Keywords

FormalPara Learning Objectives

Having read this chapter, you should be able to understand:

  • How choice and coercion exist within the sex industry.

  • The importance of avoiding the conflation of sex work and trafficking.

  • The feminist debates around sex work and trafficking and their influence on the key international regulatory models that govern the sex industry.

Introduction

There are few feminist debates as fiercely contested as those that occur around the topics of sex work and sex trafficking. Although the ferocity of these debates reached a zenith during the so-called sex wars of the 1980s and 1990s, they continue to fundamentally shape academic discourse, policy and practice across the world. On the one hand, second wave feminism gave rise to the view that prostitution is itself violence against women, ‘paid rape’, a form of sexual slavery to which no woman would consent. This radical feminist perspective still carries much weight today, as exemplified by the increasing number of countries introducing policies that criminalise the purchase of sex. On the other hand, the sex-positive defence of sex work (and pornography) that arose in response to radical feminism was initially founded on notions of sexual liberation and non-conformism.

More recently, however, there has been a ‘significant shift in the sex worker movement away from protective “Happy Hooker” myths, towards a Marxist-feminist, labour-centred analysis’ (Mac and Smith 2018: 13). Those adopting this latter position call for sex work to be understood as a form of labour and for sex workers to be granted the rights afforded to those working in other sectors as a way of protecting against violence, exploitation, stigmatisation and marginalisation. This perspective moves us away from the problematic coercion-choice binary that has historically dominated discussions of sex work and sex trafficking—a binary that has functioned to gloss over the complexities and ambivalences of lived experience. It is in the spirit of this latter position—referred to as the sex work as work perspective—that this chapter is written.

This chapter does not argue that sex work is inherently violent but nor does it suggest that violence, exploitation and trafficking do not exist within the sex industry. Instead, the chapter shows that States can give rise to, or offer rights and protections against, a whole range of harms (including but not limited to trafficking) via the regulatory model that they adopt. The chapter begins with some initial background context: exploring what is meant by sex work and trafficking and the importance of not conflating the two phenomena, whilst simultaneously avoiding the binarization of coercion and choice. Next, it outlines two key positions—radical feminist anti-prostitutionism and the sex work as work perspective—not because these are the only feminist voices in this arena but because they are the most dominant positions in academic scholarship on, and policy and practice within, the sex industry. The final part of the chapter examines the influence of radical feminism and the sex work as work perspective on two regulatory approaches: end-demand criminalisation and decriminalisation. As the chapter progresses, it should become clear that by bolstering sex workers’ demands for improved rights and safety, we can better support sex workers to resist the interpersonal and structural harms present within the sex industry.

Background

The sex industry encompasses a vast range of sexual services, which are bought and sold usually in return for monetary remuneration. Involving both physical contact and indirect sexual stimulation, these services include stripping, webcamming, live sex shows, phone sex, pornography and prostitution. It is not uncommon for sex workers to work across multiple aspects of the sex industry, to work a non-sex work job alongside their sex work and/or to move in and out of the sex industry in quite fluid ways over time (Bowen 2021; Sanders et al. 2016). The term ‘sex worker’—first coined by Carol Leigh (aka Scarlot Harlot)—is used to recast sex work as a form of work and, as Leigh (2003) explains, helps to ‘unify peep show dancers, strippers, and prostitutes’. Although the terms ‘sex work’ (see Box 1) and ‘sex worker’ are now fairly common parlance, at their origin they represented a political intervention to reduce the negative connotations ascribed to ‘the prostitute’ and align the sex industry with other service industries.

Box 1

Definitions

Sex work is a term used to describe a wide range of direct and indirect activities, in which sexual services are negotiated and performed, either regularly or occasionally, in exchange for (usually) monetary remuneration.

Sex trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons through force or other forms of coercion or deception, with the aim of sexually exploiting them for profit.

