SWOP-PHX petitions the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The following petition is posted on the website of the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. SWOP-PHX and Best Practices Policy Project are challenging the US' commitment to human rights in light of the harsh and broad anti-prostitution laws in Phoenix, as well as the "arrest-and-rescue" model of outreach and service like that employed by ASU School of Social Work's prostitution-diversion program,  Project ROSE.

Project ROSE, Social Work ethics, and FIRST, doing no harm.

(Note for subscribers: the post you received this weekend entitled "Stand with Monica Jones: Stop Project Rose!" has been removed and rewritten in 2 parts. This is part 1, which addresses Project Rose itself, which will be in action again this month. Later this week I'll put out part 2, in response to the pending March 14 trial of my friend and fellow activist, Monica Jones. My apologies for confusion or redundancy. - Peggy Plews)

                                                         Marcia Powell, PHX 2008
                                                           (Credit: Gary Millard)

The Sex Worker Outreach Project of Phoenix (SWOP-PHX) has been organizing international opposition to Project ROSE, a collaboration between the Phoenix Police and the ASU School of Social Work which rounds up hundreds of consenting sex workers -  mostly people of color, it turns out - for prosecution each year while purporting to be rescuing "victims" of sex-trafficking. Another Project ROSE operation  is supposed to go down this month, so it seems appropriate to re-visit the issue here now.


Several months ago I reached out to ASU SWK Professor Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, at the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research Project ROSE is her baby. She provided me with the documents below by way of arguing that Project ROSE has been given a bad rap. I didn’t think they did much to make her case, but I’m publishing them to give Project Rose a fair hearing in the court of public opinion - this is their counter-argument.

All that Professor Roe’s response really did was convince me that this program needs to be shut down. Look at all the agencies that have bought into it - I wouldn't trust any of these Project ROSE collaborators if I was a sex worker, homeless, or otherwise vulnerable to police violence. In fact, if you're a homeless or runaway youth and call Tumbleweed asking for help, they'll first have the cops check to see if you have any warrants before they send an outreach worker to meet you. If you do have a warrant, you can expect the police to come get you instead.

However noble Project Rose's intentions are - ostensibly to save victims of sex trafficking from being treated like criminals and rescue them from their circumstances - the effects on most people touched by the net cast to find said victims must incredibly damaging.

 The social work profession embraces the old physicians’ adage, “first do no harm”. Here they are simply ignoring the harm they do. The outcomes that ASU’s research seems to focus on doesn't detail what happens to the hundreds of people who end up being subjected to the violence of the criminal justice system through prosecution as a result of being targeted by them for "rescue", who may have never been arrested were it not for the Project ROSE stings.



 In fact, if these organizations involved in Project ROSE really thought critically about all these “victims” of sex trafficking who they want to protect from arrest (even those who assert that they consented to sex work), then they should be joining the fight to legalize sex work altogether instead of encouraging the cops to round people up for “rescue” twice a year like stray dogs.


It is not anyone's contention with SWOP-Phoenix that sex-trafficking isn't a very real problem - as is human slavery and exploitation in every other industry. But Project ROSE is not targeting johns seeking underage sex workers, nor do they appear to be busting human trafficking rings. They don’t even seem to be finding many "pimps". Rather, the Phoenix Police are sweeping city streets and Backpage.com ads for sex workers in the name of "rescuing" them, promising prosecution to those who either don't agree to or qualify for diversion, or don't complete Project ROSE's requirements succcessfully. That represents about 70% of all those arrested during these stings.


Thus, the ASU School of Social Work is responsible for assuring the criminal prosecution of hundreds of sex workers a year by encouraging police to profile and arrest them - or rather, abduct and transport them to the Bethany Bible Church basement where all these human service agencies lie in wait to "rescue" them. Eventually, some of these people may end up in prison, as the fourth violation of the city prostitution law is a felony and often means prison time. That's what happened to Marcia Powell - she got 27 months for being a repeat offender and died in a cage in the desert after being set up in a sting to offer a cop a $20 blow job. In reality, most sex workers are more troubled by violence from the state and police than by pimps, traffickers or johns.

