workingitinportland:

Laura LeMoon, who has written for us before, covers the shameful misuse of state time and funds that is the new Portland suit against Backpage, using the murder of local hooker Ashley Benson as an excuse.  

Ashley Benson was young 24 year old mother a sex worker who was murdered by a client of hers in 2014 in Portland, Oregon. She advertised on Backpage which is where she was first contacted by the man who would end up murdering her at a Portland area hotel. Ashley’s family alleges that she was a victim of sex trafficking by a violent pimp and is suing both Backpage and the hotel for $3.6 million dollars holding them responsible for Ashley’s death. The only problem with that is most of the sex working community in Portland who knew her say she may have been a victim of violence as a sex worker, or had a boyfriend who lived off her earnings, but most people knew her as a sex worker and not a trafficking victim. She certainly was not murdered by an abusive pimp or trafficker, but by a client. According to many fellow sex workers in the Portland area her family knew about her working as a survival sex worker. This raises a number of red flags about the validity of her case as one of trafficking. It was primarily only after the murder of Benson that she was to be classified as a trafficking victim. If this was indeed the case, it begs the question of why the family would sue the hotel and Backpage as being responsible for their daughters’ murder, and not her alleged pimp or even the man himself who murdered her?

Sex workers, in death, are as invisible as they are in life. No one would care, let alone would the family be able to make a criminal or civil case if Benson was just a regular old survival sex worker. Making Benson’s case into a righteous example of the perils of the sex industry is a tactical one. But it also does a great deal of harm to our sex working communities. Already the only way that folks in the sex industry can get help is if they claim trafficking. There are hundreds upon hundreds of anti-trafficking nonprofit organizations in the US alone. How many nonprofits do we have that aim to serve only sex workers from a rights perspective? A handful. Maybe.

So how can sex workers who don’t identify as being a trafficking survivor crawl out from the dark crawlspace of invisibility? Are we doomed to have to just represent ourselves as agency y-less victims in order to get justice? These are questions that the sex working community needs to be asking itself if we want any chance of having our profession recognized. One of the biggest issues in the field of sex workers rights is the vast walk of life from which people come to the industry. A street based Trans sex worker of color is going to have a very different experience with and relationship to the sex industry than a cisgender female middle class white dancer. Our industry(ies) are incredibly stratified, which makes coming together difficult because the spectrum of experiences in the industry is so diverse.

Sex Work Vs. Sex Trafficking: When is Violence Visible?