Recent reports on mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s stance on decriminalizing consensual adult sex work have inaccurately suggested it would empower traffickers and abusers. While concerns about exploitation are legitimate, the interpretations are misguided.
Global evidence shows that criminalization, rather than decriminalization, exacerbates vulnerability to exploitation and entraps the most marginalized individuals in cycles of violence, poverty, and fear.
The issue is not about the existence of exploitation within the sex trade—it does exist, just as it does in agriculture, domestic work, and other fields. The focus should be on the best methods to protect individuals from it. Criminalization, even when solely targeting buyers, forces sex work underground, compelling those involved to operate in isolation, elude law enforcement, and depend on unsafe networks because they cannot report abuses or work collectively for their protection.
Full decriminalization involves eliminating criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work while still upholding all laws against trafficking, assault, and child exploitation. It does not equate to a lawless environment but ensures sex workers can seek labor rights, health services, and justice without fearing arrest.
The evidence from public health research is decisive. A 2018 meta-analysis by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which evaluated more than 130 studies over three decades, demonstrated that repressive policing around sex work heightened risks of sexual and physical violence and increased HIV and STI transmission. Such policing disrupted sex workers’ safety networks and risk-reduction strategies.
The study’s findings were clear: full decriminalization promotes community health and safety. Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNAIDS, the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, and the World Health Organization advocate decriminalization as a strategy to tackle trafficking globally.
New Zealand, which decriminalized sex work in 2003 demonstrates this. Two decades of research, including by the New Zealand Ministry of Justice, found no evidence decriminalization expanded the sex trade or increased underage involvement. What it did do is improve working conditions, allow sex workers to refuse clients, and report violence without fear. That is not the story of a booming exploitation market. It is the story of public policy reducing the potential for disease and violence.
By contrast, laws criminalizing clients, like the Equality Model or Nordic Model, enacted in Sweden, Norway, and Canada, have repeatedly failed to deliver on their promises of reducing “demand” for sex work or combatting trafficking. When buyers fear arrest, they may rush negotiations, and sex workers are compelled to accept clients who refuse to give their legal names, exhibit nervous behavior, or insist on a remote location.
Studies and government reviews from those countries reveal that after the laws were implemented, sex workers experienced increased stigmatization and abuse and were made more vulnerable to potentially exploitative individuals.
Here in New York, passing Cecilia’s Act would move us toward real safety. This bill, the one Mamdani supports, would remove criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work and seal old prostitution-related convictions, allowing people to rebuild their lives. It keeps every law against trafficking and coercion intact but ends the unfair punishment of people just trying to get by, especially trans women, immigrants, and people of color who are the most targeted under current laws.
One of the troubling aspects of the anti-decriminalization argument is that it speaks about sex workers but rarely with them. Sex workers have long called for full decriminalization, not because they condone exploitation or glamorize sex work, but because they live with the harms of criminalization. Arrests, housing discrimination, police harassment, and deportation are regular realities and all make people more vulnerable to trafficking.
Supporting people’s ability to meet their needs, including adequate housing and employment, instead of arrest, is how to reduce exploitation. Criminal laws do not solve inequality, but they can exacerbate it. Decriminalization gives people in the sex trade access to the same rights and protections as other workers. This is not a gift to traffickers. It is a significant step towards justice, health, and safety.
New York has the opportunity to improve conditions for its most marginalized by replacing fear with facts and punishment with protection. Decriminalizing sex work is not about profits. It is harm reduction, public health, and human rights, and is just the kind of progress this city should champion.
Broudo is legal director at Decriminalize Sex Work and a former criminal defense attorney representing survivors of trafficking and sex workers.
