This is the first in what I hope will be a regular series where I talk with people you've probably never heard of, but should know – fascinating folks who do cutting edge work in their fields but for whatever reason don't have their own reality show yet. Feel free to leave me suggestions for future interviewees in comments!



Kate Mogulescu founded and runs the Legal Aid Society's Trafficking Victims Advocacy Project – a crucial arm of the New York City public defender's office that represents the majority of people charged with prostitution who cannot afford attorneys. At one point, she was representing everyone arrested for prostitution in Manhattan who went through Legal Aid. She is an Adjunct Professor at the City College of New York, and recently wrote in the New York Times about the mass arrests of sex workers around the Super Bowl. She's also a close friend.

Though our usual conversations are had over drinks, this time we talked on the phone about her work, the debate over legalizing prostitution, the "least important" people in the criminal justice system ... and the trouble we got into during high school.

JESSICA VALENTI: I want you to talk to me about the word "trafficking", because I know there's a lot of controversy there, and I was hoping you could just walk me through it a little bit.

KATE MOGULESCU: Trafficking is a crime that involves force, fraud or coercion to compel someone to engage in labor, or commercial sex. So it describes a sort of broad set of conduct that can be used to compel someone to engage in specific actions. I think where we get into more sort of confusion is where we look at the pitch and level of the rhetoric around trafficking right now. Some people use the term "modern day slavery" to refer to trafficking. I have a lot of concerns with phrasing like that.

Right. So how does the controversy around the word "trafficking" – and whether to use it – impact the work that you do?



What we're seeing is a peak level of concern about the issue of trafficking and abolishing trafficking. Unfortunately, the ways in which that's played out is through a very intense ramping up of anti-prostitution policing. And so, what we see is many people swept into the criminal justice system under the guise of helping and saving victims of human trafficking. That our efforts to help people impacted by trafficking would somehow come in the form of an arrest – it's baffling.



And do your clients largely consider themselves trafficked?



No. Many of them do meet the legal criteria for trafficking, or have been trafficked in the past. And I want to be really clear – when I talk about this, I'm talking about the specific people that I represent; I'm talking about people vulnerable to arrest in New York City. So no one comes into criminal court or to my office or to meet with any member of my team and says, "I'm a victim of trafficking, thank goodness the NYPD arrested me, because I've just been looking for assistance, and I don't know where to look." That's not what happens.

But what we learned by listening to our clients' experiences is that many of them have experienced trafficking, and many of them, even more than that, have experienced severe marginalization, exposure to violence ... and that's an area that's of real concern to us as well.

Moving back a moment, how did you get started doing this work?



A few years ago, I started looking at our representation of people charged with prostitution a little bit more closely, and traditionally in criminal court those cases were just given the shortest shrift. I mean, they were the least important in the criminal justice system. This group of clients that we represent on prostitution offenses are the most marginalized clients that I've represented as a public defender. They've faced tremendous stigma that many our other clients don't struggle with.



Can you talk about that stigma a little bit?



There's something very, very clear to my clients about how they're perceived in society. And it starts with how they're treated by the police and extends throughout the court system. There's a very particular response that is judgmental, that is moralistic, that is paternalistic. One of the problems with criminalization is that people internalize a lot of what the criminal justice system puts on them. And now we have this narrative: you're engaging in prostitution, we will arrest you; you're a defendant in court, and we're going to pathologize you.

But then we're also going to heap on top of that this notion: you're a victim of trafficking, and we're saving you – and this for your own good! But then: if you don't do what we say, you're going to go right back to being a defendant, and the bad person, and maybe go to jail. And so it's really frenetic narrative.



What do you think about legalizing prostitution?



I'm not sure there's a clear answer. I am deeply concerned with the health and safety and well being of people engaged in prostitution. However, I know that criminalization just adds further harm. The way it stands now, because of criminalization, people engaging in prostitution are very unlikely to report when violence happens to them.



Of course. And I imagine that's compounded by other factors, like immigration status, yes?



Of course, and that's the marginalization that I keep referring to. There are so many ways that people are engaging in prostitution, but we're talking about poor women of color who are vulnerable to arrest – over, and over, and over again.



Can you explain what "condoms as evidence" means in New York City prostitution arrests?



People can be arrested for a prostitution-related offence –which could be actually agreeing to engage in sex for money, or we have another crime that's called "loitering" with the intent to engage in prostitution. In this case, someone merely needs to be in any location and stand for a few minutes with the intent to engage in prostitution, which is troubling because it's really difficult to ascertain what people's intents on the streets of New York City are. But when the police search them, any condoms are taken from them and vouchered as arrest evidence.

No matter how many condoms there are? One condom, five condoms?

Exactly. Meaning that the very fact that the person was in possession of condoms may be used as evidence of their intent to engage in prostitution. Which is incredibly troubling.

The other problem is that if you assume that this is true in some way, what you're doing is criminalizing the possession of condoms. So you're discouraging people – who you believe are engaging in prostitution – from carrying condoms, from using condoms, and so the public health implications of that are pretty widespread. And we learn from our clients everyday is that there are certain people who are targeted and profiled as engaging in prostitution. Even if, factually, they're not!

Who's targeted?

We see a lot of profiling of transgender women, and women of color.

What do you think about the feminist debates around sex work?

There are people who are very invested in all prostitution being trafficking, and there are people who are very invested in this notion of agency – that all people in prostitution are voluntary participants in prostitution. I think the reality lies somewhere in between.

When you talk about people who may be exploited in the sex industry, a conversation of necessity has to go to why people would be vulnerable to exploitation and what conditions create exploitation. That's hard work. Those are big issues. I find a lot of the time the discussion doesn't even get close to that. So if we don't think very critically about issues like poverty, then we're not going to get the nuance of this issue.

On a different note, I should probably disclose that we've been friends since high school....

We have.

We've gotten into a little bit of trouble together.

That we did not do. I refuse to acknowledge that!

I think that we did.

We were pretty reckless and foolish. But I also wouldn't trade the experience that we had as young people growing up in this city, at that time, for anything in the world. I think that it's shaped who I am. I know it's shaped who you are. And we did. We ended up alright.

I'm 50% alright. Did you know back then that you wanted to be a lawyer? You have a lot of lawyers in your family.

That's the reason why I thought I probably wouldn't have done it, in my active rebellion. My family, like yours, taught me quite a bit about social justice and that our value system was a more progressive one, and so I think that certainly informed my, not my entry into law as a career, but into this particular practice of the law. And, you know, it continues to fuel the work that I do each day.

So, last question: if there could be one policy change that would most help your clients, what would it be?

My answer is broader than just prostitution and trafficking. We need to see enormous change in policing. And we know this. This is a lesson that we're learning through how we're understanding the stop-and-frisk practice. But more than that, the way policing and then our involvement in the criminal justice system impacts many people in our city, and the harm that it creates.

Did you see the #myNYPD Twitter hashtag this week?

I did. I don't know who in the police department thought that was a good idea. This is not to say that all of New York City's police department is out everyday to make bad arrests, but what we set up is a culture where we prize policing that results in a high volume of arrests for petty things that most of us can agree shouldn't be the basis for an arrest. And our criminal court systems are so overwhelmed that nobody can do their job. And justice does not result.