International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law

Work, Money and Duality: Trading Sex as a Side Hustle, Raven Bowen [Bristol University Press, 2021, 194pp, £26.99 (paperback)]

Jo Krishnakumar — 2022-07-06

Work, Money and Duality: Trading Sex as a Side Hustle is an explorative piece of work researched and written by Dr Raven Bowen, an academic, activist, and organiser in the UK and Canada. Bowen is the CEO of the National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a UK-wide sex worker safety charity, and the cofounder of the ‘Sex, Work, Law and Society’ Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association (LSA). This book has been created out of her PhD thesis and comes after long term engagement with conversations around exiting, re-entry, and duality.

The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Brenda Cossman [NYU Press, 2021, 280pp, £25.99 (hardback)]

Senthorun Raj — 2022-11-14

Book Review of The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era, Brenda Cossman [NYU Press, 2021, 280pp, £25.99 (hardback)]

Understanding the Law’s Relationship with Sex Work: Introduction to ‘Sex Work and The Law: Does the Law Matter?’

Laura Graham — 2022-07-06

This special issue of The International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law, edited by Laura Graham, Victoria Holt and Mary Laing, brings together a range of voices and knowledges on the issue of Sex Work and the Law: Does the Law Matter? Mirroring global and national sex worker campaigns, official consultations, policy and wider debates over the last two decades, there has been much academic interest in the legal responses to sex work (Scoular and O’Neill, 2007; Graham, 2017; Munro and Della Giusta, 2008). Much of this work has evaluated the varied current legal responses to sex work, how they impact sex workers’ lives, and how the law might be reformed. There is also significant academic and governmental interest in comparative research looking at legal responses across jurisdictions (Armstrong and Abel, 2020; Levy, 2014). This special issue takes a broad, critical approach to the relationship between sex work and the law, inspired by Jane Scoular’s (2010) question: does the law matter in sex work? In doing so, this special issue offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the complex relationship between law and sex work. This issue addresses global trends towards criminalisation of sex work, often predicated upon stopping trafficking, and considers the impact of these trends on sex workers, their rights, their working practices, and their marginalisation. It further examines the law’s response to new and emerging issues, such as COVID-19 and digital sex work, reflecting particularly on the varied impacts of over- and under- regulating sex work spaces. This special issue finally reflects on sex workers’ resistance – to current laws, to the expansion of laws, and to their lack of inclusion in debates around law. Throughout this issue, the voices of sex workers are integrated and prioritised, reflecting a commitment to inclusion of expert knowledges around the world.

A Social-Legal Analysis of Reforms in the Regulation of Sex Work: The Case Study of End Demand Legislation in Israel

Inga Thiemann — 2022-07-06

This article proposes an innovative approach to analysing legal and policy reforms in the regulation of sex work. Using the development of the Israeli 2019 Prohibition on the Consumption of Prostitution Act (hereinafter: End Demand Law) as a case study, we develop a socio-legal analytical framework which combines three elements: 1) the relationship between the “law on the books” and the “law in action” in the context of sex work policy – what are the distributive outcomes of the act? How is it implemented, who gets impacted by it, to which degree and why? 2) the importance of existing legal and policy baselines to evaluate new policy approaches. We argue that the baseline is key not only to understanding policy trajectories, but also to evaluating differences in perception of ‘End Demand’ legislation in different jurisdictions; 3) the lived experience of those affected by the policy. In our case study, sex workers are the population most directly impacted - we include their voices through interviews as well as secondary sources and focus on their perception of the law and its impact on their lives, options, livelihoods, and feminism.

Combining these three elements, our analytical framework is used to evaluate the dynamics of change in the regulation of sex work in the context of the Israeli End Demand Law - how it came about, which baselines it emerged from and which international influences affected it, but also how Israeli anti-prostitution governance feminists influenced the legislative and policymaking process. We pay equal attention to sex workers’ voices not only as the most affected population, but also as political actors, activists and aspiring governance feminists in the Israeli context, who were marginalised in the legislative process.

Can Willing Migrant Sex Workers be Real Victims of Human Trafficking? A WPR Analysis of the Australian Modern Slavery Act Inquiry Report.

Udesha Chandrasena — 2022-07-06

Using Bacchi’s (2009) What’s a Problem Represented to be? (WPR) methodology, this paper analyses the Hidden in Plain Sight: An Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia Report to examine the deep-seated assumptions, historical ways of thinking, and the silences used to support the contemporary construction of the problem of human trafficking in the Australian sex industry. This paper will also focus on how the Report understands migrant sex workers and their association with trafficking. In doing so, the aim is to destabilise the taken for granted knowledges and truths presented in the Report. Finally, the paper will provide alternative ways of understanding migrant sex workers and trafficking in the sex industry that may broaden all victims’ access to Australia’s human trafficking response, irrespective of the industry they are located in.

