Alaska Keeps Showing How It Really Sees Sex Workers

Alaska keeps showing how it views sex workers. Not as individuals who stop a serial killer or turn in pedophiles, or report trafficking. Not as people with rights, safety concerns, bills, children, housing needs, immigration fears, trauma histories, or lives that matter, but as evidence and scandal.

As a clickbait tool when it wants a headline, a sex trafficking crime when it wants government grants to keep coming in, or as a reason to shame someone.

And I am tired of watching everyone pretend they do not see it.

Look at the recent Jasmine Spa documents. Investigators say they executed a search warrant looking for “evidence of prostitution and sex trafficking operations.” They found two women, and according to the documents, the two women “appeared to be living in the back portion of the building.”

Really?

So, if police walk into a business and find women living in the back, the first response is, “Let’s charge them for sex trafficking?”

Read the document. At least one of those women becomes part of the state’s sex trafficking case. The sex workers arrested didn’t know that screening, scheduling, negotiating, or staying safe is criminalized in Alaska. Here, in a state with staggering rates of sexual assault and domestic violence, and in a region shaped by the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, survival strategies are “sex trafficking.”

Stop Treating Every Raid as Rescue

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Apr 17

The recent raids in Anchorage and Wasilla are being framed as arresting sex traffickers and rescuing victims, but many of those charged were actually the workers themselves. Simple things that sex workers do as part of the job, like negotiating a price, having condoms, locking doors, or working alongside another sex worker, are used as evidence to justi…

I wrote recently about the Anchorage and Wasilla massage parlor raids because the public was being handed the same tired script of law enforcement raiding a business, saying it is “sex trafficking,” and everyone is supposed to clap like someone was saved.

But when you actually look at the charging and bail documents, the picture gets a lot clearer.

Several of the people facing the harshest conditions were the women identified in the documents as sex workers. A suspected male manager, Terry Allan Volkman, was released on a $5K bail. Same with Van Ness, low bail, and he has been released. Even Tuan Huynh is out on $10k bail. Meanwhile, Guoguo Zhang is hit with $100K cash/performance and $100,000 cash/performance bail. Hongzhen Li is being held on a $55K cash/performance bail.

Those numbers look like the same old system deciding who is dangerous and who gets to walk out the door.

And in Alaska, this matters because our sex trafficking laws are what most people think of when they hear the words “sex trafficking.”

People hear “sex trafficking” and imagine kidnapping, violence, locked rooms, stolen passports, and organized predators. And yes, those things happen.

But in zero of the charging documents were any of those words used to describe what was going on with the recent sex trafficking raids.

Alaska law turns ordinary survival arrangements into sex trafficking because managing or supervising a place of prostitution, negotiating with customers, and helping someone else work, common safety practices used by sex workers, are twisted into sex trafficking charges.

According to the charging docs, that is what Guoguo Zhang was doing. An undercover officer propositioned her during a massage and asked if another girl could join. In a rational world, that might tell us something about how police manufacture these cases, but here in Alaska, it becomes part of a sex trafficking charge. In fact, they added a special charge on her just for this.

Read the wording of this added charge, and you may see something interesting. Guagua is listed as living at the spa. If a woman is living in the back of a spa, she does not need the state to turn her into a criminal defendant.

We have a problem here. Alaska has not figured out how to combat actual sex trafficking without arresting sex workers.

This is where the media comes in. Because they can see the same charging documents I can. Police didn’t build this stigma alone. Prosecutors do not build it alone. Media helps build it.

Now look at the Anchorage Daily News headline about the resigned Nome judge:

“Judicial commission accuses resigned Nome judge of lying to investigators about Facebook friendships with sex workers.”

This judge had already been accused of vile conduct and racist and xenophobic comments. He had multiple reports of inappropriate behavior from the bench. Those are things that should absolutely be reported on, and it was.

But this headline did something else. It made “sex workers” the scandal.

As if knowing sex workers is evidence of moral rot, or having a Facebook connection to a sex worker is contamination. It was written in a way that framed sex workers as people not worthy of having friends.

This kind of framing does not stay inside one article. It trains the public.

Sex workers = low worth/the thing you use to disgrace someone else.

And if anyone thinks I am exaggerating about how fast this stigma shows itself, I posted a shorter version of this on Facebook and shared it in a few groups. The comments did exactly what I am talking about.

Some people told me I did not know anything about the sex trafficking cases.

Which is funny, because I have spent years reading these kinds of documents, writing about these cases, and sitting with these laws. I myself have lived inside the consequences. I am not going to sit idly by, watching people who know almost nothing about sex work suddenly become experts the second they want to defend a raid. Of course, I am going to say something.

Some people acted like I had misspelled prostitution because I wrote “sex worker.” Ha ha.

That part is almost funny, if it were not so revealing.

No, I did not spell prostitution wrong. I chose a word that recognizes labor, agency, humanity, and the fact that people in the sex trade are not all the same.

And then there were the people who skipped straight to cruelty.

One calling me a “third world piece of shit prostitute criminal,” as if the goal was to prove my point in real time.

And they did. That is what happens when the media and public policy spend years teaching people that sex workers are not really people with rights.

I am not upset about one headline or one bad comment.

I am disgusted with the systemic structure Alaska has built around dehumanizing sex workers, and then acting confused when violence against sex workers is ignored or minimized.

Lawmakers claim criminalization is necessary because the public has already been trained to see sex workers as less credible and less worthy of rights.

Then we are killed, or go missing, and no one looks, or they look too late, and someone inevitably comments, “Well, what did they expect? It’s dangerous.”

Yes, it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because stigma and criminalization make it dangerous.

It is dangerous because lawmakers use our bodies to justify funding, task forces, and prosecutions, but still refuse to give us rights.

Alaska cannot keep pretending this is about rescue while treating sex workers as low-worth criminals and pretending to fight trafficking while charging workers.

You cannot say you care about exploitation while making it more dangerous for exploited people to ask for help or claim moral concern while using “sex worker” as shorthand for shame.

This is a system. It is a whole damn machine that sex workers pay for with our autonomy, and I am tired of being described in the language of the media and the state-sanctioned shame.

Prostitute. Commercial sex worker. Known to the police. High-risk lifestyle, anything but a whole person.

If you are still reading, thank you. I hope you understand what I am trying to be clear about. Sex workers are not asking anyone to pretend coercion does not exist, or the media to ignore exploitation.

We are asking for basic human rights.

A sex worker is not automatically a victim with no agency or a criminal with no credibility, and a person knowing sex workers is not, by itself, a scandal.

The scandal is that Alaska still treats sex workers as a class of people it can use but does not have to respect.

Lawmakers need to stop pretending criminalization protects people while every safety practice we use is turned into evidence against us.

And the public needs to stop applauding headlines before asking who is actually being helped, and who is being jailed.

Sex workers are not the scandal.

The scandal is how comfortable Alaska remains with treating us as less.

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