Big Apple pols and prosecutors are blowing it when it comes to stemming the city’s booming sex trade — letting pimps and “johns” off the hook while picking on “vulnerable” sex workers, anti-trafficking advocates charged Tuesday.

More than a half-dozen sex-trade survivors and advocates from anti-trafficking and women’s rights groups gathered in Midtown to call on politicians to reject bills put forth in the state Senate and New York City Council that would decriminalize prostitution.

“We have now become a society that looks at the sex trade as an employer like any other, and prostitution as labor like any other type of work,” said Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

“Our district attorneys, our assembly members, our senators look us in the eye and say, ‘Nah, I don’t see the harm,'” Bien-Aime said.

“Sex buyers are the strongest pillars of the sex trade. And sex traffickers would not make a dime without them,” she said. “Prostitution is neither sex nor work.”

The press conference came after exclusive reports by The Post on the open-air prostitution in New York City — including brazen street-walkers in Brooklyn and the thriving “Market of Sweethearts” brothels in Queens.

Mayor Eric Adams vowed that the city was “putting in place an operation to deal with the sex workers” following The Post’s reports on the red-light district blatantly operating in Corona. But nothing seems to have changed more than a week later.

The advocates on Tuesday said Adams, Police Commissioner Edward Caban and local district attorneys need to prioritize holding “sex buyers” accountable.

“It needs to come from the top, and that starts with the mayor who publicly sends a message to sex buyers that it’s not gonna be tolerated here in the city,” Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the National Organization of Women/NYC, told reporters.

“So, it’s really some systemic change that will have to take place,” she said.

Ossorio previously told The Post that cops are not “incentivized to enforce anything because it won’t be prosecuted” by lenient district attorneys.

“Every day we see that sex buyers and traffickers indiscriminately rape, kidnap, and torture the people that they’re buying and selling them in the sex trade,” said Ann Matheson, co-director of the Empower Center.

“The majority of sex buyers do not care whether the person they buy is trafficked, has a pimp, identifies as ‘empowered,’ or is a teenager.”

One sex-trafficking survivor warned that children will often be the victims.

“Wherever the sex trade exists, vulnerable children will be recruited, groomed and exploited. One cannot exist without the other,” she said. “New York City is allowing the sex trade to flourish, and children will end up being exploited for profit,” she continued.

“A child can never choose to sell sex. There is no such thing as a child prostitute or a child sex worker. There is only trauma.”

The Big Apple’s most visible example of the booming sex trade is along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, where streetwalkers peddle sex in broad daylight, even propositioning children, according to locals.

Merchants complained to The Post that prostitutes drive customers away, while one neighborhood mom said drunken men even line up outside her door thinking it’s one of the brothels on the block.

Frustrated landlords on the block said a pair of alleged madams — sisters Fengye Wu and Feng Xia Wu — have taken them to court when they tried to boot their brothels, foiling their eviction attempts.

A spokesperson for Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz previously said the borough’s top prosecutor “created a Human Trafficking Bureau to aggressively prosecute the real criminals in the commercial sex industry, the traffickers.” The rep didn’t return a request for comment on the advocates’ claims Tuesday, and neither did the DA’s offices in the Bronx or Staten Island.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office — which has declined to file prostitution charges against sex workers since April 2021 — said that it has stepped up its effort to shut down sex-trafficking, noting it secured the state’s first child sex-trafficking convictions.

“Combating sex trafficking is a top priority for DA Bragg and our survivor-centered Human Trafficking Unit,” the spokesperson said. “We zero in on violence against vulnerable New Yorkers, while encouraging survivors to report to our office with the comfort of knowing they will not be prosecuted for prostitution.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorneys’ Office said sex-trafficking has been a major concern and that prosecutors, cops and advocates recently visited prostitution hotbeds in the borough to determine what services were needed in those areas.

Last week, The Post revealed another sex-plagued neighborhood in East New York, where scantily-clad prostitutes sell their services from morning to night, seemingly without any interference from police.

Additional reporting by Carl Campanile