Professor Roe-Sepowitz insists that "there's no other way" to locate, identify, and offer help to potential trafficking victims than to have all these people arrested and brought to them in handcuffs, where they then sort out the "victims" from the "real criminals". When I did outreach to people who were homeless, mentally ill,  and "resistant to services" many years ago in Michigan, we actually went out into the streets, shelters, and encampments looking for them ourselves - not with the cops, either.  We recognized that not only would they not be able to trust us if we brought the cops (or sent them to bring clients to us in handcuffs and tears), but that there was a far greater likelihood that our potential clients would be hurt by police intervention than that our staff would be hurt by any of them. That's not rocket science, either; I don't know why these agencies don't do the same in their outreach to the "victims" they wish to "rescue".


As a point of clarification, by the way, there's a stark difference of opinion, more than just a matter of semantics, between the folks at Project ROSE/PHX Police and the Sex Workers Outreach Project when discussing whether or not the "victims" taken to Bethany Bible Church in handcuffs to be confronted by a prosecutor with the threat of jail down the road if they don't go along with the show are actually under arrest or not. Project ROSE asserts the people who refuse or don't qualify for rescue are not really arrested the night they are picked up and offered the option of salvation over jail, since they aren't immediately transported to jail.


Just because the harm to their would-be clients' lives doesn't happen in their line of sight or the night of their "outreach", doesn't mean that such harm doesn't happen, or that Project ROSE collaborators aren't all responsible to some degree for the consequences of those arrests. Arrest, by the way,  is what the ACLU of Arizona calls it when you're placed in handcuffs by the police and taken against your will to a location of the cops' choosing to be threatened with further state violence if you appear to be anything but a victim of someone else's crime to them.  I agree with SWOP-PHX and the ACLU here - if that happened to me, I'd say I had either been abducted or arrested. In either case, its a violent thing to do to a person. It also brings into question the validity of the "victimization histories" the cops take from their prisoners that night, all of whom are no doubt trying to figure out how to get back out of trouble.


Furthermore, whether they are booked into jail that night or not, the effect is the same down the road - those picked up in Project ROSE stings who don't qualify for or succeed at the diversion program get served with a summons to answer the charges levied against them from that encounter with the cops, and if they are guilty of any prostitution-related offense in Phoenix, it means mandatory jail time - which is doing violence to every one of those people so affected, some of whom may well lose their "day jobs", housing, custody of children, and other critical things in their lives due to that jail stay - not to mention being forced through the trauma of incarceration itself.


And for those of you who think "big deal - a few days in jail never hurt anybody", read this and think again. Just two days in the door killed diabetic Deborah Braillard, so don't ever underestimate the harm the prison industrial complex can do to a person's life.


Finally, I don't know how many readers have a social work orientation - I, myself, spent many years studying professional social work, only to abandon it for more radical possibilities for changing the world. Nevertheless, the profession has some good ethical standards worth looking at here, in the context of this whole debate, since Project ROSE is proudly supported by the School of Social Work at Arizona State University. Among other concerns (like the respect for the autonomy of individuals and basic human rights), the subjects targeted by Project Rose are actually official social work research subjects being coerced into the program studying them, which violates fundamental social work ethics about “informed consent” - how was that ever approved as an academic research project, I wonder?


Here is the national SWK Code of Ethics. The Social Work Journal AFFILIA has a good overview of the numerous ethical concerns involved in Project Rose.  I encourage readers to contact the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the Council on Social Work Education and the ASU School of Social Work Dean (Steve Anderson) with complaints about professional ethics violations, and help us put an end to Project ROSE.  Be sure to cc Michael Crow, the President of ASU, too, while you're at it. He needs to know what's going on.


Here are Professor Roe's documents, in defense of everything the Valley's non-profit industrial complex and the Phoenix Police are doing to help victims of sex-trafficking:

STAND WITH MONICA JONES: Project Rose is Violence!