Although sex has been sold throughout human history, the advent of the internet has dramatically reshaped the ways in which sex work is negotiated and performed. The outdoor sex market—the historic focus of academic enquiry—has shrunk, along with managed premises for selling sex in the form of brothels, saunas and parlours. Commercial sexual services are now largely marketed through web-based advertising and facilitated through technology, such as forums, review sites, email, social media, phone and webcam (Sanders et al. 2016). The move indoors and online has enabled independent sex workers to implement a range of technologically mediated strategies to improve their safety, such as the screening and vetting of clients using reviews and number checking tools (Sanders et al. 2018). These safety strategies are used alongside those sex workers have employed for a long time, such as working with other sex workers or with maids and other third-parties for protection (although, all of these things are criminalised in the UK context). Rates of violence within the sex industry are nonetheless high, with 45–75% of sex workers reporting workplace violence globally (Deering et al. 2014). Violence is not, however, equally distributed across the aforementioned sex markets. The outdoor sex market—albeit the smallest in the UK—has much higher rates of violence than both indoor premises (brothels, sauna and parlours) and escorting either independently or through an agency (Connelly et al. 2018).

Whilst there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of people selling sex have made a rational choice to do so, there is no denying that a range of harms exist within the sex industry. Some migrant women are made false job offers in hospitality and domestic labour and then forced to pay off large debt bondages by selling sex. Others have sold sex in other parts of the world and migrate to the UK to earn a better income through sex work, only to find the conditions under which they will sell sex are not as they agreed (Mai 2011). Both of these scenarios meet the definition of trafficking outlined under the United Nations Trafficking Protocol. Yet the stereotypical victims of sex trafficking perpetuated in populist discourse—abducted from her family and locked away by her trafficker—are very few and far between, and sensationalist depictions of this nature only obscure the complex realities of harm within the sex industry. Indeed, in addition to sex trafficking, harms are created, maintained and perpetuated through domestic policies that criminalise sex work, functioning to deter sex workers from reporting victimisation to the police for fear of arrest (Connelly et al. 2018; Klambauer 2018) and, in turn, enabling dangerous clients and unscrupulous managers to act with impunity. Anti-immigration policy and practice compels people who migrate to pursue illegal mechanisms of entry and unregulated forms of labour, such as sex work, both of which leave them at greater risk of exploitation and human trafficking (Mai 2011). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered an already marginalised social group all the more vulnerable. Whilst many sex workers were compelled to stop direct (physical contact) sex work, a lack of financial support meant that others simply cannot afford to stop. Stigma and criminalisation serve as barriers to sex workers’ ability to access economic protections and/or health services, barriers that are all the greater for sex workers who are homeless or are undocumented migrants (Platt et al. 2020).

Feminist Theorical Perspectives

Now that some background context has been established, this chapter explores two dominant feminist positions in relation to sex work and trafficking. As noted in the introduction, the debates around sex work and trafficking that grew out of the feminist ‘sex wars’ remain fiercely contested today. Although the key principles of the radical feminists’ vehemently anti-prostitution position have changed little since the 1980s and 1990s, the initial sex-radical opposition—which viewed sex work as empowering—has recently given way to a more Marxist-inflected, labour-based analysis. In that respect, the key theoretical tenets of the radical feminism and the sex work as work perspective are outlined here.

Radical feminists make little or no distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution. In this respect, prostitution and trafficking are viewed as inseparable (Jeffreys 1997: 10), for no woman would choose to sell sex. It is from this position that the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, an international non-governmental organisation aligned with the radical feminist perspective, argues that prostitution is a violation of women’s human rights regardless of consent. In this light, they ‘reject the very concept of benign migration for the purpose of sex work’, and instead the term sex trafficking ‘is applied to every instance of relocation to a destination where an individual sells sex’ (Weitzer 2007: 453). Radical feminists view ‘prostituted women and girls’ as victims of circumstance—victims of men who are empowered by sex, race and class-based inequalities (Moran and Farley 2019). For Pateman (1988: 204), prostitution cannot be viewed simply as a job like any other since it involves the sale of women’s bodies, and ‘to have bodies for sale in the market, as bodies, looks very like slavery’. In this respect, radical feminists typically reject the language of ‘sex worker’ and ‘sex work’ and instead refer to those who sell sex as ‘prostituted women’ or ‘survivors’ through discourses of ‘sexual exploitation’, ‘modern slavery’ and ‘paid rape’.