FOSTA: A Transnational Disaster Especially for Marginalized Sex Workers

Angela Jones — 2022-07-06

The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) has caused immeasurable economic harm and compromises workers' safety and harm reduction practices. The law has had the most harmful effects on the most marginal sex workers—people of color, transgender and non-binary people, people with disabilities, and working-class sex workers. Further, while FOSTA is a U.S. law its harms reverberate worldwide. Empirical data already demonstrates the damages of FOSTA to sex workers. With draft bills proposing to study the law (S.3165 - SAFE SEX Workers Study Act), and pending legal challenges, scholars continuing to gather data can help demonstrate to the U.S. Congress that reliable evidence unequivocally shows that they should repeal FOSTA. There is a need for intersectional analysis that explores the uneven impact of FOSTA, especially its effects on transgender and non-binary sex workers, who, alongside Black, Indigenous, and Latinx, and disabled sex workers, are often at the highest levels of risk. In this article, drawing from 34 in-depth interviews with transmasculine and non-binary sex workers, expanding existing studies documenting the harms of FOSTA on sex workers, I provide empirical evidence showing how the law has adverse effects on the most marginal and that such results are not limited to the U.S.

A Critical Analysis of the Enactment of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018

Hannah DeLacey — 2022-07-06

This paper presents a critical analysis of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2018 (FOSTA), and the debate in the United States Congress that led to its enactment. Although the stated intention of this law was to protect victims of trafficking and for websites to be held accountable for their role in facilitating trafficking, FOSTA was controversial. It was predicted that FOSTA would be ineffective at achieving these goals and that sex workers would be disproportionately affected.

Two methodological approaches were used in order to understand why and how FOSTA was enacted - phronetic analysis (Flyvbjerg, 2001) and Bacchi’s (2009) the what’s the problem represented to be approach. These approaches guided the process of analysis of congressional debates related to FOSTA, and the collection and analysis of additional data.

Based on this analysis, this paper argues that lawmakers and other stakeholders created and disseminated a powerful narrative about sex trafficking in order to convince lawmakers to vote in favor of FOSTA. Those who spoke out against this narrative were ignored or silenced, and those who were expected to be most impacted by FOSTA (e.g. sex workers) were excluded from the discussion. This article gives insight into the lawmaking process and how it can be shaped by various actors and ideologies, and how sex workers are impacted by legislation aimed at curtailing sex trafficking.

“Shut Up and Take My Money!”: Revenue Chokepoints, Platform Governance, and Sex Workers’ Financial Exclusion

Bianca Beebe — 2022-07-06

Sex work regulation is often debated from the perspective of state control: legalization vs decriminalization, ‘end demand’ vs criminalization. Ultimately, these debates center the State as the most significant arbiter in sex workers’ ability to conduct business. This paper contends that while state legislation has a significant effect on the material lives of sex workers, the terms of service of the US-based, privatized financial industry has a more immediate and widespread affect. Most sex workers make use of online payment applications as well as social media, even though both are highly discriminatory toward sex workers, regardless of the legal status of one’s employment as a sex worker, or even the laws in which the worker conducts their business. Rather than being treated as a luxury or privilege, access to both the worldwide web and the global network of banking are essential rights that enable full participation in contemporary society. Through an analysis of platform governance and revenue chokepoints, this paper argues that payment intermediaries function as an extra-legal regulation of sex work that has a more profound effect on sex workers’ material reality than State legislation, as these intermediaries control how they are able to secure business and be paid for it without having to answer to a voting demographic. Most of the world’s major social media and payment processing applications are based in the United States, which enables it to export the repercussions of the stigmatization and criminalization of sex work even within the boundaries of countries with differing legislation.

Webcam Performers Resisting Social Harms: “You're on the Web Masturbating… It's Just about Minimising the Footprint”

Rachel Stuart — 2022-07-06

This article will bring together Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of Smooth Space and zemiological debates of social harms to respond to the question set by Jane Scoular (2015): does the law matter in sex work? The regulation and policing of performers by hosting sites allow sites to avoid state-level legislation. However, site regulations cause performers to experience harm that traditional concepts of the law cannot address because the law is powerless against the intrinsic injuries done by neo-liberalism. The damages experienced by female performers were not generally criminal but nonetheless harmful to those experiencing them, even though generally no laws were transgressed. When performers did experience crime, the non-territorial nature of the internet prevented action from being taken. This article will explore the irrelevance of the law in the context of webcamming and the potential harms caused by academia’s fixed gaze on the customer, preventing consideration of the damages done to webcam performers by other social actors.

