A Moral Geography

Abstract

The politics of sex trafficking is, in the simplest terms, an old war being fought on a new battlefield. In both Australia and the United States of America, the development of trafficking legislation has been the new setting for a persistent debate about the asserted harms of sex work and the legitimacy of the sex industry. In this book, we have explored and compared the policy discourse in these two nation states with divergent approaches to domestic sex work, to find that despite some differences in policy, the discourse reflects similar value judgements about the selling of sex. Throughout the debates, abolitionist activists worked to characterise the problem of sex trafficking as one rooted in the existence of the sex industry and the demand for commercial sex. Others argued that sex work should be viewed in the same way as any other industry in which trafficking occurs and that it is the demand for exploitable labour, not sexual labour per se, which fuels trafficking.