The Af3irm Agenda
Over the past month, I have begun to openly criticize Af3irm’s platforms because I am genuinely worried about the way they manipulate the language of Prison Abolition to support policies created by the anti-trafficking industry. By doing this I have likely placed myself in some danger as a Filipinx trans sex worker, because Af3irm underhandedly works with police, social workers, and other dangerous people like Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, who used the police to target and arrest specific sex work activists after they spoke out against her rescue program. Af3irm has already exploited SESTA/FOSTA regulations to silence my criticism of their actions. I have compiled my research here so that people can understand what’s at stake when calling out Af3irm, and how their stance on sex work is harming sex workers.
Af3irm is a feminist Filipina anti-trafficking organization that believes in the abolition of prostitution. While their platform often uses popular movement language of the moment such as ‘Decolonization’, ‘Decriminalization’ and ‘Defund the Police’, they prioritize the abolition of prostitution above all else, even if it means collaborating with various state agencies, police, and evangelical right wing conservatives. They have fully co-opted the language of Prison Abolition: Af3irm calls themselves abolitionists (against prostitution or “Modern-Day Slavery”) in a way that dismisses how the prison-industrial complex is the true after-life of slavery. And while Af3irm’s public platform makes claims that they are against mass incarceration, their plans to abolish prostitution fully rely on coercive rescue programs related to sex work and the expansion for criminalization of sexual clients and third party actors.
After I began to publicly criticize Af3irm for being carceral feminists, Af3irm Hawai’i published a medium article, “Fuck Work: Internalizing Neoliberal Feminism”, which was meant to discredit the political authority of sex workers calling for the decriminalization of sex work. Many sex workers have already responded to similar bad faith arguments that falsely equate decriminalization of sex work with the legalization of sex work. However, the part I found most illuminating of Af3irm’s agenda is the following
Voluntary sex workers are not “in the best position” to intervene in sex trafficking. They are often more privileged and there are many other more important and better situated people in contact with sex trafficking victims, as proven by a large and growing body of national and Hawaiʻi-specific research. These include health care workers, educators, first responders, family, friends, classmates, social workers, and state workers. The majority of sex traffickers are either family members or romantic partners of the victim, many times also co-parents, and in complex abusive relationships…
-Af3irm Hawai’i (emphasis added)
Af3irm is fully preparing to deploy an array of state agencies, including the police, in order to fight sex trafficking. To anyone that has studied the politics of the anti-trafficking industry, this is particularly alarming because anti-trafficking laws do not distinguish between ‘voluntary’ sex workers and sex trafficking victims. In fact, the author of this Hawai’i-specific has made claims in her other published research that there exists an “inability to distinguish those who have make the decision independently to sell or trade sex or are being coerced by a trafficker” and that even if a prostitute is not actively controlled by someone, they have been “trafficked by circumstance”. Af3irm through their Survivors Not Criminals laws and Hawai’i-specific research are laying the foundation to designate all sex workers as trafficking survivors which unconsensually deploys an array of state interventions and provide justification for police surveillance and the criminalization of families, partners, and communities.
Project Rose: An Alternative Arrest Program
It is extremely alarming that Af3irm Hawai’i is working with Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, the creator of Project Rose. Project Rose used undercover detectives in coordinated stings to arrest hundreds of sex workers. Monica Jones, a Black trans woman and sex work advocate, spoke out against Project Rose at a rally with SWOP (Sex Worker Out Project) . The very next day, Monica Jones and other sex work activists were specifically targeted by police and arrested into Project Rose. Arrestees of the ‘alternative arrest’ program had prostitution charges filed against them that could be dismissed on successful completion. They were not allowed access to legal counsel but were instead trafficked by the police to a church basement to receive Roe-Sepowitz’s “evidence-based” psychoeducation. As part of the program, sex workers were pressured to reveal “actionable intelligence” to law enforcement authorities about other sex workers, clients, and third party actors. Project Rose was a prostitution intervention program the director of ASU STIR (Arizona State University Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research) located within the School of Social Work, in collaboration with Phoenix law enforcement.
