Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has declared a gentrification war on South LA’s Figueroa Corridor under the guise of ending sex trafficking. Informed by racist suffragette purity crusading in the early 1900s, she has weaponized an archaic law, The Red Light Abatement Act, to shut down immigrant-owned motels along the Figueroa Corridor in preparation for pre-Olympic gentrification. With her multi-agency task force that includes the Department of Homeland Security, Hydee has subjected an already over-policed neighborhood to further hypersurveillance and prostitution vice stings and raids claiming to address sex trafficking.
The Act makes the property owner responsible for vice crimes committed on their property, and it can be a complaint brought by any citizen without evidence. Essentially, businesses can be forced to shut down based on a suspicion that sex work is happening on their property, whether or not they knew of the activity. As a result, property owners discriminate against sex workers. At a time of housing crisis that has accelerated with the losses from the LA Fires, there is a question of why the city would be focusing local, state, and unpredictable federal dollars on shutting down places where people live.
Much like the evictions and disappearance of sex workers and street vendors in Paris ahead of their Olympics last summer, the City Attorney has created the conditions for discrimination, eviction, police harassment, deportation, and land theft. The Act is similar to SESTA/FOSTA, and other laws that target mutual aid or infrastructure support for sex workers, making businesses liable for vice activity, increases discrimination and unsafe work conditions as people are pushed to streets, alleys, and dark corners that make them vulnerable to predators.
The safest place for a sex worker to be is indoors in a community with other workers. Our safety is in our connection to each other, this proximity to each other is a crime. If we work together, we can catch a trafficking case simply for mutual aid. Keeping us isolated is a classic abuser technique used by intimate partners. The State keeps sex workers isolated from each other by making it a crime to gather, share housing, advertise together, or watch each other’s backs. The structural violence against sex workers is so baked into US policy that our bodies can be weaponized to seize property, shut down bank accounts, and steamroll over communities while being congratulated for saving us from ourselves.
Vice laws make it easy for Hydee to steal property while keeping the public under the assumption that heroic cops and compassionate social workers are busy rescuing survivors. Her public discourse has never included sex workers or an accurate description of the reality of police operations for social control, a grey area blending of public and private rights, and land use regulation through moral panic. Police operations make sex workers and survivors unsafe, like the recent police slaying of a trans woman of color who was killed when she called 911 for help.
While Los Angeles streets teemed with communities led by Latin organizers to fight back against ICE oppression in our streets, with loud cries against Trump and his extremist mass deportation policy, we must look more deeply at who empowered ICE in Los Angeles.
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A very light slap on the wrist for corrupt former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu Pot. Kettle. Newsom. Prop. 36 is California’s light at the end of a crime-ridden tunnel: Now we need to fund it. The real resistance isn’t what you think it is Making our rights disappear: The authoritarian war on due process Since Hydee began her purity crusade against adult consensual pleasure by couching her language in a plea to save the children, it was she who opened the Corridor to the violent impact of DHS with her rush to federalize Los Angeles for the Olympics. Hysteria is no new tactic for anti-pleasure feminists that mirrors suffragettes’ labeling of sex workers either as “fallen women” or “white slaves,” a complete erasure of intersecting identities, consent practices, and body autonomy.To be sure, exploitation is a very real and rampant issue, especially as US discourse around women’s bodies has become more and more violent. What I want to know is, how are we addressing sexual violence against marginalized street-based communities by bringing in the feds?
We, sex workers, have many questions for Hydee, as she simultaneously created a federalized human trafficking task force while intersecting its goals with the real estate task force. How can we call ourselves a Sanctuary City when we invited the feds to Hydee’s Crusade? Why increase arrest operations around “trafficking” while slashing funding for survivor services, including the potential shutdown of survivor services for youth? Could the plan for the Figueroa Corridor have nothing to do with supporting survivors and everything to do with the SoFi Stadium that will be a home for the Olympic games?
Soma Snakeoil is Executive Director/Cofounder of The Sidewalk Project, which specializes in services for street-based sex workers, survivors, and cis and trans women fleeing violence, and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project and Blue Shield of California Foundation.
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