“I hate court. I didn’t want to be at court. No one likes court. It’s boring. It’s terrible. It’s chaotic. And having to tell someone they have to do five sessions with me to get an adjournment and contemplation of dismissal, and then have to wait six months for that to happen – like, that’s crazy. But it’s the only possibility, so what are we supposed to do? Just not have the court and just let people get criminal records? And then what?”
Such was the frustrating bureaucracy that Eliza Hook, a former social worker at GEMS (Girls Educational & Mentoring Services), navigated on a daily basis for her sex worker clients at New York City’s Queens Human Intervention Trafficking Court. Headed by a female judge (the Honorable Toko Serita) and the first in the nation to emphasize harm reduction over punishment, it’s a reality Stephanie Wang-Breal captures both artistically and respectfully in Blowin’ Up, her fascinating, fly-on-the-wall portrait of this off-the-radar place where Hook served as a court advocate for close to a decade. So when I got the chance to chat via phone with the fierce film subject a few days before the doc’s theatrical premiere (April 5th in NYC, April 12th in LA), the first thing I wanted to know was whether there was a movement to reform the unjust system itself.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, there’s my friend and former colleague Melissa Broudo. She has an organization called SOAR. S-O-A-R. It’s the acronym. And she’s pro-sex work,” Hook replied enthusiastically. “She’s a fighter. And, here’s the thing, Melissa Broudo and I worked side by side for so many years. But because I worked for GEMS and she worked for another organization, the Sex Workers Project, we’re supposed to not get along, and not agree with each other, and not like each other. But we agreed on pretty much everything – we’d secretly have this pretty badass friendship. And so I really support what she’s doing ‘cause she also knows that being pro-sex work and anti-trafficking is possible ’cause she does and has witnessed exploitation. So I support the work she’s doing in New York.”
But are there courts beyond the five boroughs that are copying the Queens template? I wondered. “Well, it was an outlier, absolutely,” Hook admitted. “But because of the work that myself and some others – Judge Serita and countless others that I adore really pushed hard for many, many years – we ended up getting the courts and all the bureaus in six additional counties in New York State. And then, slowly but surely, we did trainings all over the country. Not me necessarily, but different people, different organizations, which was great, because I don’t think that any one person could have handled that. So there are other courts. I don’t know how well they’re functioning, but I know that Queens was the model. Queens was the first and it was the standard.”
As for whether law enforcement hardliners ever stood in the way of reform Hook responded that she personally experienced more dismissiveness than antagonism. “I feel like there’s some good folks who understand what’s happening. There were a few detectives that I really trusted, that supported it and wanted these young women and trans-women to get help, and didn’t really want to be arresting people,” she emphasized. “By and large, there were some court officers that were really good and had integrity and respect. But I feel like the court was kind of the brunt of a joke because, you know, they would call it things like the “ho” court.”
“But I know that Judge Serita had a lot of pushback inside the court building. As well as Paul Puma, who was the sergeant in the courtroom who ended up getting a “major male ally” award in New York City for his work. They definitely had to deal with a lot of really disrespectful behavior on behalf of their colleagues,” she lamented. “So, yeah, there was pushback from every direction. But there was also a lot of support from every direction. I mean, that’s why all of us who are in the courts every week didn’t really trust anyone. We just didn’t trust anyone.”
Except for one another- as the genuine bonds Hook managed to develop with her clients seemed to me quite remarkable. “I think it just developed naturally,” she theorized. “I never went in assuming that they would trust me. I put myself in their shoes and was, like, would I even trust someone like me if I was approached by someone like me? No. Hell no, I wouldn’t. So I just didn’t have any expectations.”
She then further clarified, “I would just, like, just show up. I’m gonna show up, you show up, let’s see what happens. I’m not trying to change you. You tell me what you want to do. Let’s put our strength together. I’m not trying to save you. I just want to create options for you if you want some, and I want to help you in whatever way you need help. Because we’re stuck with each other to get this court case resolved. But, what do you need? Like, the court thing we’ll take care of. What do you need? What do you want? What do you want to do? And I mean, it ran the gamut. Some young woman would be, like, I want to get out of the life, immediately, or some people didn’t. So I’d be like, okay, well, how can we make it safer for you, so you don’t keep getting rearrested?”
In other words, Hook never saw her role as “fixing” anyone, or acting (condescendingly) as a savior to damsels in distress. “In all my eight years, I don’t think I’ve saved anybody,” she agreed. “I wasn’t out to save people. I don’t really believe in that. I think that, you know, people come in with their strengths. I came in with my strengths, they came in with their strengths, and we just put our strengths together and tried to make something happen.”
“I was very clear on why I showed up every day. And my advice to someone that was new coming in, I would say just be clear on why you show up every day. Just walk in the door, check your shit at the door, and be of service. If you ever become unclear about why you’re showing up then you should probably stop showing up,” she stressed. “Because this is not about you, not at all. It’s about the young people that you serve. And if it becomes something different then you should walk away. That’s all it ever was for me – just about the young women I was serving.”