Social workers often act as “partners to the state, more often serving as carceral enforcers than as collaborators toward liberation.” Beth Richie and Kayla M. Martensen argue that the social and legal implications of mass incarceration have built a “Prison Nation” that continues to expand apparatuses of the prison-industrial complex. Central to the Prison Nation are “carceral services that replicate the control, surveillance, and punishment of the Prison Nation.” Richie and Martensen point out that while “Perhaps well-intentioned, social services, and social workers who conspire with the punishment system assist the carceral state in the excessive surveillance that fuels mass incarceration” . In other words, state programs under the guise of social work, support work, and rehabilitation not only rely on carceral techniques of punishment and control, but also expand criminalization. Rescue programs like Project Rose position themselves as an ‘alternative’ to criminalization, when in fact they are yet another carceral program in a chain of punishment.
As an arrestee of Project Rose, Monica Jones repeatedly challenged the authority of the program leaders and was graduated early from the program because the program leaders worried Monica Jones would infect the other arrestees with her ideas. Project Rose then coordinated with the Phoenix police in a targeted undercover sting to falsely arrest her for intent to manifest prostitution and place her in jail. With the help of the ACLU, SWOP Pheonix, and media exposure by trans activists, Monica Jones won a court case against Project Rose for violating her civil liberties and successfully shut the alternative arrest program down.
However, just days after Project Rose was shut down, Dominique Roe-Sepowitz received a 1.28 million dollar grant from the US Department of Health and Human Services for ASU STIR to continue her research as well as expand her social work programs throughout the country.
Hawai’i Specific Research
From 2018–2020, ASU STIR (Arizona State University Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research) has published three Hawaii specific research studies about Sex Trafficking in Hawaii. ASU STIR is a branch of ASU’s school of social work. The funding for these projects came from the Colorado-based Kaimas Foundation, “a private family foundation”, and a grant from the US Department of State . The primary author of these studies is listed as Dominique Roe-Sepowitz (ASU STIR), and the secondary author is Khara Jabola-Carolus (Hawai’i State Comission on the Status of Women).
Khara Jabola-Carolus is the founder of Af3irm Hawai’i, a self-described state bureaucrat with a law degree, owns the fairly popular instagram @decolonizefeminism, and is Director of the Hawai’i State Commission on the Status of Women (HSCSW). Jobola-Carolus, in a stump speech for her husband’s political campaign rally, described the HSCSW “as a government agency that is basically… the feminist police”. While conducting this Hawai’i specific research, Jobola-Carolus founded Af3irm Hawai’i as a grassroots organization that aggressively advocates and legislates for this research’s calls to actions.
Statistics and research about sex trafficking have had notoriously low standards when presenting qualitative data. One major issue is that research tends to make large extrapolations from small and biased groups, using inflated numbers to justify increases in “services” and law enforcement budgets. While the quality of the “Sex Trafficking in Hawai’i” research lacks credibility, the calls to action in these studies is quite clear. I will be focusing on those as they align with Af3irm’s Survivor Not Criminals bills paying particular attention to the ways that Af3irm is prepared to collaborate with law enforcement and other state agencies to expand carceral services and increase criminalization as well as technological surveillance.
The first research study is titled “Sex Trafficking in Hawaiʻi Part I: Exploring Online Sex Buyers” and is trying to persuade law enforcement officials and state agencies that the crime of sex-buying is a widespread on Hawaii and should be prosecuted more. Using questionable statistical extrapolations, key findings in this study claim that “one out of every eleven men in Hawaiʻi over the age of 18 is an online sex buyer.” The solutions to this identified problem seem to be focused on encouraging more policing and prosecutions. The study states “Hawaiʻi does not currently have an organized effort to combat sex buying although it is illegal under state law. Honolulu Police Department arrested 50 sex buyers from January 2017 to June 2018.” And furthermore states “Today, it is genuinely troubling that more people are penalized for homelessness (sit-lie violations) and jaywalking in Honolulu than for buying sex. The general lack of response by law enforcement and the state demonstrates a crisis of priorities” (13). While Af3irm’s public platform states that they simply want “non-carceral accountability for sex-buyers,” this research is specifically calling for carceral interventions to be made. It is alarming that Roe-Sepowtiz and Jabola-Carolus are implying to law enforcement officials that one out of eleven men in Hawai’i should be criminalized and that law enforcement and other state agencies need to make some type of coordinated action.
