Free to Prostitute?

Phoenix, Arizona, which has some of the nation’s severest laws against sexual solicitation, has put into place a controversial project that has drawn both praise and condemnation. For two days out of the year, undercover police officers go online and travel to red-light districts, in an attempt to snare and detain women suspected of prostitution. The police handcuff suspects and place them in custody, although law-enforcement officials delay arresting those suspects who have no pending warrants and no drugs in their possession. To those who qualify, officials offer an alternative “diversion” program that, if successfully completed, spares them from legal charges. During their detention, they are offered a variety of health and housing services, as well as a hot meal, clean clothes, and toiletries. Thereafter, they are required to complete a social-retraining course that can last up to six months.

This essay weighs the and benefits of the Phoenix program, in an attempt to determine its impact on the dignity and rights of those apprehended. Ultimately, this essay considers prostitution itself. Lurking throughout is the question of whether or not the program serves the interests of the individuals concerned and the society they inhabit.

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The police, prosecutors, and Arizona State University social workers who designed Project Rose (Reaching Out to the Sexually Exploited) defend it as an innovation in ameliorating the misery associated with the selling of sex. They recognize that sex workers are victims as much as criminals, they say, and so they offer suspects a rare opportunity to change their lives. The project’s designers hope that histories of violence, drug addiction, poverty, and sex trafficking can be reversed through timely, comprehensive intervention.

Detainees are not hauled to a police station. Rather, they are brought to Phoenix’s Bethany Baptist Church and questioned in a prosecution room where a cross hangs prominently on a wall. The social retraining course that follows is overseen by Catholic Charities of Phoenix. The project exemplifies the sort of “faith-based initiative” lauded by many American citizens and government officials over the past twenty-five years.

Newspaper Account of Project Rose 

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Detractors of Project Rose raise three basic objections. One is that detainees are denied the civil liberties constitutionally guaranteed to criminal suspects. Although the women apprehended are not initially arrested, they are handcuffed and confined within the project’s “command post,” where they are confronted by a project volunteer and a city prosecutor. They are prevented from consulting with a defense attorney, even though they have been denied the constitutional right to leave freely. Those who refuse to undergo the diversion program face criminal charges of “manifestation,” which bring a mandatory minimum prison sentence. With these conditions in mind, Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, complains that the project tramples over detainees’ civil rights. 

The second basic objection is that the program violates the Constitution’s prohibition against a government establishment of religion. Some observers find it objectionable that detainees are brought to a church facility to decide whether or not to accept the social services being offered, and that, if the detainees agree to accept those services, they must specifically authorize Catholic Charities to enroll them in its diversion program.

“Phoenix is essentially telling criminal suspects that they can go to church or go to jail,” charged Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “The government has absolutely no right to force anyone into a position like that. These suspects shouldn’t be coerced into participating in a program that might not reflect their own beliefs.”

Comments From Americans United 

The two objections raised above are legitimate and point to fatal flaws in Project Rose. It is unacceptable for law enforcement to apprehend and detain suspects as if they have been arrested while failing to extend the constitutional protections that attend arrest. Moreover, to detain suspects in a church and then coerce them into undergoing a program carried out by a religious organization is tantamount to establishment of a government-sponsored religion. This violates everything the First Amendment implies. As soon as suit is filed against Project Rose, the courts must find it—at it now exists—a blatant violation of civil rights.

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The third and more complicated concern is that any program aiming to constrain or reprogram sex workers violates their basic human rights. This was the view of an editorial in Affilia: The Journal of Women in Social Work.  The authors, two Portland State University social-work scholars, argued that Project Rose deprives its targets of their dignity and rights as individuals. "We challenge the assumption that arresting (or participating in the arrest of) people 'for their own good' constitutes good or ethical social work practice," the authors claimed. "Rather, we believe that targeting people for arrest under the guise of helping them violates numerous ethical standards, as well as the humanity of people engaged in the sex industry."

