Prostitution in the Pandemic
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, sex workers are struggling with overpolicing and punitive measures in the enforcement of Covid regulations. [1] Many sex workers cannot stop their in-person services and face even more unsafe work environments and access to social services. Worsening conditions of child welfare, foster care, and the criminal justice system for sex workers are due to the criminalization of the sex trade, fueled by neoliberal policies of a capitalist economy. They are being forced to choose between social isolation that brings no income and working with dramatic risks to their health and safety. [1]
Today, there is a rise is sex work activism, particularly through the lens of intersectionality as the pandemic disproportionately affects sex workers of color. The now late Lorena Borjas, a transgender Latina woman who died from Covid at the age of 59, had a history of sex work, addiction, abuse, arresnt, trafficking, and precarious citizenship. She used her unique identity to connect to others in the sex work industry, as she wanted to emulate someone they could rely on. She was dedicated to breaking the “arrest-jail-deportation” cycle, a concept that uses the feminist intersectional lens. The Black Sex Workers Collective addresses the needs of black sex workers with peer support, legal assistance, housing, financial and other basic needs. As the Pandemic as increased the effects of systematic racism, this organization has held fundraisers to help black sex workers incapable of working during the pandemic. While supportive, their guiding principle lies in anticriminalization of sex work, allowing black sex workers the autonomy to decide the conditions of their sex work. [1]
[1] Bromfield, “At the Intersection of COVID-19,” 140-48.