(Edited November 10, 2013) 

When I first put up this blog post, I didn't realize how toxic the environment was in which the debate between sex worker rights activists and anti-traffickers has been taking place these past several years. It was not my intent to polarize local parties even further by focusing so much on the person who developed and implemented Project Rose, as opposed to simply critiquing the methods the program employs to rescue people. The edits made in this post account for that concern.

I also didn't intend to diminish the reality that there are many lives torn apart by human trafficking, whether or not the labor exploited and stolen is sexual in nature. There are enough in the business who would choose a diferent line of work, given the option, that I don't want to minimize that reality, either. In a truly healthy economy, people would have more choice and mobility.

Sex work really isn't for everyone - but those who do work in the field deserve respect, safety and protection from exploitation and violence. I don't see how Project Rose does anything for them but expose them to even more state violence than they otherwise would be...and it seems as if Social Work should be very much concerned with the principle of "first do no harm" when professional interventions are designed for public policy and private lives. I was a social work student for many years myself, and Project Rose runs counter to so much I learned about social work ethics.

I still adamantly object to a program design which casts a large net to round everyone up in handcuffs and sorts through who gets to be free and who goes to jail later. It "liberates" some at the expense of others, and does immeasurable harm to those arrested in the end.  That said, I hope readers who take issue with Project Rose - particularly those of you who are ASU students, will still raise your concerns with Professor Roe, but please do so in a respectful  way which allows the dialogue to continue. I don't think her ultimate objective is to hurt anyone, by any means, and I hope there is at least some common ground we can agree on...like the principle that consensual sex workers and their allies also deserve to be free of violence, and thus Project Rose should offer everyone assistance, regardless of priors or other factors, and arrest no one (especially not those of us protesting it). If the people behind Project Rose could at least agree to that much, we will have made progress.


Peggy Plews

 SWOP-Phoenix Activist Monica Jones

 

SUPPORT MONICA HERE!!!!

  

Last May I joined the  Phoenix Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP-Phoenix) in a protest of Project Rose, a Phoenix Police prostitution sting operation that purports to rescue victims of sex trafficking, and claimed not to arrest those voluntary sex workers swept up in its net (See: Cracking down on sex trafficking by not arresting prostitutes). My friends and I were not terribly well-received, and the day after our protest - which was the second day Project Rose was operating - one of our transgender friends who was out there with us, Monica Jones, was even arrested for "manifestation" of the intent to commit prostitution for accepting a ride to the bar in her own neighborhood.


Specifically, the Phoenix Police say that under the Phoenix Municipal Code, she is guilty of this:

23-52 Prostitution, soliciting an act of prostitution and related offenses.

A.    A person is guilty of a misdemeanor who: 


3. Is in a public place, a place open to public view or in a motor vehicle on a public roadway and manifests an intent to commit or solicit an act of prostitution. Among the circumstances that may be considered in determining whether such an intent is manifested are: that the person repeatedly beckons to, stops or attempts to stop or engage passersby in conversation or repeatedly, stops or attempts to stop, motor vehicle operators by hailing, waiving of arms or any other bodily gesture; that the person inquires whether a potential patron, procurer or prostitute is a police officer or searches for articles that would identify a police officer; or that the person requests the touching or exposure of genitals or female breast;  


The first time I put this post up, I did some speculating about the mindset of the Phoenix Police when they decided to arrest Monica. My comments were kind of inflammatory and probably unfair to the arresting officer, so I've taken them down. The truth is, I don't know what the PPD was thinking - maybe they weren't thinking at all. I can't believe they thought we would all quietly go away after this. 

It's possible the cop who did the dirty work is the one who made the call to target her while he was driving through her neighborhood, and thought she was really out hooking. I'm skeptical of the arresting officer's veracity and his bias about transgender people, though, having read the report. For one thing, even though Monica's driver's license identifies her as female, the cop identified her using male pronouns throughout the entire police report - he really felt she should be clearly identified as a man, not a woman. And there are a few variations between his version (or interpretation of events) and hers.