Hook then turned reflective. “It was the greatest privilege of my life, and if anyone got saved in that it was definitely me. Because the young people that I served were the most intelligent, the most powerful, the most hilarious – just the fact that they were in court, the fact that they were arrested for prostitution, all these things, that’s not even remotely their overarching story. They were the most talented, strong, badass humans I will likely ever know in my whole life, and I get emotional because I still miss it.”
Though Hook is currently taking a respite from the exhausting court grind she has no plans to retire permanently from social justice work. As she explained, “If it weren’t for people in my life that stepped up for me I wouldn’t have been able to be there and have been of service. I’m a cycle breaker in my family. I just wanted them to know that they could be a cycle breaker. Like, their whole history, going back to their mom, their grandmother, their great-grandmother, their dad, their brothers, all that, it’s all cyclical. And I wanted them to have options to do something different if they wanted to.”
“I gotta say, a lot of the young women that I served are just killin’ it in the world now,” she was quick to note. “Not because of me, but just because, I don’t know, maybe I helped create some internal motivators. That’s all I can hope for.”
And Hook was also hopeful that Blowin’ Up would ultimately prove the necessary corrective to the usually biased media coverage of HITC. She rued too many journalists “sensationalizing on both fronts. Staunchly anti-trafficking or staunchly pro-sex work, and it never really stopped. It didn’t seem like there was much grey area there – pretty much only wanting to having conversations around exploitation, or pro-sex work and having choice and agency and all these things. Not realizing that there was actually two separate conversations there. Like I said, I’m actually pro-sex work and anti-trafficking, you know?”
But how does one tell the two apart when the lines can often be so blurry? Is it even possible to be a willing participant in the sex industry when you’re living in poverty, when no other options are on the table? “My thinking is, from what I’ve gathered over the years, is that we as a people, as a social justice community, are always putting the cart before the horse,” Hook hypothesized. “We’re not actually going back and addressing the issues that cause these issues. So, the young woman is saying she is choosing to do sex work. Well, would she be choosing that if she had basic human rights such as access to her interests, or access to health care, or access to education?”
She continued, “As for a lot of the pro-sex work arguments – not everyone who is for sex work is white, but there’s a pretty large forum of white women who are for sex work. Who, you know, are going to college in Portland, Oregon and can always fall back on mommy and daddy’s money, and they’re choosing to do sex work. That’s fine. But you have access in a way that the people that I mostly encountered do not have access.”
“So, if you ask a trans-woman of color from, like, Honduras, who’s doing sex work – if they’re choosing to do this and you want to empower them, great, I’m all for empowerment. But, if you actually ask them what they want to be doing, most of them are not gonna be saying sex work,” Hook stressed. “Most of them are gonna be, like, I want to be in fashion. I want to go to cosmetology school. I want to be in theater. I want to, you know, do this, do that, but they just don’t have access. So is that real choice?”
“And I don’t think I’m the person that can say that for them. But that’s my experience – that a lot of the people I encountered weren’t given the choices that all these other people were given. Choice and agency – it’s so nuanced. Nothing is black and white. Until we address lack of access and poverty and all these things, we’ll still just be chasing our tails, and talking out of our asses basically,” she added with an exasperated sigh.
Yet what about all the johns who remain free to “reoffend” while the women they pay for services from end up unfairly incarcerated? Shouldn’t they be dragged into court as well? “Well, johns do get busted – like Kraft of the Patriots,” Hook pointed out. “Nothing’s gonna happen to him. He’s just gonna be humiliated for a month or two and then he’ll go back to normal. I mean, there was a brief period of time in the Bronx where they were towing johns’ cars. They would tow their cars and then, you know, good luck explaining that. Having to come get your car from the NYPD car lot or whatever. But nothing really happened. Honestly, that’s another grey area. If you are arresting johns that also hurts people who are choosing to do sex work, you know? That hurts their income. If johns feel like they could be arrested they’re less likely to pay for services. So people who are choosing to do sex suffer financially.”
“So I don’t really know,” she admitted. “Here’s the thing – I don’t know that there is a solution. And also, our laws are so puritanical that to legalize prostitution in this country… Honestly, I feel like if that happened I would just fall on the ground in complete sheer shock that it actually happened. Maybe when the baby boomers are out of legislative power, maybe that will happen. But I just don’t see it happening, and again, that’s not gonna stop exploitation.”
A lesson learned the hard way by the city of Amsterdam, the freewheeling Dutch capital where legalized prostitution has long coexisted with the Russian mob’s trafficking operations. “It’s gonna be never-ending,” Hook readily agreed. “There’s never gonna be a solution that is gonna fix everything. I don’t believe in criminalization. I think it’s traumatic and I don’t believe in it. But whether or not you agree, intervention court is the only thing that we can do inside of a system that, in my opinion, is not broken. I don’t think the system is broken. I think the system is working exactly as it was meant to work, flawlessly, you know? It’s the finest racist institution the world has ever seen.”