For radical feminists, the sex industry is not only deeply harmful for women who sell sex but is emblematic of, and operates to sustain, violence against all women. From this position, prostitution is regarded as ‘the absolute embodiment of patriarchal male privilege’ (Kelser 2002: 19). It is demonstrative of the inferior socio-political status of women relative to men, and, in that respect, the ‘prostitute’ becomes that paradigmatic image of women’s economic, sexual and social repression in society as a whole. As Giobbe (1990: 77) puts it, ‘her status is the basic unit by which all women’s value is measured and to which all women can be reduced’ (Giobbe 1990: 77). Key to radical feminist understandings of prostitution and trafficking, therefore, is the notion that the ‘sex trade’ ‘perpetuates the objectification and sexualisation of all women and girls’ (CATW 2021). Considered incompatible with the promotion of gender equality, the sex industry is understood to be a male-driven market. As Moran and Farley (2019: 1947) argue, ‘prostitution exists because of the male demand for it’. It exists because ‘users’ or ‘perpetrators’ of prostitution gain gratification from objectifying, subjugating and exploiting women and girls. It is the male demand for the purchase of sex that is thus considered to be the root cause of trafficking for sexual exploitation.

Critics of the radical feminist perspective argue that by conflating the phenomena of sex work and trafficking, the diversity of lived experience within the sex industry becomes totalised. Variability in levels of personal autonomy are ignored in favour of an essentialist victimising narrative (Connelly et al. 2015). In light of these critiques, sex-radical narratives—prominent particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s—framed sex work as a ‘potentially liberating terrain’ (Chapkis 1997): one that allows women to exert their sexual autonomy and foregrounds pleasure and freedom of (sexual and financial) expression. As the sex workers and authors Mac and Smith (2018) suggest, although this position is an understandable response to a radical feminist narrative that frames sex workers as ‘damaged, an animal or piece of meat’, it operates to elide the harms present within the sex industry. In this respect, in seeking to oppose the radical feminist viewpoint, sex-radicalism contributes to a simplified debate that promotes one-dimensional and essentialist understandings—a deeply polarised debate that binarizes ‘choice’ in relation to the radical feminist emphasis on ‘coercion’ (Scoular 2016). This binary has become so deeply instilled within debates around sex work and trafficking that, as Chapkis (1997) notes, scholars have faced pressure to align themselves with one of the two perspectives: ‘the certainty and conviction of those who disagree with me make my own enthusiasm for partial and contradictory truths feel inadequate’. Yet, in recent years, the sex workers’ rights movement has increasingly called for debates to move beyond the coercion-choice dichotomy to take better account of how structural factors act to mediate the levels of exploitation and violence sex workers experience, with non-citizens, the poor and women of colour more likely to experience abuse, whilst middle- and upper-class white women remain better able to obtain high remuneration in the course of their sex working.

This more nuanced position, moving beyond a simplistic binary, foregrounds a labour-based analysis that recognises sex work, first and foremost, as work. This position fundamentally opposes the conflation of sex work and trafficking that underpins radical feminist scholarship and instead recognises them as different phenomena. Sex work as work advocates point to evidence that most sex workers—including migrant sex workers—make conscious choices to enter the sex industry (Weitzer 2007; Mai 2011). In this respect, sex work is regarded as an understandable response to socio-economic constraint, a way for people—women, men, transgender and non-binary folx—to make a living under white supremacist capitalist heteronormative patriarchy. In particular, sex work may offer a viable and flexible labour option to those who migrate to a new country, especially from the global South to the global North, in a context where access to formal labour markets may be restricted by repressive immigration policies and racist nativism (Mai 2011). For those adopting a sex work as work perspective, sex workers should be afforded the same basic human, legal, political and worker’s rights as those in other professions.