The second research study, “Sex Trafficking in Hawai’i Part II: The Stories of Survivors” identifies several specific ways that policing can be more effective in combatting sex trafficking. The authors seem frustrated that there is a lack of “attention from law enforcement about sex trafficking, including not having any specialized human trafficking units in Hawaiʻi.” (3) Anti-trafficking police vice squads have historically been known to harass street based sex workers and BIPOC trans women, regardless of our participation in sex work.
Calls for specific policy in this study include
“1) Develop a statewide training program on Hawaiʻi’s human trafficking laws to those in the law enforcement, legal, educational, and healthcare community.”
“2) Develop a centralized data collection and statewide database.”
“4) Create the legislatively funded position of a statewide coordinator on the trafficking in persons” (10).
Sex workers are extremely worried at this time about having our personal information and contacts unconsenually inputted to a centralized databases that are shared with law enforcement and other state agencies. Technologies like this are extremely dangerous, particularly to the many people who use sex work because they have already been criminalized due to citizenship, queerness, race, and other factors. Historically law enforcement databases, such as those created to support Los Angeles gang injunctions have been used to criminalize and incarcerate BIPOC. Centralized databases like these have also been shared with ICE to target individuals for deportation. Taking sex worker’s data without their consent for unknown purposes should be alarming, particularly as many sex workers are also activists, we have seen these technological tools used by the state and other agents to target and silence us.
The third research study, “Sex Trafficking in Hawaiʻi: Part III. Sex Trafficking Experiences Across Hawaiʻi” calls for increased funding for “targeted programing” to combat sex trafficking and helping victims. While vague, these calls for programming are clearly trying to instate some type of rescue program: reaching across various state agencies and churches to enforce reporting to a centralized sex-trafficking database, targeted “clinical” and “evidence-based intervention approaches for treatment programming” (43), police involvement reduced as the “first point of contact” with sex workers and “providing survivor-advocates on the scene when police are involved to provide support and victim-centered service connections.” (44). While specifics of these intervention programs are still being planned, it is clear some type of carceral service rescue programs is to be implemented. Using Roe-Sepowitz’s previous rescue program research as a model, they are likely instating intervention model in Hawaii where social workers (the first point of contact) use these centralized databases to coerce sex workers, at the threat of prosecution (second point of contact), to enter into programs where they receive mandatory psychoeducation and confess actionable intelligence to law enforcement detectives about other sex workers, clients, and third-party actors. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, as the architect “Sex Trafficking in Hawai’i”, is using this research to create another intervention program like Project Rose.
Sex workers activists and prison abolitionists should be very concerned about Af3irm’a collaboration with Dominique Roe-Sepowitz and ASU STIR. We can not allow a new more technologically invasive version of Project Rose to exist. As demands for defunding Police departments are put in action, opportunists like Af3irm Hawai’i and ASU Stir will justify more funding for alternative arrest or equivalent carceral services. At this moment Af3irm Hawai’i’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for Covid-19 is attempting to backdoor the proposed policies to combat sex trafficking. While sex workers are economically hurting during this time, we can not allow the mobilization of more carceral services that remove our own agency and place us in even greater danger.
