Press Releases

Measure Q Hurts Women, Neighborhoods: By ZELDA BRONSTEIN

COMMENTARY
Friday October 22, 2004

If Measure Q passes, the Berkeley Police will be told to make the enforcement of existing laws against prostitution their lowest priority. Supporters say that this will help women.  

In fact, Measure Q is likelier to hurt the women its supporters want to help. That’s one reason it should be defeated. The other reason is that it will certainly harm our neighborhoods.  

First, the women’s issue. The prostitutes who would be affected by Measure Q are the ones likeliest to get arrested, which is to say, the ones who work the street. In Berkeley, that means the prostitutes who frequent San Pablo Avenue and nearby neighborhoods. Often young (the average age is 14) and poor, these women became streetwalkers in the first place because they were fleeing an abusive family or, in an economy with shrinking opportunities for the disadvantaged, they were desperate for paying work. As prostitutes, many of them are trapped by drug addiction, isolation and low self-esteem into emotionally and physically abusive relationships with their pimps.  

The best way to help street prostitutes is to help them get out of prostitution, and the best way to help them to get out of prostitution is law enforcement. The City of Berkeley has a successful court diversion program, in which a judge offers street prostitutes who’ve been arrested for solicitation the options of going to jail or getting professional help through Options Recovery Services. This city-funded program helps women mend their lives, reunite with their families, and find meaningful work that will set them on the road to self-respect and independence. Options Recovery Services has had 65 percent success rate in getting people off the street and off drugs.  

The second reason to vote against Measure Q is that it turns a blind eye to street prostitution’s degradation of community and neighborhood life. After CNN and other TV stations reported that Measure Q had qualified for the city ballot, street prostitution increased in south and west Berkeley. We’re talking about sexual acts taking place in cars, on porches, in driveways. There are two schools in the area, the East Bay French American School and the Infant School for the Deaf. Children walking to and from school or just playing in front of their houses see prostitutes and their clients openly going about their business. They find condoms and dirty needles on the sidewalk.  

But it’s not just kids who are being put at risk. A man who lives near San Pablo told me a chilling story. He had walked toward a car parked on his block that had been used by a pimp to transport prostitutes. After memorizing the license plate, he had turned around and started to walk home when he heard a car door slam and a menacing voice behind him say, “You looking for something?” It was the pimp, who, having realized he was being watched, had gotten out of his car to defend what he had come to regard as his turf. The neighbor kept on walking. He got home, safe but shaken.  

The group that put Measure Q on the ballot, Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP), never consulted beforehand with Berkeley residents or their elected representatives. Perhaps that’s because SWOP sees its campaign in our town as merely a steppingstone toward its ultimate goal: the decriminalization of prostitution, which is illegal under California State law.  

At the July meeting of the Berkeley Commission on the Status of Women, SWOP spokesperson Robyn Few said that regardless of how Measure Q did on Nov. 2, the initiative had already succeeded, because she had been contacted by CNN and Reuters. “We have won,” said Few, “because all over the United States they’re talking about prostitution in Berkeley.” Repeatedly queried by members of the commission about harm protection programs for prostitutes, Few said again and again that she didn’t “have the details.”  

In fact, there no such details in Measure Q. Measure Q neither founds nor funds any programs that would help women get out of prostitution. Instead, it asks Berkeleyans to avert their eyes from the exploitation and intimidation of women that’s occurring daily in their neighborhoods. And it says nothing at all about protecting the women and children and, for that matter, the men, who already live and frequent those neighborhoods from the violence—physical and emotional—that sustains prostitution.  

Berkeley is a proudly humane city. That’s why we’ve been targeted by Measure Q’s supporters. We should reject their simplistic, publicity-seeking initiative and instead work to strengthen and expand the programs we have in place—programs that reach out to prostitutes and offer them real, practical opportunities to better their lives.  

For the sake of women and children and our neighborhoods, vote No on Measure Q.