Experiences of Sex Workers in Times of Pandemic: from Lawful to Risk-Producing Environments in Switzerland.

Jenny Ros — 2022-07-06

This paper aims to shed light on the difficulties faced by sex workers (SW) during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research was carried out in collaboration with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting SW in canton Vaud, Switzerland.

Drawing on the idea, developed by Scoular (2015), that the law is not sufficient to address the problems faced by SW, we propose to consider Swiss SW’s experiences in order to analyse interactions between the law and other societal forces in times of pandemic.

We used a mixed-methods approach (observations, focus groups and questionnaires) to understand the needs of the SW, the assistance that has been offered to them, and the obstacles they have encountered in accessing it since March 2020.

Our findings suggest that SW were confronted with a broad range of financial, administrative, psychological and relational difficulties that were conducive to health risks. We call for political responses and structural changes to promote SW’s empowerment and improve their working conditions.

Racial Profiling and The Larger Impact of Covid-19 on Migrant Sex Workers in France

Calogero Giametta — 2022-07-06

In this article we will discuss the first Coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown and its immediate aftermath on the lives of migrant sex workers living and working in France, drawing on original interviews gathered between May and July 2020. Since 2016 in France, sex workers have worked under the so-called Swedish model legal framework criminalising the demand of sexual services. This has meant that sex workers, both migrant and non-migrant, have had to find various strategies to continue working within a criminalised environment infringing upon their rights and safety. Research in the French context has largely shown that the introduction of the Swedish model increased the financial precarity and impacted in significant, detrimental ways the physical and mental health of sex workers (Le Bail & Giametta 2018). In the context of the existing hardship to which migrant sex workers were exposed under this repressive regime in France, this article investigates if and how the law enforcement and emergency measures around the Covid-19 crisis aggravated their already precarious living conditions. Our analysis here demonstrates that both institutional racism (e.g., government policies and law enforcement targeting racialized migrants) and interpersonal stigmatisation (e.g., poor treatment and stereotyping by clients and civil society) must be combated to reduce the discrimination against migrant sex workers that is amplified in times of crisis.

Sex Workers: Citizenship Status and Identity, Civic Deficits, and Exiting

Andrea Gaynor — 2022-07-06

Sex workers have a lesser citizen status, yet the relationship between sex work and citizenship status has rarely been explicitly considered within extant research. In contrast, this article will critique England and Wales’s sex work legal and policy discourses and frameworks from the perspective of the moral, material, structural, and operational components of citizenship (Lockwood,1996). The operation of citizenship has led to the creation of policy and law (such as the Sexual Offences Act 2003) which has assigned sex workers to a “negatively privileged” group prevented from accessing a full citizenship identity (Lockwood, 1996, 538). Sex workers experience civic deficits (stigmatised, power, and fiscal) and inferior resource allocation, as their access to social citizenship rights are curtailed on moral and material grounds. Despite claims by policy and lawmakers to support and protect this group, the article proposes that the structure and operation of citizenship interplays with victim and criminal discourses to further marginalise sex workers. This is evidenced in the article by the example of exiting programmes, which reconfigure and reinforce the exclusion of sex workers while claiming to provide a supportive route out of the profession.

Impacts of Colonial Legacies on the Rights and Security of Sex Workers in Southern Africa

Carolien Aantjes — 2022-07-06

This article will explore the relationship between sex work and the law in four Southern African countries – Madagascar, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe – to shed light on the persistent barriers to promoting the rights and security of sex workers. In these countries, as across Southern Africa, criminal laws on sex work introduced by colonial powers have profoundly shaped contemporary societal attitudes towards sex work and women who sell sex. More recently, the question of sex work has often been linked to HIV and AIDS and decriminalisation has been promoted as part of a wider strategy to protect ‘key populations’, including sex workers, who are perceived as being at greater risk of HIV infection. Based on our research with young women engaged in selling sex, we found that repression continues in various forms within and outside of the law. Though sex work is no longer fully criminalised in most countries in the region, the relics of the colonial past permeate contemporary norms and attitudes to sex work thus locking the selling of sex within the grey areas of the law and contributing to situations of vulnerability for sex workers. Our four case studies demonstrate that transformations in dominant social norms and representations around sex work have been far slower and less far reaching than many assumed they would be, even in the countries which have adopted more progressive laws and policies. The situations of vulnerability experienced by sex workers also escalated during the COVID-19 crisis, highlighting the critical need for state intervention to improve their legal, economic and social position.

