In the midst of all this presidential election excitement (and fear and dread), there's a whole other slew of elections happening at the state level, including San Francisco's Proposition K, which will de-criminalize prostitution and forbid police from prosecuting sex workers and their clients.

If it passes, San Francisco will be the first city in the country to have de-criminalized the "world's oldest profession" (Brothels in Nevada are a form of legalized prostitution, a very different situation than what Prop K is proposing).

Prop K has been a long time coming and was the recommendation of a task force on prostitution 10 years ago. What Prop K will do is not only decriminalize prostitution, it will also ban funding for "John School", a program first time offenders are sent to as well as banning funding for investigations that use racial profiling to investigate prostitution, ie, investigating massage parlors, which traditionally have Asian workers.

Opponents to Prop K claim that the measure will increase human trafficking to San Francisco and will turn the city into a "welcome mat" for pimps and prostitutes, painting an almost comic picture that the entire city will be engulfed in a sea of pimps and streetwalkers; ignoring the fact that a lot of sex work now begins online and almost all sex work, as Melissa Gira Grant points out, happens behind closed doors.

Naturally, no one has bothered to ask any actual sex workers what they think of the measure, because if they did, they would see statements like this, from a link on sex worker blog Bound, Not Gagged, which claims that Prop K will actually reduce trafficking. Because prostitutes will no longer live in fear of being arrested if they go to authorities for help, they'll be able to get out of bad situations much more easily than before.

And that to me -- that prostitutes won't go to the police for help because they're afraid of being arrested or not taken seriously-- is the driving force behind why I voted for Prop K.  Regardless of how you feel about sex work itself, women should be able to go to the police and get help if they are in a dangerous situation. Most importantly, regardless of how a person gets to sex work, it doesn't mean they are worth less as a human and it doesn't mean that we should treat all sex workers as victims. Regardless of how they got there, sex workers deserve the same protection as anyone else. 

Image via Socialist Unity