Audrey Morrissey, co-executive director of My Life My Choice, said she showed up to the State House Tuesday to fight for Black and brown women of color who are stuck in the commercial sex industry.
As a survivor of the industry herself, Morrissey said trying to get out of sex work is difficult. It’s hard to find a job and housing, she said, and most survivors return to the life because there is no path out.
“I stayed in after my exploiter went to jail, and I come from that Combat Zone area,” Morrissey said of her time in the industry. “It wasn’t until after I left that the traumatic impacts caught up with me.”
Morrissey was among a coalition of advocates who packed a State House hearing room to speak in favor of legislation from a trio of Democrats that ensure people who are bought and sold for sex will not be criminalized and repeal laws on common streetwalking, nightwalking, sex for a fee, and solicitation for prostituted persons.
It was among a handful of bills addressing sex work that lawmakers took testimony on, including one from Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, a Northampton Democrat, that decriminalizes most sex work and expunges cannabis and prostitution-related records.
But some advocates say Sabadosa’s bill may go too far in a society that still holds strong views on sex work. Those advocates instead point to the bill Morrissey backed, which they say takes a more conservative approach and was filed by Reps. Mary Keefe, Tricia Farley-Bouvier, and Sen. Cindy Friedman.
Aside from partial decriminalization, the legislation also puts in place an income-based fine for buying sex, creates a committee to increase support and exit options for people who have been prostituted, and expunges past criminal charges of prostitution, common nightwalking, and streetwalking.
Farley-Bouvier said it is hard to believe that some of those crimes are still on the state’s books.
“The sex trade is rooted in United States history of exploitation, of buying and selling humans,” the Pittsfield Democrat said. “(The bill) would take a small step towards counteracting the stark history of our country and decriminalizing prostituted people, and allow them a pathway to exit the sex trade.”
Friedman said laws are failing to recognize the needs of those who have been forced into the sex trade, either through trafficking, coercion, manipulation, or economic desperation, the Arlington Democrat said.
“We need a comprehensive and nuanced approach to the sex trade, sex work, and prostitution. We need solutions that will protect survivors, increase access to opportunities for at-risk populations, and break the cycle of intergenerational poverty and exploitation,” Friedman said.
As for Morrissey, she said if there were more robust support systems in place when she entered the sex work industry as a teenage girl, “I might have gotten out as a teenage girl.” But there were no exit services, she said.
“We must have exit services. We must expunge their records and show people a better way to live,” Morrissey said. “When I use that word survival, that’s when I was in the life. We need to make a path for people to live, not just to survive.”
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Former sex workers back partial decriminalization and more exit services - Boston Herald
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