#SurvivorsNotCriminals
While Af3irm has consistently spoken out against the decriminalization of sex work, Sex Workers, Prison Abolitionists, and Human Rights groups have been pushing for full decriminalization of sex work because it will reduce incaceration and give us more agency to address harm against us on our own terms. In response to this, groups like CATW, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women directed by Janice Raymond, have called for the Nordic Model or the Equality Model. This calls for the decriminalization of sex workers but sustains/expands criminalization of people the state deems as sex-buyers, pimps, or traffickers. Many sex work advocates have pointed out that this still means sex work is still criminalized and leads to unsafe living conditions for us. Despite this, Af3irm, who shares leadership members with paid CATW members, has aggressively pushed bills titled Survivors Not Criminals in Los Angeles, Hawai’i, and possibly other places as well. Af3irm’s public platform claims that these bills decriminalize sex workers (not sex work) and then simply provide accountability for sex-buyers and traffickers, the actual implemented laws do not reflect these claims.
In 2017, Af3irm Hawai’i publicly spoke out against decriminalization of sex work in Hawaii. Instead Khara Jabola-Carolus passed a Survivor Not Criminal bill that Af3irm has claimed decriminalized sex workers or “defacto decriminalized sex workers.” This is a gross misrepresentation of the bill; it only allows for a sex worker to vacate a single charge of prostitution after three years provided they have not been charged with any other criminal offense. Sex workers can still be fined or imprisoned for up to thirty days and are still subject to police surveillance and harassment. While it may be beneficial for some sex workers to no longer have to prove they are a victim of human trafficking to have a prostitution charge vacated, this bill is unlikely to benefit the most marginalized sex workers who are routinely criminalized by police due to various identities: Black, Transgender, Indigenous, undocumented, systematically impoverished. However Af3irm declared this bill as a victory because it allows for the creation of their “alternative arrest” program or equivalent carceral service, as opposed to full decriminalization which would only allow for voluntary exit programs for sex workers to exist.
Af3irm Los Angeles also passed a Survivor Not Criminal bill in January of 2020 in collaboration with the Department of Human Services and the Sheriff’s Department. Af3irm has made claims that this bill is decriminalizing sex workers and that it ended the police raids on massage parlors, however again this is not supported by the evidence. This bill authorizes the Sheriff’s Department and Department of Health the “right to enter” and “enforce compliance” massage establishments at any time (11.36.300) and increased funding for both of these departments to conduct inspections(ex.B p.2). This bill also criminalizes anyone performing home based massage, regardless if they are a sex worker or not(22.140.290). Particularly troubling is how Af3irm has stated that the Department of Health or social workers will be the first point of contact for trafficked women in massage parlors, which indicates that they work with an alternative arrest program or equivalent carceral service in Los Angeles.
We should not consider Af3irm’s Survivor Not Criminals campaigns to be decriminalization, as they have not been informed by prison abolitionist thought. Rather, we should recognize how the Survivors Not Criminals campaign coerces sex workers to be a survivor or a criminal. Both of these are carceral designations that justify state intervention. Survivor Not Criminals lays the foundation to create carceral services and coercive rescue programs, like Project Rose. This unconsensual designation of ‘survivor’ removes agency from sex workers and authorizes social workers, police, and other state agents to seek justice on our behalf. These actions are fully at odds with Transformative Justice and other forms of abolitionist world-making. Sex workers deserve to have our own agency respected and we demand decriminalization.
The Abolition of Prostitution
As the politics of abolishing the police are being prioritized and set into motion, we must be wary of the state deploying these ‘alternative’ forms of policing. While calls for ‘Defund the Police’ is a tactic that reduces violence enacted by the police, policing as a strategy of state subjugation continues to expand across various state and technological agencies. Defund the police is just a tactic, prison abolition is the goal. It is up to us to unmake these extensive carceral systems of the prison industrial complex and embrace community forms of safety that do not rely on the fiction of policing and punishment. We can not allow state agencies and nongovernmental organizations to set up systems of alternative policing and believe that is justice.
