Cambridge, Massachusetts, has gone as far as a city can go without rewriting state law. On Monday, its City Council voted 8–0–1 to deprioritize arrests for consensual adult sex work, urge the Middlesex district attorney to stop prosecuting those cases, and create a dedicated phone line so workers can seek help without calling the police.
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The order does not legalize anything the state still criminalizes. It does change what Cambridge prioritizes, who workers can call when they need support, and how the city talks about the difference between consensual work and trafficking.
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler authored the measure. Co-sponsors included Patty Nolan and Marc McGovern. It had been in motion since a May 2025 committee hearing and followed a similar path taken by neighbouring Somerville, which voted to encourage statewide decriminalization in 2020 and reaffirmed that stance in 2024.
What passed is a compromise. An earlier draft called explicitly for full statewide decriminalization of consensual adult sex work. That language was stripped on Monday to lock in votes. Supporters of the order, including Sobrinho-Wheeler, say coverage of workers and clients still holds. Some other councillors read the final text as leaving clients in a criminal category and tilting toward exit rather than regulated continuation. “People are going to read it a little differently,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
Shameka Gregory, who leads Cambridge’s Domestic and Gender Based Violence Prevention Initiative, told the council that local police have already treated sex-work arrests as a low priority — roughly four in five years. High-profile cases in the city have tended to be federal. Still, she said a non-police referral path was “absolutely” necessary. Trust in law enforcement, across the board in this community, is thin.
That gap is the practical heart of the order: a CARE Team line so someone in the industry can reach health, harm-reduction, or victim services without automatically becoming a police matter.
The public comment period made the underlying argument impossible to miss. Dozens of current and former sex workers, advocates, and clients spoke in favour of treating the work as work. Several described deliberate choices — flexible hours, better pay than available alternatives, the ability to care for a parent. Others rejected the idea that safety is possible at all under any model that keeps buyers criminalized.
Two speakers aligned with the Safe Exit Initiative argued the opposite: that buyers are often predators, that “consensual, safe sex work will never be possible,” and that the Nordic model — decriminalize the seller, criminalize the buyer, fund exit services — is the only honest frame. That model is the one Sweden and Norway popularized; it is also the one global health and human-rights organizations have repeatedly criticized for driving work further underground and reducing workers’ ability to screen clients or report violence.
Jessica Van Meir, a Harvard teaching fellow and co-founder of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective, put the research case for full decriminalization in plain terms. Criminalizing clients, she said, makes it harder for workers to enforce safety rules and harder for clients who notice coercion or trafficking to report it. Survivors she has interviewed have sometimes left the industry because a client helped them. “If clients are criminalized, they can’t.”
Quinn Curry, who described being pushed into the industry as a teenager, supported full decriminalization for a different reason: political power. Criminalization, she said, is what left her without leverage. Only a framework that treats workers as people with rights — not permanent victims or permanent offenders — changes that.
Cambridge cannot rewrite Massachusetts criminal law. What it can do is stop treating its own residents as a policing problem first, build a help path that does not run through a badge, and put a local marker on the state’s map. The Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective called the vote a useful precedent. Whether the rest of Massachusetts follows is a different fight.
For now, the city has drawn a line: trafficking and coercion remain the priority. Consensual adult work is not.