Council member David Grosso I-At-Large called on police to suspend arrests and prosecutions of sex workers. Photo courtesy of the Office of David Grosso. Attorney for D. Jessie Liu to temporarily suspend arrests and prosecutions of sex workers involved in commercial sex between consenting adults.
His call for a temporary suspension of arrests and prosecution of sex workers comes six months after he introduced legislation calling for the city to decriminalize prostitution for consenting adults. Following release of his statement on Monday, Grosso told the Blade that the latest developments resulting in the forced shutdown of sites such as Backpage reinforce the need for his decriminalization bill. The FBI, which seized the Backpage website operations last week, said it did so as part of an ongoing investigation into sex trafficking of minors that authorities have said placed ads on the Backpage site to facilitate sex trafficking.
Backpage officials have said they cooperated with authorities to prevent traffickers from using the site. Sex worker advocacy groups have said the overwhelming majority of sex workers advertising on the site involved interactions between consenting adults. Congress last month passed an anti-sex trafficking bill that would subject websites to criminal prosecution and civil litigation if they accept advertising, knowingly or unknowingly, linked to both coerced sex-trafficking as well as sex work engaged in by consenting adults.
Fears by sex worker advocates that more websites used by sex workers would be shut down were heightened on Monday when news surfaced that seven top Backpage officials were indicted by a grand jury in Phoenix, Ariz. In response to a request from the Washington Blade, D. The data show that out of a total of 2, prostitution related arrests during that four-and-a-half-year period, just seven involved sex trafficking involving minors.
The data released show this breakdown by year for prostitution related arrests in D. Grosso, who had not seen these figures when he released his statement calling for a suspension in prostitution arrests involving consenting adults, told the Blade he was not aware of a significant number of sex trafficking cases in D. He said his concern was the shutdown of websites that had in the past enabled adult sex workers to ply their trade safely and who had nothing to do with sex trafficking would now be subjected to danger.
