Sex worker activists (who want the sex trade to be treated like any other work) and prostitution abolitionists (who want to see it disappear entirely) don\u2019t agree on much, but they do on this: Giving people charged with prostitution a felony also gives them a criminal record that makes other work almost impossible to find, thus trapping them into selling sex in perpetuity.<\/p>\n
And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution \u2014 where nonviolent, mostly female prostitution offenders are serving in state prison \u2013 a battle to lessen criminal penalties has been joined by an unlikely ally. Conservative lawmakers, looking at price tags, are also receptive to changing the way we see \u2013 and treat \u2014 people working in prostitution.<\/p>\n
The latest example of this shift to view people in prostitution as victims rather than criminals is last week\u2019s passage of a bill removing the felony penalty in Illinois \u2014 which has some of the harshest prostitution laws in the country. The legislation sailed through the Illinois Legislature, after a decade of work by End Demand Illinois, a coalition that wants to see prostitution eliminated. The highest penalty for selling sex in the state will now be a Class A misdemeanor.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are very, very few crimes, in my view, that exist in the criminal code, that you can truly say in this instance, the perpetrator is likely as much a victim as they are a perpetrator,\u201d said Illinois state Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and former prosecutor, when the bill was being debated. \u201cPeople who would disagree with that would say, \u2018there\u2019s a notion of personal responsibility here. They decided to do it.\u2019 And you know, in the strictest of legal terms, there\u2019s no doubt that that\u2019s true. But the situations that most of these young ladies find themselves in are unlike any situations that I bet any of us have encountered, and I hope none of us ever have to encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n