Editorial in Affilia 

Project Rose comes under similar attack by the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), which describes itself as “a national grassroots movement that focuses on improving the lives of sex industry workers by promoting safety, dignity and diversity in sex work, and fostering an environment that affirms individual choices and occupational rights.” SWOP rejects Project Rose’s claim of providing services to those it targets.  “Project ROSE and programs like it violate ethical standards in social work and perpetuate the idea that individuals who sell sex are not human. Further, Project ROSE frames its work as saving sex workers—who are stigmatized as scarred victims— rather than people with civil and human rights (the right to work, the right to be free from violence, the right to due process and much more).”

Sex Workers Outreach Project 

This third objection—that constraining or reprograming sex workers violates their basic human rights—proceeds from fundamental conceptions of sexual behavior.  These begin with the inherent dignity in all consensual sexual acts and the inviolable liberty due sex workers. Their dignity is violated, the argument goes, not by their livelihood, but by efforts to squash their livelihood and to remake their values and desires. According to this third objection, Project Rose could not pass ethical muster even if its church-state and criminal-rights infirmities were remedied. To be defensible, the project—indeed, any effort at thwarting sexual commerce—would need demonstrably to honor the humanity of the sex workers it apprehends.

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Officials who oversee Project Rose defend it as an innovative approach to saving women from a self-destructive lifestyle. By offering suspects basic human services (public health, public housing, a hot meal, clean clothes, toiletries, and a social retraining program), officials claim that they offer suspects a rare opportunity to change their entire lives.

Law enforcement officials such as City of Phoenix Prosecutor Aarón J. Carreón-Aínsa believe that prostitution is a scourge that society needs to try to eliminate. “If prostitutes are indeed victims,” Carreón-Aínsa concedes, “then let's treat them as victims.” But, “at the same time, they are doing things that are harmful not only to themselves but to society." To protect society as well as redeem individuals, he maintains, Project Rose is justified.

The law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and academics who designed Project Rose assume that the program can potentially cure prostitutes from the spiritual and psychological maladies responsible for their depraved lifestyle. This assumption rests on beliefs about free will. The designers seem to believe that detainees, in choosing to prostitute themselves, have already been deprived and perhaps become incapable of free choice, long prior to this intervention. After all, no one would choose prostitution. Although detainees do retain a degree of free will insofar as they can agree or refuse the diversion program, their life choices have been profoundly limited by sexual abuse, drug addiction, and the like. Ironically, it is only by circumscribing their remaining available choices that social workers acquire any chance at reversing the women’s hard and set lifestyles. Because these women have been brutally deprived of any meaningful free will, the program’s designers would likely claim, they cannot readily acquire it; rather, it can take root only if their thoughts and behavior are cured, so to speak—if their inner and outer compulsions have been removed and so no longer prevent them from making genuine choices.

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Proponents of Project Rose thus assume that it honors women’s humanity. They assume that prostitution itself, and not the intervention, violates women’s humanity. The project’s defenders thus proceed from three fundamental premises: that women who sell themselves do so because of abuse or harm suffered; that, in selling themselves, women behave out of compulsion rather than free will; and that, by redeeming them from the sex industry, criminal law, with all its force, is an optimal tool for restoring a measure of free will to the lives of sex workers.

More than just supporting Project Rose, these assumptions provide foundation for a wider attack on prostitution, its purported morality, and its legalization. Sprung from these assumptions, the project carries out more than an intervention. Essentially, it is an attempt to stem a social and personal malady by pressuring the individuals who carry out its most sordid acts. For its proponents, to defend Project Rose is to defend women’s dignity by trying to stem one of its most heinous threats.

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Andrea Mrozek, a conservative commentator and opponent of legalized prostitution, operates from these premises. In the Huffington Post, Mrozek responds to the Canadian Supreme Court’s December 2013 ruling striking down Canada’s criminal laws against prostitution.

