NOTE: If you are experiencing trafficking, sexual violence or domestic violence, you can get help by contacting Call to Safety’s 24/7 phone line at 503-235-5333 to talk with a confidential and non-judgmental advocate.
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A first-of-its-kind largescale study is now underway looking at how Oregon laws that criminalize consensual sex work are impacting sex workers and survivors of sex trafficking.
Project Impact is a partnership between Oregon health research powerhouse, Influents Innovations, and advocacy groups led by sex workers and survivors of trafficking around the state.
“This will be unique for any state to have this level, almost any research at all,” said Kate Marquez, the project’s director for Influents and a former sex worker herself. “Having incontrovertible data is both armor to protect us, but also it’s going to be just fascinating what we find through this research.”
The hour-long, paid and anonymous survey looks at criminalization’s impacts on wide-ranging factors like access to healthcare, childcare, housing, banking, other employment and many other parts of life. It also stands to show the role sex workers and survivors of trafficking play in their communities.
The project comes after efforts to decriminalize sex work in Oregon had been stalled at the political level by Governor Tina Kotek, and as Portland area police continue a sting-heavy response to sex work that research and many workers say makes their lives harder and more dangerous.
It also follows a detailed 2025 report laying out exactly how Oregon can fully decriminalize sex work produced by the Oregon Safer Workers Coalition.
“Everybody wants to do the same thing, which is to reduce sex trafficking and abuse and exploitation,” said Elle Stanger, president of OSWC and a longtime sex worker. “But people have misunderstandings of how we could achieve that. And again, that’s based on media and laws written by outsiders.”
The results of Project Impact, alongside the OSWC report, stand to correct those false narratives — giving sex workers and survivors of trafficking two crucial tools in their fight to make Oregon the first state to fully decriminalize sex work.
Two huge losses and an idea
Back in 2023, sex workers, advocates and survivors of sex trafficking rejoiced when the state legislature budgeted $600,000 for two studies. One on criminalization’s impacts on sex workers and survivors of trafficking, and the other on decriminalization.
The victory was the result of a yearslong push by a broad coalition of people with real life experience and policy expertise, as well as their allies.
“It was all looking like it was going to happen,” said Stéphanie Wahab, a longtime Portland State University social work professor who had been asked to co-lead one study.
Then, at the 11th hour, Governor Kotek cut the pair of studies from the budget, saying they should be “privately funded” in a notice.
(Street Roots asked Kotek if she has ever vetoed any other proposed studies for the same reason, and if she supports decriminalization. Her office did not respond by deadline. Street Roots searched for other examples of that veto rationale and was not able to find any.)
Even without the funding, Wahab completed an influential smaller-scale study on criminalization’s impacts. But she said “it wasn’t the study that I had planned, or I think that we need.”
Kotek’s veto could easily have been a death sentence for the research push. Especially now as the second Trump administration cuts hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for health research about LGBTQIA2s+ people, sex workers, immigrants, people of color and people who are all of those things.
But a different loss the community suffered about a year earlier would soon offer a change of fortune to the coalition.
“She was poor all her life, but her mom died just a few months before she did, and the mom left her some money,” Marquez said.
The “she” Marquez was talking about was her close friend Carol Leigh, a history-shaping sex worker and activist who famously coined the term “sex work.”
The two had been a part of COYOTE — “Call Off Your Old, Tired Ethics” — which was the first group fighting for decriminalization in the U.S. back in the 1970s. When Leigh passed away, her will left Marquez in charge of giving away about $1.3 million to sex workers and advocacy groups around the world.
After all the designated money had been paid out, however, there was still some leftover. Marquez got to thinking about what she could do with it to honor her friend.
“I just thought I could fund something here in Oregon, and I thought that we could add a lot of value,” she recalled. “It was a unique combination of possibilities coming together that hasn’t happened before and is unlikely to happen. Who’s going to fund something? Nobody. Not the state of Oregon.”
With that last $150,000 dollars, Project Impact was born.
If it’s for the community? Ok!
“I don’t know if I would have as much trust in this project if it wasn’t connected to Carol in the way that it is,” said Cat Hollis Bowe.
They’re the founder of Haymarket Pole Collective, a sex worker-led project that provides aid and other supports to sex workers, especially people of color and LGBTQ+ people. Leigh mentored them back in 2020, shaping Hollis Bowe’s own activism — including local events they helped organize like Portland’s International Whores’ Day celebration in June.
And, just as Leigh’s blessing of the project built their trust, Hollis Bowe’s work with Project Impact has built up other people’s faith.
One evening in late July just before talking to Street Roots, a sex worker stopped by Haymarket’s warehouse to pick up COVID-19 masks to distribute.
“I was like, ‘Oh, by the way, since you’re picking up masks, do you want to do a survey for $100?’” Hollis Bowe said. “And she was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe.’ And then I told her what the purpose of the survey was.”
“They were immediately like, ‘Oh yeah, I want to take this survey — not just for the $100 gift card, but for the purpose of sharing this information,’” Hollis Bowe said.
Interactions like that are the foundation of the survey and are crucial for it to reach many of the people researchers most need it to.
