Sex workers, anti-trafficking groups, the New York Civil Liberties Union, public health advocates, and LGBTQ organizations are today lobbying the lawmakers of New York state to pass a bill that would make the possession of condoms inadmissible as evidence in criminal prosecutions of prostitution and related offenses. They say that the police regularly target sex workers and arrest them if they are carrying condoms — even though condoms are legal. And they say that the fact that the city and state health departments distribute over 40 million free condoms annually, even as law enforcement routinely use them as evidence of prostitution, is hypocritical and non-sensical.
Public health officials agree that condom use is something to be encouraged, especially given that rates of H.I.V. transmission in New York state are rising. Currently, H.I.V. is the third leading cause of death among New York City residents aged 35-54. But if a sex worker knows that possession of condoms may prove to be the difference between a nasty encounter with law enforcement and a nasty encounter with law enforcement that ends in arrest and prosecution, sex workers are likely to be fearful of carrying and using condoms. As we’ve written here before, the impacts of this policy on sex workers (and women who are mistakenly profiled by the police as sex workers) can be devastating. Sex workers also report that police confiscate their condoms during searches. (“No, these are for healthy people; hope you get killed tonight,” an officer allegedly told a 56-year-old sex worker in Brooklyn.) The policy effectively discourages condom usage by sex workers, and that puts them (and their sex partners, and their sex partners’ sex partners, and…you see how this works?) at risk.