inclusion of sex workers perspectives. New Moon believes that lived experience should be at the center of policy-making, especially that which involves criminalization; OSWC’s Legal Mapping Guide is a great example of how sex workers and survivors are working together to create meaningful change that policy-makers could learn from.

 Plans for the Guide include presentations to partner organizations, and eventually the introduction of a bill to decriminalize using the legal frameworks provided in the guide. “I don’t know if the political climate is going to allow for that the passage of any statewide decrim law, so even if there’s no bill proposals at a state level, OSWC is committed to doing this work at every local level that we can,” said Elle Stanger, co-founder of OSWC.

Running parallel to this project is another endeavor meant to capitalize on the Legal Mapping Guide’s momentum, which is an Impact Report on the criminalization of adult consensual sex work and sex trafficking in Oregon state.

This new project will attempt to collect baseline data about how criminalization of prostitution and related activities affect both adult consensual sex workers and also survivors of sex trafficking, which will help legislators and the community understand the true impact of pre-and post decriminalization efforts in the state. According to Kate, this data will help Oregon to be uniquely situated to understand these issues, empirically, helping to reframe the debate about the decriminalization of prostitution.

New Moon plans to assist OSWC in attracting attention to these parallel projects, as we see them as incredibly additive to the movement for sex workers’ rights.

 Check out their Legal Mapping Guide and accompanying videos to learn more.