CHICAGO — The Democratic Party on Sunday released its official platform for the 2024 presidential election, omitting the 2020 platform’s pledge to “protect the lives of sex workers.”
Both the 2020 and the 2024 platforms include sections titled “Ending Violence Against Women,” in which Democrats commit to “ending sexual assault, domestic violence, and other violence against women.”
However, the 2020 platform adopted by the convention that nominated President Joe Biden included the following passage: “We recognize that sex workers, who are disproportionately women of color and transgender women, face particularly high rates of sexual assault and violence, and we will do that too.” working with states and localities to protect the lives of sex workers.”
The 2024 version released this weekend and expected to be approved at the Democratic National Convention currently taking place in Chicago omits the statement recognizing the existence of sex workers and establishing a commitment to protect their lives protect.
As XBIZ reported, Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has been widely criticized by sex workers as well as activists and adult industry organizations for her vocal support and prosecution of cases under the controversial FOSTA-SESTA legislation .
In a 2019 interview, Harris claimed to support the decriminalization of sex work, but described her approach in terms that contradict that claim and instead align closely with the criminalizing Nordic model.
Harris said that as a prosecutor in San Francisco, she advocated “to stop arresting these prostitutes and instead go after the johns and the pimps.”
Harris’s conflation of ‘the johns’ – a tellingly outdated word for those who pay for sexual services – and ‘the pimps’ – which in practice includes anyone who helps a sex worker in any way, regardless of coercion – is a common strategy of both outright prohibitionists and supporters of the ‘Nordic model’ of sex work.
The Nordic model technically decriminalizes the sale of sexual services by sex workers, increasing penalties and enforcement focus for any third party who benefits from the sex worker (categorized as a pimp) and for purchasers of sexual services. The aim is to end all forms of sex work and ‘save’ sex workers, whom they see as invariably exploited.
In practice, the Scandinavian model drives sex work underground, forcing sex workers to operate in a shadowy, dangerous environment.