Sex work, trafficking and decriminalisation
People...I have low opinions of most celebrities. I mean, I have low opinions of most people if I’m being honest. But celebrities really irritate me. They're people in positions of perceived authority whose opinions somehow manage to shape our society and our own opinions. That’s a bit bullshit really. Our society and our opinions should be shaped by those we deem to be the most informed on any given topic. Not the least informed.
An amnesty from celebrity opinions, please!
You may have heard of the Amnesty International Sex Decriminalisation debate. It hit headlines only after an array of waif-like ingenues decided to speak out on behalf of people they've never met, who work in an industry they've never engaged in. It was riveting stuff.
The Spark Notes are that Amnesty International put forward a proposal to decriminalise sex work globally as a way of protecting sex workers and their rights.
You’ll remember Amnesty International as a rather large human rights, not-for-profit organisation whose stated objective is “to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated”.
After Amnesty put forward this proposal, a slew of Hollywood starlets, including Lena Dunham, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, and Kate Winslet, came forward stating that they thought this was a bad idea, because this would increase human trafficking and lead to a “gender apartheid”.
You’ll remember these starlets as people who are paid to professionally impersonate other people, both real and imagined, for amounts of money that surpass the GDP of small nations.
Celebrities and their opinions have a long history of leading to incredibly stupid movements and social outcomes. Thanks to Jenny McCarthy and her idiot husband, we now have a movement of anti-vaccinators who are so terrified of autism that they will literally risk killing not just their own children but other children in their community.
Because the only thing worse than autism is peer reviewed science.
To be fair, when it comes to celebrity opinions on sex workers, I can’t entirely blame them. These are people who work in an industry that makes money from pretending to be sex workers. And it’s that same industry that largely dictates how society sees them.
When you think about ‘prostitutes’ in movies and television, it’s almost exclusively a low-end, pimped-out, drug-addicted, heroin-chic looking cis-gendered woman who happens to be a victim of poverty and circumstance.
We’ve seen sex workers played for laughs, or played for empathy, or played as shameless Oscar-bait. But we almost never see sex workers depicted as independent individuals, in a variety of gender identities, choosing to be in the industry and looking after and enjoying themselves. Because let’s face it, if you put that on film, you’d be accused of ‘glamourising’ the industry and of sanitising ‘sexual assault’. And it sure as hell wouldn’t win an Oscar. Who wants to see someone doing a job they enjoy, for decent money, in a safe environment for 90 minutes?
So I look at these actors and their indignity about Amnesty’s proposal and I feel sorry for them. Because they’ve started to believe the bullshit Hollywood peddles.
Many are arguing that it’s anti-feminist to support decriminalisation. Once I wipe the spray of irony off my face, I would address those ‘feminists’ who are telling other women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. I would point out that they’re ignoring all the people who don’t identify as women who are working in the sex industry. Or the people who aren’t women that are victims of human trafficking. And I would ask if they give fucks about them as well, or are we only interested in ‘rescuing’ able-bodied, cis-het white women?
Feminism is about equality. A big part of equality involves bodily autonomy and economic independence. Basically you should have the right to make decisions about what you do for money. So maybe we should let the people who are doing sex work decide for themselves if they want it decriminalised. Because really, their opinions on this are the only ones that matter. While victims of sex trafficking are in the sex industry, they are not sex workers. If you’re not doing sex work of your own free will, you’re not a sex worker. Sex work and sex trafficking are two very different things and conflating them hurts both.
This woman makes the argument that “all prostitution is a form of male violence against women”. This is the epitome of conflating sex work and sex trafficking, declaring that anyone who participates in sex work is a victim and I don’t care about their own opinion on it (not to mention the complete erasure of sex workers and sex trafficking victims who aren’t women). It ignores the agency of people who do sex work by choice or implies those people don’t exist at all.
The truth is, the only thing separating ‘prostitution’ from what that woman does with her husband (at night with the lights off with her socks still on), is money. And to be honest if she’d phrased it as “money is a form of male violence against women” I’d be more inclined to agree, since at least we can quantify that in terms of the wage gap and institutionalised glass ceiling.
But when you conflate sex work and sex trafficking you make victims out of people who are actively telling you that they’re not.
How acceptable would that be if you did it to any other career or industry? Imagine walking into an accounting firm and telling all the accountants that they’re victims and you’ll help them leave the industry, and then ignored them when they said they liked their job.
But oh wait, that’s the interesting part isn’t it. See, human trafficking isn’t limited to sex work. In fact, there’s a whole industry called labour trafficking, where people are forced to working in agriculture, hospitality, cleaning, factories and even sales. But you know what’s funny, I don’t hear anyone calling for the criminalisation of farms, restaurants, hotels, manufacturing or marketing. Isn’t that odd? And despite there being over 14.2 million trapped in forced labour, no one seems to be talking about them.
