On March 29th, 2012 a judge ruled that continuing to require people convicted for solicitation of prostitution under the “Crimes Against Nature Statute” to register as sex offenders violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. This decision follows the abolishment of the Crimes Against Nature Statute (CANS) and frees approximately 500 people previously convicted under the statute from this discriminatory and disparate punishment. More information is available at Women With A Vision’s website and the Center for Constitutional Rights case page. Special thanks to Streetwise and Safe for bringing this information to our attention.
Sex workers and their allies have released an open letter (March 22, 2012) to the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC) to raise awareness about the impact of dehumanizing statements made by organizations such as NOW-NYC weighing in on the debate over the murder of a number of people on Long Island. As activists from SWOP-NYC and SWANK prepared the open letter, they received news of another body being found on Gilgo Beach. Read more in Media Analysis.
A proposal in Washington, D.C. to make “prostitution free zones” permanent has been criticized by human rights activists, health advocates, and even the police and prosecutors. BPPP has helped to coordinate and support the local efforts to stop the law — read more in Media Analysis.
Some activists in Washington, D.C. have been having a sense of dejá vù lately. Several years ago, communities fought a proposal to create “Prostitution Free Zones” (PFZs) – areas declared by the police chief where officers could order people to move along and/or arrest them if the officers believed the individuals were “congregating for the purposes of prostitution.” Despite a robust organizing effort that brought together groups in new ways, the law was passed, and legitimized long-standing police tactics of arresting people for looking a certain way or being in a certain area in the name of enforcing prostitution laws.At the end of 2011, a member of the D.C. Council proposed a bill to make the PFZs – originally temporary – permanent.
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