Proponents of the sex work as work position also argue that the sex industry is not inherently exploitative or violent but, rather, exploitation and violence are facilitated by poor working conditions, societal stigma and processes of criminalisation. Indeed, in countries where sex work is criminalised (or quasi-criminalised such as in the UK), sex workers are deterred from reporting victimisation to the police for fear of arrest (Klambauer 2018). This enables violent clients and other perpetrators to act with impunity, shifting the balance of power away from sex workers. The effects of criminalisation are compounded for migrant sex workers, who are made susceptible to violence and exploitation by the vulnerabilities that emerge through precarious immigration status. Indeed despite experiencing increased violence, xenophobia and racism post-EU Referendum, migrant sex workers report being unable to rely on the police for support and having to compromise on their safety in order to avoid arrest, detention and deportation (Connelly and English Collective of Prostitutes 2021). To critique working conditions should not be taken to imply that sex work is inherently problematic but, rather, as further evidence that sex workers need the labour protections fought for and, in some cases, won in other sectors of work (Mac and Smith 2018) in order to keep themselves safe.

International Contexts: Policy and Practice

The radical feminist and sex work as work perspectives have not only occupied a central space within scholarly literature on sex work and trafficking but influence policy debates that occur at the local, national and global levels too. This part of the chapter offers some brief analysis of two key regulatory systems—end-demand criminalisation and decriminalisation—that are informed by radical feminist and sex work as work positions, respectively. It focuses in particular on the implementation of end-demand criminalisation in Sweden and decriminalisation in New Zealand.

End-demand criminalisation—the radical feminist gold standard—appears, at present, to be the en vogue model of regulation. In the last couple of decades, an increasing number of countries have adopted what is variously known as end-demand criminalisation, neo-abolitionism, the ‘Swedish Model’ or the ‘Nordic Model’: a regulatory approach that criminalises the purchase but not the sale of sex. First implemented in Sweden in 1999, end-demand criminalisation has since been successfully marketed, with Finland (2006), Iceland (2009), Norway, Canada (2014), Northern Ireland (2015), France (2016), Ireland (2017) and Israel (2018) all having since adopted the approach. In Sweden, the sex purchase law passed with little opposition. Its stated aims were to combat prostitution, which was regarded as not only harmful to those directly involved but also oppositional to gender equality more broadly, and to reduce incidents of sex trafficking (Government of Sweden 2010). Ultimately, end-demand criminalisation seeks to eradicate the sex industry by ending the demand for prostitution through penalising the client.

Although proponents of end-demand criminalisation in Sweden hail it a success, there is a burgeoning body of evidence to the contrary. For example, advocates claim the sex purchase law has achieved a key aim of reducing the size of the sex industry, with a 50% reduction in outdoor prostitution (Government of Sweden 2010). Yet, critical analysis indicates that the decline in outdoor prostitution was only a short-term result of displacement as sex workers moved indoors in order to avoid detection (Levy and Jakobsson 2014). Furthermore, whilst a government evaluation claims that fears around the negative impact that the purchase ban would have on sex workers ‘have not been realised’ (Government of Sweden 2010: 37–38), sex workers report a whole range of harmful consequence of the law. Far from keeping sex workers safe, the Swedish model has increased the stigma experienced by sex workers (Dodillet and Östergrem 2011)—a stigma that manifests in interactions with clients, deters sex workers from engaging with health and support services and is present in media and public discourse (Fuckförbundet 2019).

