In May 2013, Monica Jones, a student and sex-work activist, was arrested for “manifesting prostitution” by the Phoenix police.
Hers was one of more than 350 arrests carried out by Project ROSE in conjunction with Phoenix police since the programme's inception in 2011.
Project ROSE is a Phoenix city programme that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion programme to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially “arrested” at all.
In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programmes.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms – they were “lawfully detained.”
“Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem,” Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting “help.”
Project ROSE is the creation of Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. She is the director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research and a tenured professor at Arizona State University, where Monica Jones is a student. Once, she and Monica had even debated Project ROSE.
According to Project ROSE's website, most costs are absorbed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries of the officers carrying out the raids. Fifteen-hundred dollars (£900) more per day goes to the Bethany Bible Church. Volunteers, including students from Arizona State University, fill in the gaps. SWOP-Phoenix, an activist organisation by and for sex workers, is filing freedom of information requests to discover ROSE's other sources of funding.
At first, Project ROSE may seem similar to the many diversion programmes in the United States, in which judges sentence offenders to education, rehab, or community service rather than giving them a criminal record. What makes ROSE different is that it doesn't work with the convicted. Rather, its raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE's programme without being convicted of any crime. Project ROSE may not seem constitutional, but to Roe-Sepowitz, “rescue” is more important than rights.
In November 2013, Roe-Sepowitz told Al Jazeera: “Once you've prostituted you can never not have prostituted... Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy.”
“As a social worker, you’re supposed to see your clients as human beings,” Monica told me. “But her way of thinking is that once you’re a sex worker, you can never not be a sex worker.”
To the best of Google's knowledge, Roe-Sepowitz has not spoken to any press since Al Jazeera. She ignored my repeated requests for comment, and she has only been willing to engage sex workers if they risked their freedom by speaking to her class alongside members of the police.
Monica is a proud activist. Days ago she spoke to USA Today, comparing struggles against Arizona's SB 1062 bill (which permits businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals) to those her family fought for their civil rights. On her third year of a social-work degree, Monica volunteers with battered women, works at a needle exchange, and passes out condoms to sex workers. She is a member of SWOP-Phoenix (Sex Workers' Outreach Project). She describes herself as “homemaker at heart,” a girl who loves to cook, dance, and party, but also as an “advocate.”
Monica fears she was targeted for this advocacy.
On the day cops dragged Monica to Bethany Bible Church, she had posted on Backpage.com, an advertising service used by sex workers, to warn them of a coming sting. The day before, she had spoken against Project ROSE at a SWOP rally.
Monica told me she had accepted a ride home from her favourite bar the night of her arrest. Once inside the car, undercover officers handcuffed her. They were rude, she said, calling her “he” and “it” (Monica is trans, but her ID lists her as a female). They threatened to take her to jail. Like many incarcerated trans women, Monica had previously been imprisoned with men. Frightened, Monica agreed for them to take her to the church.
Ineligible for Project ROSE's diversion programme because of previous prostitution convictions, Monica now faces months in jail and worries incarceration will hamper her pursuit of a degree. She has been questioned on the street three times since her arrest. Once, police handcuffed her for 15 minutes.
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