I'm more inclined to think that the commander made the decision the day before after they identified her at the protest and saw that she had a prior - which is what makes her so vulnerable to that "manifestation" charge: they apparently use a prior offense as evidence that you intended to commit that crime again. I guess it's possible that her neighborhood was on their map of areas to target, but it seems awfully coincidental that the Project Rose officers were lurking around there.


  In any case, here's pretty much what went down: The day after our protest, Monica got dressed up and decided to go to the bar.  She's on her way, by foot (through her own neighborhood, mind you), when this guy pulls up in front of her, literally blocking her path, and offers her a ride. She has a mile yet to walk to the bar and was bothered by another dude in the area, so she figures "either this guy is a cop and I've got a safe ride, or he's someone who might buy me a drink when we get there", and she gets in.


Almost immediately the guy starts propositioning her, asking how much she wants for a sex act. Monica wasn't working, though - besides, she knew full well what was going down with Project Rose; he must have been disappointed that she wouldn't take his bait. This guy kept being really pushy, too, so she asked him "look are you a cop? Because there's this sting going down and you really need to be more careful about asking those kinds of things..." He was obviously a cop.

The guy insists several times that he's not a cop, though, as he passes by Monica's bar, and keeps going when she says "turn here!" "stop!" "I want to get out!". So what was she supposed to think? If he wasn't a cop, then he was in the process of abducting her, so she grabs his..umm..male organ,  having every reason to be concerned for her safety now (what would you do if you thought you were being kidnapped? That's better than going for the jugular...). Of course, in his report Officer John made that moment sound like a sex act. At that point he gave his buddies the signal to pull him over, and they arrested her for trying to solicit him.

The cops took Monica (in cuffs) to Project Rose's HQ at the Bethany Home Bible Church, where she asked for an attorney, and was introduced to the prosecutor, who threatened to send her to jail that night if she didn't agree to participate in their program. She was not entitled to consult an attorney before deciding whether or not to sign away her rights and enter the diversion program (which is an implied admission of guilt). 



Monica had already been through a diversion program, though, which they soon discovered - that disqualifies you from ever being diverted from the criminal system again (that's how they sort out the "victims" from the "repeat offenders"  - the  "real prostitutes" who they apparently do feel belong in jail). She also would have been disqualified from the program if she had so much as a baggie they thought once held pot in it. After detaining and processing Monica that night, though, they released her without charges...that is, until this fall, when they sent her a summons to answer the charge of "manifestation".

This is no small thing. Monica is facing up to 6 months in jail and a $2,500 fine - with a minimum mandatory of 30 days in jail.  Even if the judge doesn't think imprisonment is appropriate, with a conviction she would lose not only her freedom, but also her student loans and class standing, as well as her safe, affordable housing. Now, I ask the perpetrators of Project Rose: just how are you "saving" trafficking victims with this program again? Are you sure it isn't inadvertently hurting anyone?

As a transgender woman who would be locked up in a male facility, Monica faces infinitely higher levels of violence, abuse and exploitation from both prisoners and officers than cisgender people are when incarcerated. She would be forced to remain in solitary confinement for her own safety through the course of her imprisonment - which still doesn't protect prisoners from lecherous guards and the jail trustees. She would have to endure the special "care" of Joe Arpaio's gracious deputies, who are known for beating up some of thier mentally ill prisoners in restraints, and killing others through overt violence or deliberate indifference, among other things.

The law that Monica is being prosecuted under assumes that certain things she did that day: walking in a "high-vice area", accepting a ride from a stranger, asking the man who was propositioning her repeatedly for sex if he was a cop, and making physical contact with his, um, sex organ - were motivated by the intent to trade sex for money. Now, how do they prove criminal intent? They'll point to her prior conviction for a prostitution charge as evidence of that intent: after all, "Once a whore always a whore". They may even use her statement from the protest the day before - she, like myself - believes sex work should be legalized. Does that mean she was out hooking the next day herself? C'mon, guys - you know she wasn't.