How to take it
The paid survey is open to any Oregonian 18-years-old or older who has participated in criminalized sex work or been sex trafficked in the last two years, said Jessie Marquez. She’s Kate’s daughter and also a senior program designer and developer at Influents.
People who complete the survey get $100.
Anyone interested in taking the survey can contact one of the project’s partners which include: Haymarket Pole Collective, New Avenues for Youth, Oregon Safer Workers Coalition and Rahab’s Sisters.
Project Impact staff have shown people at those groups how to refer people to take the survey.
After a referral, eligible people can take the survey in-person with a Project Impact staff member or trained volunteer, many of whom have personal experience with the material.
Alternatively, potential survey-takers can also get a unique code from those partners to take the survey online.
Many of those groups have been involved for about two years, long before they began outreach efforts in June.
Kat Salas helped shape the project. She’s a senior-level social worker as well as a former sex worker and a survivor of sex trafficking.
“We’ve looked at every single question,” she said. “Things as small as like, what terminology do we want to use? What reading level is this at? Does this language feel accessible? Is this trauma-informed? How are people going to take the surveys? What information makes sense to share? Do we want it to be available online or not online?”
In addition to being shaped by people with real life experience with its subject matter, the survey was also approved by an Institutional Review Board ethics committee.
Influents has a team of five people on the project, including an in-house methodologist. The company generally leads studies funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, so none of this is new to them.
That methodological seriousness is no accident, said Jessie Marquez. It’s meant to function as armor, making the team’s eventual findings clear and indisputable to even the most skeptical people.
“There’s strength in numbers,” she said. “One person’s story is an anecdote, but a representative sample of the entire state is very powerful.”
Influents is aiming to give the survey to about 400 people from all around Oregon and is making sure the sample is indeed representative.
So far about 50 people have taken it. They anticipate the research will be done within a year.
“We’re kind of on our own timeline, and we want to make sure that we do this right,” Jessie Marquez said.
How criminalization works
Research efforts like Project Impact provide proof that backs up what sex workers and survivors of sex trafficking have been saying about their experiences all along. The hope is that hard data will make it harder for policymakers and people in general to deny reality.
“In the last five years,” said Salas, “I, in my role doing nonprofit work, have seen people become involved in stings and be charged with other things who were definitely being trafficked at that time.”
She said she also knows multiple people who were being trafficked but were charged with prostitution in the last 10 to 15 years.
Salas said decriminalization is key to keeping people safe because it reduces isolation and the leverage that traffickers have to force people into things they do not want. That’s partly because people can’t safely report crimes they’re being subjected to without risking their own arrest — or worse.
“If I’m being trafficked and the police officer doesn’t believe me, and my trafficker sees me talking to the cops,” they explained, “I’m putting my life at risk, and that’s just not worth it. Criminalization is another piece of leverage that we could take away from traffickers.”
Right now, Oregon law criminalizes consensual adult sex work as a class A misdemeanor. The law defines “prostitution,” as when someone “engages in, or offers or agrees to engage in, sexual conduct or sexual contact in return for a fee.”
If someone is found guilty, they can be jailed for up to 364 days and face a fine of up to $6,250.
Wahab, the PSU professor who conducted the 2024 study, found Oregon’s criminalization increases “risks of abuse, violence, and exploitation.” It also pushes people into dangerous isolation and erodes access to things like stable housing, jobs and even banking.
A tool and a long fight
The additional evidence of harm from criminalization that Project Impact may provide will be crucial to groups like Sex Worker Affirming Advocates.
“Our sole purpose of existing is to pass decriminalization to sex work, whether that’s through the legislative session or through a ballot measure,” said Marchel Kaleikini, volunteer campaign manager for the group and a former sex worker.
If groups like SWAA succeed, Kate Marquez said Project Impact’s data will also provide a valuable baseline to evaluate how a decriminalization effort is working.
Hollis Bowe said the detailed demographic data the survey collects will be useful in the meantime too.
It stands to provide proof of the widespread racism and transphobia sex workers experience that Hollis Bowe has spent years fighting. And that data will allow groups like Haymarket to show the community’s needs in a way that the remaining grant funders who might support their work can understand.
That’s a situation Kate Marquez said the project itself faces right now as the $150,000 from Leigh is nearly spent. The team is looking for grants and accepting tax-deductible donations through the Oregon Safer Workers Coalition.
But Marquez isn’t waiting around for anyone else to save the work she’s seen come so far in her lifetime.
“I paid off the mortgage in January, and then I did the HELOC (home equity line of credit) on my house,” she said.
A HELOC is a type of loan where someone puts up their own home as collateral. That money will keep the project going for now.
Hollis Bowe, who is working a second job to support their family as they continue Haymarket’s work, described an additional benefit to the survey.
“Something that this survey also does is show the people who are taking it that there are people pulling for them,” they said. “There are people who care about these things that you’re experiencing. And even if the governor is pushing back on it, and even if police are pushing back on it, and even if SWERFs (sex work exclusionary radical feminists) are pushing back on it — there are people who are pushing forward.”
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NOTE: If you are a sex worker who had a client who was harmful or violent, you can anonymously report their description to the Portland Bad Date line at calltosafety.org/services/bad-date-line/.
