Cambridge went as far as it could Monday toward decriminalizing sex work: deprioritizing arrests by city police for sex work and people providing it support services, telling the Middlesex district attorney she should end prosecutions of consensual sex work and asking for the creation of a dedicated phone line where sex workers can seek help – not from police, but from the city’s Community Assistance Response and Engagement team.
The move was urged by dozens of speakers during public comment, many of them current or former sex workers, along with advocates and clients. “San Francisco was the first city to recognize same-sex marriage. Our state was the first to follow. This is an opportunity for Cambridge, Mass., to lead the way yet again,” said a commenter, reading testimony from a client. “Cambridge can protect people from trafficking, violence and exploitation while also respecting the dignity, safety and rights of sex workers.”
The City Council policy order, in the works since a May 2025 committee hearing, follows a 2020 decriminalization vote by Somerville’s city council that was affirmed in 2024 to encourage similar action on Beacon Hill. Cambridge’s policy order was amended Monday to remove a call for the full decriminalization of consensual adult sex work statewide by the Legislature.
Sex workers and their clients were covered in the original version, and author Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and supporters believe that full coverage remains. In the version that passed, some councillors believed they voted for something different: that customers remain seen as criminals and that the goal is to end sex work rather than allow the trade to continue safely with protections for human and worker rights. “People are going to read it a little differently,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said, but he and supporters believe the order continues to cover clients and suppliers of sex work.
The policy change resulted from “a deep division within the people who are involved,” said councillor Patty Nolan, a co-sponsor of the order. The advocates for full decriminalization agreed to the amendment to lock in enough votes for passage, said another co-sponsor, councillor Marc McGovern. “The fact that they feel comfortable with this and are willing to make this compromise says a lot to me.”
The policy order was still seen as a victory by the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective.
The 8-0-1 passage of the order – councillor Tim Flaherty voted “present” – was “a really good precedent to show the rest of the state that this is the direction that things are moving in terms of protecting the human rights of sex workers,” said Jessica Van Meir, a doctoral student and teaching fellow at Harvard who co-founded Bswac.
Cambridge government was represented by Shameka Gregory, head of the city’s Domestic and Gender Based Violence Prevention Initiative. She said arrests of sex workers are already de-emphasized by local police, who have made around four such arrests in the past five years. The much publicized arrests in the city’s “brothel” case in 2023 were federal.
Still, it was “absolutely” necessary to set up a way for sex workers to seek help that didn’t involve police, Gregory said. “There is consensus across the board about the lack of trust in being able to reach out to law enforcement.”
Recommendations in the order for Cambridge policies were discussed and agreed to by the affected departments, which have funding to enact changes, including adding a referral line for sex workers to call, Gregory said.
Full decriminalization favored
Sobrinho-Wheeler said he preferred full decriminalization – covering worker and client – whereas Nolan called it “an open question” which was the safest and best way to support workers.
The cause for uncertainty was clear, as there were passionate voices against client protections heard Monday during public comment. Audra Doody, co-executive director of Safe Exit Initiative, said that from her perspective as a survivor of the sex trade, “sex buyers are often predators. They don’t ask how old you are or if you want to be there.” Robin Miller, who said she survived six years being bought and sold on the street and spent the next 27 years dealing with it, told councillors that “consensual, safe sex work will never be possible. You cannot screen out a rapist. You cannot screen out a serial killer.”
Doody and Miller were the only two speakers against full decriminalization, with Doody adding that in her work “I have talked to thousands of survivors of the sex trade. Not one of them was there by choice.”
At least eight speakers on Monday said they were, many mentioning financial benefits and flexible hours. “I made a conscious choice,” read the testimony of a Russian who works in Cambridge and Brighton and discovered a better living by not using a master’s degree in project management from Northeastern. “When I started working as a dominatrix, it really transformed my life. I really like what I do, and I see the difference that I make for my clients. Also, the flexible schedule has allowed me to better be the sole caregiver for my mom, who has Alzheimer’s.”
“My deliberate choice of becoming a sex worker has improved my quality of life and mental health,” said another speaker, Francesca Ackerman.
Van Meir, whose research focuses on the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, said her findings about customers differ from Doody’s. “I’ve interviewed almost 300 sex workers and sex trafficking survivors, and several survivors that I’ve interviewed told me that they escaped because a client helped them,” she said. “Most clients do not want to be engaging in nonconsensual sex with someone who’s being trafficked. Most want a consensual, negotiated arrangement with an adult, and they’re some of the most likely people to see if something bad is happening in the industry. If they see something that is concerning – exploitation, trafficking a minor – they should be able to report it. If clients are criminalized, they can’t.”
Limits of the Nordic model
The partial decriminalization backed by the Safe Exit Initiative and allied groups is known as the Nordic model for its use in countries such as Norway and Sweden. It decriminalizes selling sex and provides support services to help workers leave, but makes paying for sex a criminal offense. “We need to hold sex buyers accountable,” Doody said.
Not even all survivors of trafficking agree. Quinn Curry, who told councillors she was pushed into the sex industry as a teenager – “It was ugly. I didn’t want to be there” – said she supported full decriminalization because punishing clients would only be effective if all sex trade somehow ended; sex workers more often point to practices such as abortion. It’s never stopped when and where it’s illegal, but it’s less safe, they say.
Curry said men “were able to hurt me because I had a lack of political power to keep myself safe and to determine the trajectory of my own life. Only full decriminalization has been proven to afford both trafficking victims and sex workers more actual political power. I should have never gone through what I went through. No one should have, and it’s only through that power that we can prevent it.”
The Bswac website has a page of links to reports and academic studies showing the failures and flaws of the Nordic model. “From the assessment of global human rights and global health organizations, it is very clear that any form of criminalization – including of clients and noncoercive third parties – leads to greater violence against sex workers, lower ability to access health services and peer support services, and greater impoverishment for sex workers,” Van Meir said. Sex workers “are not going to be able to save up money and pay for college to accomplish that goal if their clients are criminalized and it’s harder for them to find clients, and then clients are not complying with their safety screenings.”
The Monday vote was as close to de facto full decriminalization as could be achieved within the bounds of the law, Van Meir said. Giving an example from Cambridge, where some people believe the sex worker business broken up in Alewife in 2023 involved trafficking, she noted that “it’s possible that there was some labor exploitation going on. In other industries, when we see a situation of labor exploitation, we say the solution is those workers should be able to report that … you can’t do that if your job is a crime.”
This post was updated Oct. 8, 2026, to reflect that the author and supporters of the policy order believe it decriminalizes clients as well as the supply side of sex work.