If anything, the fact that this arrest went down during Project Rose - the day after she publicly criticized the sting - should have been evidence enough to the cops that Monica WASN'T attempting to solicit anyone  - she knew full well what they were up to. They should have been wary that SHE might be stinging them when they went after her - none of us would be so stupid, though, as to deliberately bait a Vice operation.

Even if the cops who picked Monica up were totally oblivious to her role in the protest the day before, Daniel Garcia, the Chief of Police and Aarón J. Carreón-Aínsa, the Phoenix City Prosecutor, are well aware of the back-story to this arrest now - and yet these charges still stand. What does that tell you about the overall "intent" and integrity of  Project Rose?

 Can't miss Monica standing tall, even in this one...

(May 2013: Protesting Project Rose)

Interestingly, given that some of these Project Rose arrests are being based on assumptions about the target's "intent" behind non-criminal behaviors and their response to having someone aggressively proposition them for a sex act, the Phoenix Police department apparently decided not to record any of their cops in the act of setting these people up - or any of these people actually committing their crime. I guess they know that in court their testimony alone always wins against some streetwalker's version of events - and a recording might contradict the good officer's word, so they made sure not to have any way for these women to defend themselves if they alleged the officers version ws inaccurate. That alone brings the validity and credibility of Project Rose arrests into question.

I recently wrote to the professor at the Arizona State University School of Social Work who is supervising the academic/research side of Project Rose about my concerns for Monica and the charges she's facing. She never responded to it, though. ASU insists that Project Rose first does no harm...of course, we can see from Monica's prosecution that this assertion isn't true at all - they appear to be going out of their way at the Phx PD to do my friend as much harm as possible for challenging them.

Project Rose is also embraced by a host of non-profit organizations in the valley, most of which serve populations at high risk of victimization by state violence. They're all collaborating with the cops in the worst kind of way, encouraging violence against sex workers by lining up to have the police deliver their prospective clients to them in a church basement in handcuffs and tears, so they're more receptive to the great services those kind people have to offer them. I think those agencies are being paid from anti-trafficking funds for the time they give to Project Rose, by the way, but don't quote me on that.


Shame on all of those organizations (including ASU, Catholic Charities, EMPACT, Community Bridges, and HealthCare for the Homeless , StreetlightUSA, and ALERT) - beginning with the biggest provider of services to homeless youth in the valley, Tumbleweed. Most of these agencies appear to have a bunch of cops, prosecutors, and big business CEOs on their boards of directors - no wonder they don't know what they're doing. And they all seem to be quite happy to be in bed with the Phoenix Police - how can they really be serving the vulnerable populations that are most violated by the police, then? Word must be out on the street that these places can't be trusted by now.


Anyway, if you're hungry and homeless and you call Tumbleweed for a crisis outreach team to take you to a homeless shelter, you better make sure you don't have a warrant out for your arrest: before they come to your aid those nice people at Tumbleweed are going to call the cops to see where you stand with them - and to tell them where to grab you if you're wanted. I was floored. I had to drag it out of them, but they really told me that when I called them about a homeless 18 year old kid getting out of prison the other day.  They said "well, we can't have people up in here who have warrants out for them." That doesn't mean you have to call the cops on them yourself, though! What a violation of trust.


Now, why should homeless and runaway youth ever ask these people for help?  They seem far more interested in their corporate image than the safety and survival of their clientele, and clearly lack a meaningful, critical analysis of how state violence plays out against the youth they serve.  They certainly don't seem to understand the basics of street outreach and harm-reduction, with these kinds of policies and their cozy "partnerships" with the police. Far too often the people who are there to help those kids only do them harm by involving the police. Good intentions can even kill.

