Brendan Michael Conner
I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.
—Gary Ridgway, aka The Green River Killer
The paradox of the “violent victim” determines how the public casts sex workers as both perpetrators and victims of violence. The “victim” is a homeless fifteen year old; a mother of three in shackles; a migrant in debt bondage. She is someone’s daughter. She is light-skinned and from a broken middle-income home, or a country in Southeast Asia. Her fate is arbitrary detention and rehabilitation. The “perpetrator,” on the other hand, is a predator, pimp, crack whore, “female impersonator,” or junkie. She—or he—is from a low-income background and is probably Latin@ or of African descent. She spreads disease and lowers property values, strolling outside elementary schools leaving a trail of condoms and needles in her wake. His fate is incarceration, deportation, loss of social benefits, and humiliation. Neighbors operate sprinklers to drive her out like a stray cat. Police march him and his peers in chain gangs to the city limits after collecting them on street sweeps and stings.
The narrative is different, but the approach is the same: state violence in the form of targeted raids, brutal street sweeps, arbitrary detention, sterilization, forced labor, mass incarceration, and license to murder. The violent victim paradox endorses a schizophrenic reality in which people must be punished as they are saved, shamed as they are pitied, condemned as they are declared innocent.
Cha Cha illustrates the stereotype of sex workers as perpetrators of violence in “Paradise Lost, Paradox Found,” in which she details her intimate experience with Louisiana’s since-repealed Crimes Against Nature law. The victim stereotype, meanwhile, is exploited in the cases of migrant sex workers and those from the Global South to justify another form of violence: regressive anti-immigrant laws. In “Bodies Across Borders,” Juhu Thukral and Melissa Ditmore examine how the anti-trafficking movement peddles sexist assumptions about female migrants’ capacity for choice, leading to arbitrarily arrest and deportation of migrant sex workers and survivors of trafficking.
Exclusion from social and health benefits is another form of violence. In “Epidemic of Neglect,” Mack Friedman discusses how discrimination has led to a criminally high prevalence of HIV and AIDS among transgender sex workers. Similarly, the Thai sex worker outreach organization Empower reports on how sex workers were denied international aid in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.
The violence that sex workers face at the hands of clients is often compounded by the state. Catherine Plato discusses a case in which a man arrested for raping a sex worker at gunpoint had his charges reduced to “theft of services” by a Philadelphia judge. Indeed, societal acceptance of violence leaves the sex worker community to take care of our own. In “The Unicorn and the Crow,” Prin Roussin uses a traditional First Nations storytelling form to depict the haunting years in which a serial killer murdered dozens of women, almost all of whom were First Nations and sex workers. Roussin reminds us all “to make sure our sister and our brother are protected, because if we do not protect each other and ourselves, no one will.”
Suffice it to say, violence against sex workers is institutionalized. Politicians push “quality of life” policing, resulting in fines and incarceration for minor conduct. Police use vague and far-reaching laws to harass sex workers and cycle them through the criminal system. Killers lurk in the dark, taking advantage of workers’ isolation. The few who report crimes are usually assumed to be deserving of violence. And the media greases its distribution with yearly bloodlettings of Jack the Ripper headlines, where “Hooker Murdered!” is just a placeholder. Workers are not considered mothers, sons, brothers, cousins, or even neighbors, just bodies to be murdered and moved, whether to prison or as dismembered body parts in the trunk of a car. In the pages of $pread, sex workers counteract this dehumanization by documenting both the violence against and the resilience of our communities.
BRENDAN MICHAEL CONNER—also known by his pseudonym, Will Rockwell—is a former escort and $pread editor. He currently works as a police misconduct and prisoner’s rights attorney for people in the sex trade and street economy in New York City. Brendan has also worked both independently and as a research editor with Avrett Consulting for organizations such as Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project, UNDP, USAID, the HIV Young Leaders Fund, and the Open Society Institute.