OPINION | Why Did Seattle City Council Screen Video Footage of Sex Workers on Aurora?

by Megan Burbank

A strange thing happened earlier this month at the Public Safety Committee meeting to discuss City Attorney Ann Davison and Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore's proposed SODA and SOAP zones, controversial since their inception, that would, among other things, ban sex workers from a designated area on Aurora Avenue North, a major corridor of Seattle's survival sex trade. In a bizarre moment during her presentation, Moore screened a video of sex workers engaging in what she described as "commercial sexual exploitation," because, she said, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The video, from July 19, comes with a content warning for "partial nudity," and essentially just shows sex workers walking around on a corner of Aurora — nothing that will be surprising to anyone who's driven that stretch in the past decade. But the video, which Moore described dramatically as "a snapshot of one hour of the sex trade on one corner of Aurora" was oddly familiar to me. It looked like a surveillance video, and reminded me of the prurient 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 you're talking about supporting sex workers and survivors of gender-based violence. But the SODA and SOAP proposals are quite transparently not about creating more robust support for sex workers or people who use drugs: They're about getting them to go somewhere else. And that dehumanizing, distancing approach was evident in the rhetorical tools committee members employed at the meeting, perhaps most of all in Moore's video.

Even setting aside the privacy concerns it brought up, taking videos of sex workers to screen publicly at a recorded meeting that's also posted online — without giving anyone in that video a voice of their own — is an odd way to try to prove how against exploitation you are. It's an exploitative act in itself, and a reminder of how out of touch the City Council is with the communities it serves, which include not just concerned neighbors — many of whom spoke at the meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 13 — but sex workers themselves.

The voices of people currently involved in sex work were notably absent from a panel the committee convened to discuss the issue on Tuesday, which leaned heavily on the savior narrative of helping people "escape" the sex trade, a framing that ignores people who can't leave sex work — or don't want to — and also deserve safety and dignity.

But sex workers did show up for the public comment period, speaking out against the SODA and SOAP zones. So did public defenders, the ACLU, business owners, organizations advocating against gender-based violence, and volunteers with the Green Light Project, a mutual aid group that brings supplies, food, and peer support to people working in the sex trade on Aurora twice a week.

Their opposition was clear, and rooted in lived experience. "This legislation will hurt survivors of gender-based violence," said anti-violence advocate Shannon Perez-Darby. "It will criminalize people experiencing violence. I care deeply about the safety of every member of our community. Prioritizing safety for some above safety for all is not the answer. We can do better."

"[I]f you want people to stop being trafficked or stop doing sex work, you need to give those people resources," said one sex worker. "SOAP orders and profiling will create a barrier to 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's missing from Moore's proposal, which would simply revive a practice the council repealed in the past due to its disproportionate impact on People of Color.

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

By contrast, the advocates and sex workers who attended the meeting offered a powerful counter-narrative — and one that must serve as the basis for any legitimate policy concerning sex work moving forward.

One Green Light Project volunteer put it this way: "The women on Aurora are not abstract concepts to us. They're our friends. They're our peers. They're us. This law doesn't do anything for them except make their lives more dangerous. I implore those of you who support this bill to actually read it and see what it does, which is arrest the victims that you seem to want to protect, and actually talk to people who are in these communities and see what they have to say."

At Tuesday's meeting, it didn't seem like the City Council was listening. But if they don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past, they'll have to.

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📸 Featured Image: Councilmember Cathy Moore presenting CB 120836, an ordinance relating to prostitution, at the Public Safety Committee special meeting on Aug. 13, 2024. Screenshot from a Seattle Channel broadcast of the Aug. 13 Public Safety Committee meeting.