Project Rose has already been roundly criticized in a well-respected professional journal, AFFILIA - and I expect more to hit the presses soon. Please read that article if you still believe programs like this "help" more people than they hurt, or that the harm they do to some is worth the good they do for others. There are far more effective outreach programs to help people who are really being trafficked against their will, and the best jail "diversion" program for sex workers would be to simply legalize prostitution altogether. It would certainly undermine those who are trafficking others by bringing the entire sex work industry out of the shadows, making it safer for victims to ask for help.


The City of Phoenix needs to drop these charges against Monica now, before it takes any more of a toll on her. The intent of prosecuting her seems not only to punish her, but to silence anyone who would publicly call this project what it is - a conspiracy between cops and social workers to lock up people they think are "willing whores". They had to charge Monica for "manifesting" her "intent" because she wasn't actually doing anything criminal - they know full well she wasn't out there prostituting during their sting, and that she had every reason to think their buddy was indeed a cop.  This prosecution is malicious - and when she beats it, she's going to have one hell of a good wrongful arrest suit on her hands.

Monica's next court date (we thought it would be her trial, but it's a pre-trial) is November 27, 2013 at the Phoenix Municipal Court. Tune into SWOP-PHX to keep up on what's happening, and visit our INDIEGOGO page to support Monica's defense - though I'm going to be really pissed off if the city makes us spend all that money on a lawyer just to motion to dismiss this garbage...


(note: I made prior reference to Monica being Dr. Roe-Sepowitz' student - she never was. She's an ASU student planning to major in social work, and had simply spoken to Professor Roe before about Project Rose).

Social work values, state violence, and Project Rose.

The following post from the Best Practices Policy Project references a great article in AFFILIA: Journal of Women and Social Work that sums up my own major concerns about Project Rose being supported by the ASU School of Social Work program.

Download the PDF and read on...

 SWOP-Phoenix 

protesting Project Rose 

October 17, 2013

-------------------------------

Questionable Practices: Arresting people “for their own good” violates social work ethics

Best Practices Policy Project

October 18th, 2013 ·

Tags: diversion programs, Phoenix, policing

 

Stephanie Wahab and Meg Panichelli provide a succinct analysis of the ethical considerations associated with diversion programs that arrest people in the sex trade in order to force them to accept services. Their commentary which appears in a 2013 edition of AFFILIA, a peer reviewed social work journal addressing the concerns of social workers and their clients from a feminist point of view, challenges the “assumption that arresting (or participating in the arrest of) people ‘for their own good’ constitutes good or ethical social work practice.” The authors conclude that, “targeting people for arrest under the guise of helping them violates numerous ethical standards as well as the humanity of people engaged in the sex industry” and express concerns that such an approach “constitutes an act of structural violence against individuals who already frequently report negative, discriminatory, and often violent encounters with law enforcement including people with precarious migratory or citizenship status, poor, youth, transgender, and people of color.”

The example that sparked the writing of the AFFILIA editorial is Project ROSE, a program in which social workers from Arizona State University  School of Social Work and some service providers collaborate with city wide raids orchestrated by the Phoenix Police Department. Project ROSE is found to violate ethical standards described in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics, the Council on Social Work Education Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, and the International Federation of Social Work Ethical Principles. Informed consent–an essential element of social work practice and the standard in many other professions–is violated because the services provided rely on recruitment via ”massive police (in this case 125 officers) sting operations.” The authors explain that, ‘if targeted sex workers (and people profiled as sex workers) reject the ‘offer’ to enter the diversion program and/or if they fail to successfully complete a diversion program… they face criminal prosecution.”

Wahab and Panichelli provide the reader with clear guidance on how to avoid unethical practice from the perspectives of social workers. “Whether you believe that sex work = sex trafficking or whether you believe that there is no universal sex work experience and that sex workers can make their own decisions about what they need and when they need it,” they write. “Schools of Social Work and social work in general should not be in the business of arresting people for their own good.”

The full text for the commentary is available at: Ethical and Human Rights Issues in Coercive Interventions With Sex Workers Stéphanie Wahab and Meg Panichelli, Affilia 2013 28: 344.