Criminalising the client also reduces sex workers’ ability to manage risk. As clients are fearful of arrest, outdoor sex workers are compelled to solicit in secluded areas where the risk of violence is greater and to hurry the screening of clients (Krüsi et al. 2021; Global Network of Sex Work Projects 2015; Levy and Jakobsson 2014). Fewer clients has meant that there is increased competition (Dodillet and Östergrem 2011; Levy 2014), and, in turn, prices are driven down (Global Network of Sex Work Projects 2015). As such, sex workers are compelled to accept clients they would previously have rejected or provide services they are not comfortable with in order to make a living. Therefore, whilst the Swedish model purports to target the client, it is clear that, in practice, it empowers the client to the detriment of the sex worker.

Although advocates claim that the Swedish model protects sex workers from criminalisation, we once again see that in practice the evidence suggests otherwise. It is clear that ‘there are laws and polices used directly to destabilise the lives of sex workers themselves’ (Levy and Jakobsson 2014: 603). Sex workers in Sweden are, for example, being harmed through the enforcement of brothel-keeping laws that prevent sex workers working in groups for safety (Fuckförbundet 2019), and the police are reporting sex workers to landlords in order to force an eviction (Global Network of Sex Work Projects 2015). There is also evidence of sex workers losing custody of their children due to their sex working status (Global Network of Sex Work Projects 2015), including in the case of Petite Jasmine (see Box 2). Furthermore, whilst proponents claim that the Swedish model curtails sex trafficking (Government of Sweden 2010), there is little supporting evidence.

On the contrary, there is evidence that criminalisation has led sex work to be driven underground thereby enhancing risk of exploitation, which is likely to make victims of trafficking even more reluctant to reach out to authorities (Healy et al. 2020). There is also evidence that trafficking and voluntary sex work are being conflated under the new category of ‘trafficking-like prostitution’ introduced by the National Police Board in Sweden 2006. This new category is defined as ‘foreign women who during a temporary visit to Sweden, offer sexual services’ (cited in Wagenaar et al. 2013) and leaves no room for migrant sex workers who travel to Sweden to sell sex of their own volition. What is abundantly clear, therefore, is that without addressing the reasons why people (need to) sell sex, criminalising the client does little to reduce demand and simply creates further harm to sex workers. These harms are felt greatest by those who are already most vulnerable and those engaged in ‘survival’ sex (Levy and Jakobsson 2014).

Although the radical feminist informed approach (end-demand criminalisation) has gained significant traction across the globe, it is the decriminalisation model that is preferred by the vast majority of sex workers and their allies within the sex workers’ rights movement. Whilst sex work was decriminalised in the state of New South Wales, Australia, in 1995, New Zealand remains the only country to have implemented the decriminalisation model of regulation, passing the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) in 2003. Although frequently conflated in popular discourse with legalisation—a model that sees the State regulation of particular aspects of the sex industry, ‘legalising some sex work in some contexts’ (Mac and Smith 2018: 176)—decriminalisation involves the removal of all laws that criminalise consensual sex work. This means that whilst buying and selling sex is legal indoors and outdoors and so too is operating a brothel (in accordance with local bylaws), sex trafficking remains criminalised and it is against the law to compel anyone to sex work or for a third party to facilitate anyone under the age of 18 years old into the sex industry. The key aims of the PRA are to safeguard the human rights of sex workers, offer protection from exploitation and promote the welfare, and health and safety of sex workers, as well as wider public health.

Box 2

Case study: Petite Jasmine

Eva Marree Kullander Smith (27), otherwise known as Petite Jasmine, was a Swedish national who lost custody of her two children after a family member informed the Swedish authorities that she had been selling sex. Eva had only been selling sex for 2 weeks, following her separation from an abusive partner. Social services removed Eva’s two young children and placed them in the care of their father, her abusive ex-partner. They told Eva that she was suffering from false consciousness: that she did not realise that her sex work was a form of self-harm. She was not permitted to see her children.

