OPINION | Why did Seattle City Council show video footage of sex workers on Aurora?

by Megan Burbank

Something strange happened earlier this month at the Public Safety Committee meeting discussing the SODA and SOAP zones proposed by City Attorney Ann Davison and Seattle Councilwoman Cathy Moore, which have been controversial since their introduction and, among other things, would ban sex workers from accessing a certain area on Aurora Avenue North, a major sex trade corridor in Seattle for survival. In a bizarre moment during her presentation, Moore showed a video of sex workers engaging in what she described as “commercial sexual exploitation” because, as she said, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

The July 19 video comes with a warning for “partial nudity” and essentially just shows sex workers walking around a corner of Aurora — nothing that should surprise anyone who's driven this route for the past decade. But the video, which Moore dramatically described as “a snapshot of an hour of sex trade on a corner of Aurora,” seemed oddly familiar. It looked like surveillance video and reminded me of the lewd YouTube account I reported two years ago that showed videos of sex workers walking up and down Aurora, seemingly without their consent.

Consent and collaboration are important when it comes to supporting sex workers and survivors of gender-based violence. But the SODA and SOAP proposals are clearly not about providing more comprehensive support for sex workers or drug users: they are about getting them to go elsewhere. And this dehumanising, distancing approach was evident in the rhetoric used by committee members at the meeting, perhaps most clearly in Moore's video.

Even setting aside the privacy concerns it raised, publicly showing videos of sex workers at a recorded meeting that is also posted online – without anyone in that video being given their own voice – is a strange way to prove how much you are against exploitation. It is an exploitative act in itself, and an indication of how out of touch the city council is with the communities it serves. That includes not just concerned neighbors – many of whom spoke at the meeting on Tuesday, August 13 – but also the sex workers themselves.

Noticeably absent from a panel the committee convened on Tuesday to discuss the issue were the voices of people currently engaged in sex work. The panel relied heavily on the savior narrative of helping people “escape” the sex trade, ignoring people who cannot – or do not want to – leave sex work and who also deserve safety and dignity.

But sex workers showed up at the public hearing to speak out against the SODA and SOAP zones. So did public defenders, the ACLU, business owners, organizations that fight against gender-based violence and volunteers from the Green Light Project, a mutual aid organization that brings supplies, food and peer support to people working in the sex industry in Aurora twice a week.

Their opposition was clear and rooted in lived experience. “This bill will hurt survivors of gender-based violence,” said anti-violence activist Shannon Perez-Darby. “It will criminalize people who experience violence. I care deeply about the safety of every member of our community. Putting the safety of some above the safety of all is not the solution. We can do better.”

“[I]”If you want people to stop being trafficked or doing sex work, you need to provide resources to those people,” said one sex worker. “SOAP orders and profiling will prevent life-saving resources and lasting change. Protect our most vulnerable. Vote no on this bill. Listen to sex workers.”

Listening to sex workers is exactly what is missing from Moore's proposal. It would simply revive a practice the council has eliminated in the past because of its disproportionate impact on people of color.

But she is right about one thing: A picture Is worth a thousand words. And the images shown at the Public Safety Committee meeting say quite a bit about how policies like the one Moore is proposing view people who work in the sex trade: as a problem that needs to be solved and a source of sensationalized fear whose very presence is equated with violent crime, even though the council offered no concrete evidence that sex workers themselves were involved in the recent shootings along the Aurora. It's hard to see people as human when you look at them from such a distance.

In contrast, the advocates and sex workers who attended the meeting provided a strong counter-narrative – one that must serve as the basis for any legitimate policy on sex work in the future.

As one Green Light Project volunteer put it, “The women in Aurora are not abstract concepts to us. They are our friends. They are our colleagues. They are us. This bill does nothing for them except make their lives more dangerous. I ask those of you who support this bill to actually read it and see what it does, which is arrest the victims you seem to want to protect, and actually talk to the people in these communities and listen to what they have to say.”

At Tuesday's meeting, the city council didn't seem to be listening. But if they don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, they have to.

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📸 Featured image: Councilmember Cathy Moore introduces CB 120836, an ordinance regarding prostitution, at the special meeting of the Public Safety Committee on August 13, 2024. Screenshot from a broadcast of the August 13 Public Safety Committee meeting on the Seattle Channel.