Groups Have Differing Views On Proposed Stripper Registry

By Andrew Staub | PA Independent

Plenty of people have made cracks recently about legislation that would create a registry of strippers in Pennsylvania, but a group supporting increased regulation of adult nightclubs contends flippant comments only obscure a darker story.

The focus on a “salacious” piece of the bill shields people from realizing the sexual violence that can happen to women in such establishments, said Brandon McGinley, director of strategic initiatives for the PA Family Institute.

“I feel like so much of that language that’s used — the glib language — is precisely in order to make us feel better about what we suspect is happening,” he said.

What once looked like a marginal bill jumped to one of utmost importance, McGinley said, after he researched the issue, including reading a 2009 report about the adult-entertainment industry in Texas that was completed by the Bureau of Business Research, the IC² Institute and the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault of The University of Texas at Austin.

That report cited a sampling of 222 women working in sexually oriented business and as prostitutes. Of that group, 24 percent were exotic dancers. Almost half of those women had been threatened by rape and almost a quarter had experienced forced sex at work, with violence most often happening in back corners and private booths and at the hands of customers.

“They are fully at the mercy of men in private dark spaces,” McGinley said.

State Rep. Matt Baker, R-Tioga, the prime sponsor of the legislation, has echoed the PA Family Institute, saying his intent is “to help combat sex trafficking, abuse and exploitation of women.” The legislation is idling in the House Judiciary Committee, which delayed a vote on it last month.

The bill would require employees at adult-oriented clubs to register with the Department of State. They would have to provide their full name, any aliases, their age, birthday, place of birth, height, weight, hair color, eye color, home address, telephone number and place of employment.

Perhaps most personal, the bill also requires a statement of whether employees have been the victim of sex trafficking, but McGinley said that would likely be removed to avoid people being forced to report such sensitive information to the state.

While critics have said the registration digs too deep into employees’ personal lives, such a repository could help law enforcement identify red flags — such as women being moved from club to club — and root out fraudulent registrations being used to hide illicit behavior, McGinley said.

The bill also bans the sale of alcohol and creates a buffer zone between nude dancers and patrons.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania has criticized the bill, saying it treats strippers like criminals. Supporters want to regulate adult-entertainment establishments into oblivion, the ACLU has argued.

“They cannot pass a full ban on this activity because that would be overturned by the courts,” Andy Hoover, a lobbyist for the ACLU, wrote in a memo urging lawmakers to oppose the bill. “Instead, they suffocate the activity with excessive regulation. This isn’t about protecting victims of trafficking. This is about shaming the workers of this industry, particularly women.”

The ACLU said the groups concerned about human trafficking should instead focus their attention on a “safe harbor” bill that would grant immunity to underage trafficking victims. The Polaris Project, a national anti-trafficking organization, has recommended Pennsylvania do that to build upon improvements to its trafficking laws.

While backing up McGinley’s stance in some cases, the Texas report also noted “no study has authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented businesses, and the perpetration of sexual violence.”

In making the case for Baker’s bill, McGinley cited another report written by two members of the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force in 2011. They wrote that strip clubs — like truck stops, massage parlors and cheap motels — are “havens for prostitutes forced into sex trafficking.” Three Baltimore strip clubs were also raided last month in a human-trafficking case, McGinley pointed out.

Glib comments about the stripper registry bill distract from bigger issues of violence against women, he said.

“We don’t want to believe it because we want these places to be innocent,” McGinley said. “ … That’s kind of the polite fiction that we tell ourselves.”