Article on Court Ruling

Mrozek defends the coercive power of criminal law. She contends that law, at its best, morally instructs those it affects. It can teach either that the buying and selling of sex is destructive and intolerable or that it is healthy and acceptable. Mrozek argues that, whenever law sanctions sexual transactions, it licenses impulses stirring inside perhaps all of us. In particular, it stokes stirrings in those among us whose upbringing lacked adequate love and attention—those whose stirrings most need to be dampened. Law that sanctions sexual transactions causes at-risk women to “play with fire.” “By the time they realize where precisely they are,” those who give in to the temptation to sell themselves can no longer “turn around in the middle of the blaze and come back.” The blazes of destruction can be extinguished only by laws that staunchly prohibit such behavior.

Mrozek Essay 

Short Bio of Mrozek

Mrozek’s argument gets at the core of what, I believe, the project’s designers really intend—and what some of its graduates report. One, Elisa Cordova, believes that the intervention literally saved her life. “I had been beaten, I had been tortured, and I had been raped," she reported. "I finished my classes, and I focused mainly on what I wanted out of life, because I was going to die out there."

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Like Mrozek, the project’s designers believe that human dignity is protected rather than breached by the diversion program. So valuable to them is the program that they would probably, if required by the courts, agree to rectify its first two infirmities. In all likelihood, they would insist that they could accomplish their goals without violating the rights of those apprehended. And, without question, the project could be thusly reformed. This much was admitted by the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, Dan Pochoda, who conceded that diversion programs shorn of coercive elements can offer sex workers useful services. Moreover, if those apprehended were not threatened with criminal charges, and if they remained free to walk away from the intervention, then the program’s church affiliation would be voluntary and not in violation of the First Amendment.

We could then question the virtues of a reformed Project Rose based on this question: Is it prostitution or its suppression that violates the dignity of sex workers? Behind that is the question of whether prostitution is the product of circumstances that compel sex work, or whether prostitution is a freely chosen career path. Compulsion is the absence of free choice. An individual whose behavior is compelled has been stripped of dignity, whereas freely chosen behavior is dignified behavior.

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Arguments about the cause and nature of sex work are legion and are often in mutual conflict. Given that proliferation and contestation, our view of the practice necessarily rests on our underlying beliefs rather than on indisputable data or argumentation. My own view resonates with the qualitative research recently conducted and published by Shahid Qayyum. His article, “Causes and Decisions of Women’s Involvement into Prostitution and Its Consequences in Punjab, Pakistan,” discusses the factors that lead women into prostitution. Foremost among the factors he discovers are poverty, debt, family and personal illness, parental neglect, drug addiction, marital violence, rape, and sexual trafficking.

"Causes and Decisions of Women’s Involvement into Prostitution"

I provide no social science findings of my own. Like anyone having done no research and gathered no direct experience, I can only surmise. I can say only that Qayyum’s findings support my presuppositions. My inexpert belief is that prostitution is the result of past suffering and the cause of further suffering. Most of what I have heard and seen anecdotally suggests that those (mostly women) who perform sex for money or drugs have previously surrendered their capacity to choose how to live, and that any free choice they might retain is only further circumscribed by their selling of their services.

I am not surprised that some sex workers claim to enjoy their work and the freedom of choice purportedly behind it. Dealing with one’s own dire lack of freedom must be unbearable. Denying such circumstances must be an attractive, if ultimately deceptive, means of coping.

While I might well dissent from most of Andrea Mrozek’s positions, I concur with her stance on prostitution. Like her, I believe that sex work is a horrifying practice that anyone would do well, if at all possible, to avoid or escape. No one should be coerced, but everyone deserves the opportunity to get out. Now, I don’t know how reliably law actually helps victims avoid or escape the profession’s clutches. I would assume that, in practice, law-enforcement efforts to wipe out prostitution—efforts such as Project Rose—sometimes treat suspects harshly and tread on their civil rights. On those grounds, Project Rose is intolerable. But a remedied Project Rose would stand as an example of law helping to restore dignity to human beings whose lives lie in tatters.