Appalled at her treatment and the State’s stigmatization of sex workers, Eva became a sex worker rights’ activist organising with the Rose Alliance. After four trials, she also successfully secured visitation rights to see her children. On 11 July 2013, at one such parental visit, her ex-partner brutally murdered her and injured the social workers present. He has threatened and stalked her on numerous occasions in the leadup to her murder. Yet, despite asking for State protection, Eva never received it.

Eva’s case is widely seen as emblematic of the structural harms and stigma that is (re)produced by the Swedish Model.

Evaluations of decriminalisation have shown the PRA to be successful in meeting these aims. Indeed, in a context where sex workers report often feeling spoken over and on behalf of in radical feminist narratives (ICRSE 2015), the PRA Bill was drafted in collaboration with the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (Abel et al. 2007), functioning to ensure that sex workers’ needs and experiential knowledge were at its heart. As the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective reports, one of the key advantages of the PRA is that it has encouraged discourses surrounding law enforcement to shift from those of punitiveness to protection, which operates in practice to better enable sex workers to report victimisation to the police without fear of negative repercussions (Healy et al. 2020). In turn, sex workers are more likely to report suspicions around trafficking and are less tolerant of poor working conditions. An initial government-commissioned evaluation of the PRA found that 90% of a sample of sex workers felt that they had improved rights, and 65% felt that they were better able to refuse clients (Abel et al. 2007). The same evaluation also found that post-decriminalisation, sex workers are better able to negotiate safer sex practices with clients (Abel et al. 2007). Furthermore, contrary to the situation in countries that have adopted end-demand criminalisation, sex workers have noted that they are better able to vet clients in the outdoor market without fear that spending time engaging in a vetting process leaves them more susceptible to arrest (Armstrong and Abel 2020).

The decriminalisation model adopted in New Zealand is, however, imperfect. Although it offers improved safety and workers’ rights for New Zealand national sex workers and those with permanent resident status, it does little to improve conditions for undocumented migrant sex workers. Indeed, it ‘explicitly prohibits temporary migrants from working in the sex industry’ (Armstrong and Abel 2020: 6). In this respect, the most marginalised and precarious sex workers remain under-protected by the State. The stigma that surrounds sex work has not dissipated. Indeed, a hierarchy of respectability continues to exist in New Zealand, with so-called high-end workers experiencing greater social acceptance than so-called low-end workers (Easterbrook-Smith 2020a). There is also evidence of sustained surveillance and harassment of trans sex workers, particularly trans women of colour, by self-appointed ‘community representatives’ (Easterbrook-Smith 2020b).

Although there are necessary improvements that can be made to the PRA, decriminalisation remains the preferred model for those adopting the sex work as work perspective. In the UK, key sex worker-led collectives, the English Collective of Prostitutes and SWARM, are leading the fight for decriminalisation and are joined by a burgeoning group of academics and practitioners. In recognition of the enhanced rights and safety of sex workers under decriminalisation, a large number of non-government organisations have also publicly supported sex workers’ demands for decriminalisation, from the World Health Organization, to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. Decriminalisation has also been supported by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women and La Strada International, two key anti-trafficking organisations (ICRSE 2015).

Summary

  • The radical feminist anti-prostitution position dominates State responses to sex work and trafficking, despite there being overwhelming evidence that end-demand criminalisation does little to protect sex workers.

  • There is little doubt that human trafficking, exploitation and victimisation occur within the sex industry. Yet, international evidence indicates that the solution does not lie with criminalising the client.

  • Instead, it should be recognised that trafficking is but one of many harmful consequences that arise both from the criminalisation and stigmatisation of the sex industry and anti-immigration policy and practice.

  • To reduce the incidences and effects of these harms, we must support sex workers’ demands to improve rights and safety. Sex work is work and, like other industries, requires the legal protections that help to curtail interpersonal and structural abuses and harms.