While many people who believe in prison abolition may also agree with Af3irm’s public platforms, these ever shifting platforms misrepresent and contradict many of their actions. Why is Af3irm willing to collaborate with anti-trafficking organizations and state agents who do not believe in anti-imperialism, prison abolition, or radical organizing? Why has Af3irm refused open dialogue and accountability when their actions contradict their own platform? Why is Af3irm only accountable to a collection of ‘survivors’, when it is current sex workers who will be harmed by these policies?
Af3irm knows that sex work is work but believes that sex work should not be work. This means that they are completely unwilling to collaborate with sex workers who are actively working on ways to reduce violence against us. Sex workers demand full decriminalization of sex work because it will unmake carceral systems of state violence. Instead of supporting us, Af3irm has demonized sex work activists to their followers. They have called us the pimp lobby, men’s rights activists, and brainwashed servants of the patriarchy. They say we are more privileged and are actually harming the sex trafficked women that Af3irm claims to center, yet we know that it is precisely these carceral services that harm the most marginalized among us.
Just a month ago Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, a Black trans woman, was killed by incarceration through medical negligence while in solitary confinement. She was there because she was unable to afford the $500 bail for missing court dates for an alternative arrest program for prostitution. Instead of imagining themselves as saviors of “modern-day slaves”, Af3irm and the rest of the anti-trafficking industry must recognize their own complicity in Layleen’s murder. At this moment, Black trans sex workers are calling for us to decriminalize sex work, repeal the Walking While Trans ban, repeal SESTA/FOSTA, and stop the EARN IT act. If Af3irm centers the most vulnerable, why does Af3irm refuse to support any of their demands?
The abolition of prostitution is far too violent of an agenda. It causes groups like Af3irm to fight against sex workers who are actively working on radical and transformative ways of protecting our own. Af3irm will use sensationalized stories about violence committed against sex workers to justify an ever growing carceral system of violence. To justify their own agenda as anti-imperial, Af3irm has cited pre-colonized Hawai’i or the Zapatistas as having bans on prostitution but those bans do not exist within the context of the Prison Nation that is the United States. If you truly understand the deadly nature of the prison-industrial complex and the pervasiveness of these carceral systems….
Af3irm Sisters you must ask yourselves: how many sex workers are you willing to kill in order to abolish prostitution?
Afterword
I am disappointed to see Af3irm decide to ignore the majority of the claims in the article and instead resort insults and ad hominem attacks about me. I am not involved with any SWOP chapter and much of the article seems to be uncited claims against other sex work activists. However what is most troubling is their defense of Project Rose.
No AF3IRM members or Khara Jabola-Carolus had any involvement with the Arizona diversion program Project Rose. What we are able to discern is that the program appears to have been an attempt by sex trafficking survivor-advocates to divert people in the sex trade from arrest into support programs. This model is called “law enforcement assisted diversion” and is a favored approach by pro-prostitution advocates in Hawaiʻi. SWOP Phoenix organized against the diversion program as “nanny-state-ish” and “paternalistic” when one of their members was unjustly arrested for prostitution — unfortunately this would have happened regardless of Project Rose due to existing state laws against prostitution. SWOP sued to end the diversion program. Today, Phoenix police have resumed their previous practice of arresting and charging sex workers with no option of diversion from arrest. That is the extent of our knowledge about Arizona’s Project Rose.
While my article did not claim that AF3IRM was directly involved with Project Rose, Dominique Roe-Sepowitz certainly was. Project Rose set up specific police stings of sex workers and Monica Jones’ court case shows that she was targeted by Dominique Roe-Sepowitz in retaliation for speaking out against her. Instead of addressing the many abuses of Project Rose that many activists have brought to light, AF3IRM has chosen to ignore this evidence and claim “that is the extent of our knowledge” because it is inconvenient for them to know anything more than that.
The Af3irm Agenda: The Real Controversy behind Af3irm https://medium.com/@hawaii_78988/the-af3irm-agenda-the-real-controversy-behind-af3irm-fcc73f4603eb
Notes: Pictures and afterword were added to this article on 2/25/2021