It’s an industry known for exploiting people seeking asylum, and it is particularly rife in Australia.
“The most common type of case is when someone does come to Australia willingly — they’re coming to study, travel, work, or to become a part of the community — and when they arrive, they are exploited usually by very unscrupulous employers.
“We see a lot of cases that are treated by the police as illegal immigration or breaches of visa conditions, when actually, that person is a survivor of human trafficking.”
- Dr Erin O’Brien, modern slavery researcher at Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Justice.
So maybe, if you actually give a fuck about human trafficking and the millions of people globally that are victims of it, you listen to the people who are doing the work to research and stop the practice.
Like this amazing organisation.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that the people demanding the continued criminalisation of sex work, aren't actually worried about the other victims of human trafficking.
The people who oppose sex work decriminalisation believe that outlawing something stops people from wanting it. But doing this just forces the production and/or sale of it to hide.
If prohibition is anything to go by, criminalising sex work will just encourage people to make sex workers at home in their bathtub.
Seriously though, we have so many examples of how making shit illegal backfired horribly. Prohibition didn’t make an entire nation sober. It created a golden age of crime! The black market that emerged around illegal alcohol was violent, corrupt, and helped to establish a fuck ton of organised crime that made piles of money from something that used to be regulated and taxed.
You don’t have to look as far back as the 1920s though. You can see exactly the same thing happening with the ‘war on drugs’ (TL;DR - drugs won.)
It’s why experts recommend ‘harm minimisation’ instead of criminalisation. Basically, compare morphine to heroin. One is legal, one is not. One is clinically tested to ensure there’s nothing harmful in it and systems are set up to minimise the possibility of addiction and overdose. The other is forced underground, mixed with unknown substances in order to pad out the weight and comes with zero support or information about what happens when you take it to the point that if something goes wrong people are scared to seek healthcare because of prosecution.
Which drug would prefer to take? Because I sure as shit enjoy some medical grade morphine when it’s legally administered.
In most countries around the world sex work is illegal. Do you know what still happens in these countries? Human trafficking.
So, effectively all the people opposed to decriminalisation are arguing to keep the existing system...you know the one with all the human rights violations.
Because that’s working out so well, with all those people who aren’t at all getting trafficked, because trafficking is illegal.
If you want to know why the existing, criminalised system is so bad, please watch this video.
Even if you don’t want to know and don’t care, PLEASE watch the video. It’s quite short and will give you an insight into why we need reform.
Some people advocate for the “Nordic Model” (sometimes known as the Swedish model). The Nordic model means that buying sexual services is illegal, but being a sex worker isn’t. It’s a nice idea, right? Nooooope. It’s problematic as fuck.
It basically mimics the system we have for statutory rape. One party is inherently guilty and the other is innocent. And, like statutory rape, it also implies that one party is not fully aware of, or fully in control of, their body and choices. And the other party is predatory, violating and taking advantage of a weaker person. This shit is not cool; it infantilises and disempowers professional sex workers and brands consensual sex as a crime.
It’s especially problematic when you consider how many people with disability rely on sex work for physical connection.
In addition, Amnesty International points out that,
”[Amnesty International]’s view is that existing laws around prostitution, such as the ‘Nordic Model’ where sex workers are decriminalised but clients and pimps still face criminal sanctions for buying sex, still create problems for sex workers.
Sex workers can find it difficult to rent accommodation, as their landlords could be charged with pimping, and are often evicted with little notice if the police are involved.
The law also prevents a number of sex workers living together, as their home could then be classified as a brothel, and so they are forced to work alone.
Another issue is that their customers may pressure them to meet in unsafe locations to avoid being caught by the police, which can put the sex worker at risk.”
My biggest issue with the Nordic model is that it’s designed to drive people out of the sex industry. Basically clients become too afraid of the consequences to seek sex services and sex worker’s lives become dangerous enough that they feel sex work is no longer an option. This also results in many migrant sex workers being deported.
I can only assume that the feminists who support the Nordic model either don’t understand its purpose and its consequences, or they’re willing to sacrifice the safety and well-being of other women for the sake of making an ideological statement.
Either way, they’re not part of any 'feminism' I would put my name to. You can't pick and choose the kinds of women you support.
Long story short; Amnesty International made the right choice and decided to support sex workers. It’s important to keep in mind here that Amnesty is NOT a government body, they are not in charge of legislation anywhere and they are still just a charity. So even though they have decided to support global decriminalisation, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
It doesn’t mean anything, except that a group of people who specialise in human rights violations believe there’s a better way to deal with sex work than criminalising it. I hope we can all remember that.
That is all.
You may go now.