Transgender Law Center condemns Rentboy.com raid
Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security suddenly raided the offices of Rentboy.com in New York, which has been operating in public view for 18 years, and arrested several staff on charges of racketeering and promoting prostitution. This bust comes at a time when human rights advocates globally are uniting around a call to decriminalize sex work and at a time when the United States has the largest prison population in the world, with people of color, particularly Black people, representing a vastly disproportionate percentage of the incarcerated.
With this raid, the U.S. federal government is not only jeopardizing countless people's lives and only source of livelihood, but sending a clear and troubling message that the country is less invested in addressing systemic issues of racial, economic, and anti-LGBT injustice than in further criminalizing the individuals most marginalized by those systems.
Last week, Transgender Law Center and four other U.S.-based LGBT advocacy organizations issued a statement in support of Amnesty International's call to decriminalize sex work. Yesterday's action by the federal government is a clear demonstration of why LGBT organizations and people must be invested in this work to protect the human rights of sex workers. Laws criminalizing sexual exchange impede sex workers' ability to negotiate condom use and other boundaries, and force many to work in hidden or remote places where they are more vulnerable to violence. Actions like the government's raid contribute to the unjust and unacceptable systems and society we have today, from the disproportionate incarceration of Black transgender and gender non-conforming people to the epidemic of violence against transgender women of color.
Transgender Law Center is reaching out to global advocates to see how we can best be helpful in this situation.
Read this release online: transgenderlawcenter.org/archives/11903 .
National LGBTQ Task Force statement on Rentboy.com raid by Homeland Security
WASHINGTON DC, August 26, 2015—In the light of the controversial raid by the Department of Homeland Security on the headquarters of Rentboy.com, the National LGBTQ Task Force is making the following statement:
"There are so many other important investigations that federal resources should be focused on right now instead of sex workers. Take the appalling murders of trans women of color — now at epidemic proportions across our nation. Sex work is a fact of life — it has been, it is and it will be as long as human beings are around. Criminalization puts the livelihoods, health and lives of sex workers in jeopardy. It's time for our federal justice system to get its priorities straight and it's time once and for all to decriminalize sex work," said Russell Roybal, Deputy Executive Director, National LGBTQ Task Force.
