Historically, social norms about prostitution and prostitution law criminalizing all aspects of the sex trade have been rooted in a patriarchal moralism. The prostituted person has been stigmatized, criminalized, blamed and shamed as a moral failure, as a fallen woman who leads men astray. 

There has been a more recent approach in some places to alternatively address prostitution through an individual rights frame that ascribes absolute agency and choice to an empowered sex worker and promotes legalization or full decriminalization of the sex trade. 

Neither of these views question the ethics or considers the social context of the practice of sex buying itself. Neither holds buyers to account for the very real harms of CSE that are experienced by people who have been exploited.

Over the past three decades, however, there has been a significant global shift in attitudes towards prostitution and prostitution law that is rooted in equality values. 

These Equality Model approaches to CSE call for robust exit programming and real alternatives for those who are prostituted while requiring increased accountability and consequences for prostitution sex buyers and traffickers. 

This asymmetrical approach sets norms that let everyone know what the harm of prostitution really is; who is, in fact, being harmed; and who is doing the harm. It is a revolutionary concept and it works. There is ample data to prove its success. Although this Equality Model frame of prostitution as gender-based exploitation and violence is the most compelling and accurate paradigm, there are competing frames that prescribe different policy measures that are presently finding favor in the US.

The Anti Human Trafficking movement in the United States has largely adopted an approach to CSE that is based upon the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) definition of severe forms of sex trafficking. By defining those as happening only to minors, or to adults who experience force, fraud and coercion, the TVPA addresses harm only if it is perpetrated against youth or by third parties (pimps and traffickers). This does little to challenge prostitution sex buying itself as a harmful practice. The approach gives rise to a tendency among some to differentiate between free and forced prostitution, between sex trafficking and “sex work”. This has proved problematic in several respects. First, it serves as a barrier to services for many of those who have been exploited but are not seen to meet the criteria described in the legislation. Second, it creates a false dichotomy between prostitution and sex trafficking, viewing one as free and another as forced. In reality, CSE happens on a continuum.

TVPA further confuses things by addressing both sex and labor trafficking as Human Trafficking, giving rise to a conflation of these two distinct, although related, problems and opening the door for viewing prostitution as work like any other. This deeply flawed analysis has real world consequences, and it is the most vulnerable among us who pay the price.

The Roots

Modeling Equality is based on the recognition that CSE is a form of gender-based violence. It is being catalyzed by Peter Qualliotine and grows from the work he helped pioneer in Seattle over the past decade with the Ending Exploitation Collaborative and as co-founder and director of men's accountability with Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS). Both of these efforts were rooted in an analysis of CSE as a practice of gender based violence and treated sex buying as inherently exploitative and as a barrier to gender equality. This analysis was also the basis of the 10-week sex buyer education program Stopping Sexual Exploitation: a Program for Men.