“This industry is supporting a lot of people.”
In 2011, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott labeled the Super Bowl “the single largest human trafficking incident in the United States.” Since then, an annual flurry of media stories suggest a strong link between the national sporting extravaganza and an increase in forced prostitution. Responses to this perceived increase include awareness campaigns and heightened enforcement. Yet few people in the vicinity of the Super Bowl are identified as actual trafficking victims.
Advocates for consensual sex workers find this sort of awareness push troubling. They seek to distinguish their own work from that of coerced trafficking victims, and they urge caution when encountering claims about trafficking rates. While researching my recent Century article “Sex, Love and Commerce,” I reached out to Chicago’s Sex Worker Outreach Project, knowing that no discussion of sex work could responsibly exclude the people who engage in it. I was never able to get an interview, but after the story ran I heard from SWOP on Twitter and was able to arrange a conversation with “Serpent,” one of the organization’s leaders.
It surprises some people to learn that SWOP exists, since prostitution is still illegal in Illinois (though no longer a felony). Starting on the west coast in the 1990s, the SWOP movement of mostly small, decentralized and volunteer-driven local groups has sought to advocate for a broad array of workers in the sex industry: prostitutes, escorts, exotic dancers, pornography performers, phone sex operators and dominatrixes. Serpent told me that they emphasize community, peer, and legal support--everything from tax tips to rights training to accessing nonjudgmental medical, legal and social service professionals.