When the Law Fails to Protect: Stigma, Violence and Sex Workers’ Multi-Layered Responses in the Kenyan Cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisii and Meru

Lise Woensdregt — 2022-07-06

In Kenya, criminal laws on sex work and same-sex activities, combined with stigma on sex work and homosexuality, shape sex workers’ vulnerability to violence. This paper explores sex workers’ responses to violence at various levels of social and legal organisation. Drawing from a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach including qualitative interviews and focus group data, the paper illustrates a close and mutually reinforcing nexus between criminalisation, sex work stigma and homophobia as well as a resulting climate of impunity for perpetrators. By understanding sex workers as agentic actors, it demonstrates how sex workers respond to, rework and resist this repressive landscape of violence. It argues that sex workers mitigate the risk of experiencing violence by ‘getting by’ and ‘getting ahead’, while sex worker organisations support them to engage in collective resistance. The paper demonstrates a need to reform sex work-related laws and argues that action should extend beyond legal reform to include efforts to mediate the social processes that undercut sex workers’ access to rights and social justice.

Upholding Racist Heteronormativity: The Anti-Blackness of Prostitution Neo-Abolitionism in the United States

Crystal Jackson — 2022-07-06

This article will address the present-day racist implications of anti-prostitution “modern day slavery” efforts, referred to in the literature as prostitution neo-abolitionism, specific to the United States. An intersectional feminist triangulation of U.S. sex worker rights ideology, prostitution neo-abolitionism, and racial justice abolitionism reveals how race and gender are coded implicitly and explicitly in U.S. socio-legal efforts. In the U.S., “abolitionism” is commonly understood as a racial justice movement that includes demands to abolish policing and the prison industrial complex (PIC). This ideological triangulation illuminates how prostitution neo-abolitionism in the U.S. uniquely co-opts historical anti-slavery movement language—a movement that was inherently anti-racist— to push for increased legal punishments and increased policing. This is in direct opposition to PIC abolitionists who have identified the system of mass incarceration as “the New Jim Crow” in the United States (Alexander, 2012), and who challenge racial profiling and continued police brutality against Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian people, particularly those who are transgender and gender non-conforming, and those who are (profiled as) immigrants and sex workers.

The Limits of Vulnerability: Arguments Against the Inclusion of Sex Workers Within Hate Crime Policy in England and Wales

Victoria Holt — 2022-07-06

On 23rd September 2020, the Law Commission launched their Hate Crime consultation paper, which suggested including ‘sex worker’ as a protected characteristic when considering hate motivated violence. The inclusion of sex workers in policing hate crime policy had already been implemented in Merseyside in 2002, and Yorkshire in 2017 (Sanders and Campbell, 2020). From a policing perspective, this approach has its advantages: it encourages a more coordinated approach to crimes against sex workers, as well as having an educative and awareness raising function around the discrimination they face (Sanders and Campbell, 2020; Chakoraborti and Garland, 2012). However, those who advocate for this approach caution that whilst it is an important first step to address crimes against sex workers, it can only go so far in a legal framework where sex work is still criminalised (Campbell, 2019; Campbell, 2014; Platt et al., 2018). This article challenges the idea that increased hate crime legislation will reduce violence against sex workers, suggesting that it may in fact put sex workers in even greater harm by increasing their interaction with the police. We emphasise that there is limited evidence that higher sentences deter hate crime offenders, and it is almost impossible to assess whether this type of legislation even provides the educative function it claims to. This paper argues that full decriminalisation of sex work is the most effective first step to responding to violence against sex workers, rather than increased legislation and tougher sentencing (CPS, 2019). In doing so, we add to the growing body of literature evidencing how full decriminalisation increases safety of sex workers. We also aim to contribute to a broader understanding that harsher sentencing and increased carceral responses do not best protect vulnerable communities of any sort.

Sex Workers’ Access to Justice

English Collective of Prostitutes English Collective of Prostitutes — 2022-07-06

In November 2020, the English Collective of Prostitutes organised a ground-breaking event, Sex Workers: Access to Justice, which brought together sex workers, violence against women organisers, academics, and human rights groups to examine the extent of violence faced by sex workers, what exacerbates the risks of violence, and the obstacles experienced by sex workers when reporting violence to the police and accessing justice. This report records that information and the policy recommendations and campaigning strategies that emerged which would improve sex workers’ safety.

LGBTQIA+ sex work in the time of Covid 19

Chloe Marshall — 2022-07-06

This report extrapolates how gender, sexuality and the law intersect for queer and trans sex workers, within the conditions of the Covid-19 global health crisis. It reports on the outcomes of legal policy as they were adopted during the pandemic and examines which is the most damaging: the lack of legal rights, the criminalisation, or the dyadic relation of the two.