“Scratch a Communist, and find a Philistine. Of course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women.” - V. I. Lenin
In this I will be clarifying the essential nature of solidarity with sex workers to any serious leftist movement, especially in regards to migrant rights, women’s rights, queer rights and anti-racism.
I am not interested in any discussions about personal feelings in regards to the sex trade, nor do I care about any utopian conversations about a society in which sex work does not exist. The fact is that sex work does exist, and any discussion therefor must focus on ways to protect the lives, rights and dignity of sex workers right now.
I acknowledge that there are cis men who engage in prostitution, and I have no desire to erase or ignore their experiences and marginalisation. However, statistically speaking the overwhelming number of sex workers are women, particularly migrants and people of colour, and queer people, especially trans people, are over-represented. This is due to the economic marginalisation and enforced precarity of women, racialised people, and trans people who are excluded from employment, education and institutional access to social services, especially for migrants in a border regime that creates a tiered system of access to rights and criminalises entire populations based upon their location of birth.
Firstly I will address the term “sex work” itself. There is an oft propagated notion that defining sex work as work is somehow indicative of a glamorization of the sex trade, apologia for sexual violence and exploitation, or a desire to expand and increase the amount of sex work that happens. There is, at the same time, an argument that all sex work is inherently assault, and as such to term it work is to ignore the reality of the sex trade’s exploitative nature.
"Part of believing me when I say I have been raped is believing me when I say I haven’t been." - Nikita, 2017 Annual General Meeting of Amnesty International UK.
Regulation (or full legalisation), is sometimes presented as an ethical alternative. Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and some places in Nevada all use this model. In regulation, sex work is legal, and regulated by the state. In the words of Mac and Smith, this creates a “charmed circle.” This means that any sex work that happens outside of the regulated industry is fully criminalised, which pushes the most precarious sex workers into the same model that we just so readily dismissed as punitive.
Why would some sex workers do sex work outside of the regulated industry? By regulating sex work, the state gives power to managers, who choose how many people to hire, what wages they make, how long they must work. Sex workers know they are competing for employment, and so they can be pressured into accepting work conditions that they otherwise would not.
Trans sex workers, especially those that don’t pass, are widely excluded from regulated sex work. For instance, in Turkey they are banned from all state brothels. Migrant sex workers are by law excluded from regulated sex work. Migrants, especially undocumented migrants, make up a large portion of the sex industry. In regulation models, all migrants are still subjected to deportation, thus making them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
People with disabilities, mad people, addicts, seropositive sex workers are all also excluded in regulated sex work, and are thus in this model still living under full criminalisation. There are sex workers who may live too far from a regulated zone or brothel.
Regulation can serve only to create a two-tiered system where all sex workers outside of the charmed circle are criminalised, and those sex workers within the circle are easily exploited as to lose employment would result in having to engage in illegal sex work.
Regulation also gives the state the power to create a capitalist institution out of sex work, thus cementing it as a social inevitability, a supposed necessity that must always be done. Under regulatory models, sex workers can not work to eventually undo the very existence of sex work.
It’s clear, and I’m sure most reading this now will agree, that full criminalisation and full regulation are both deeply flawed models that punish sex workers and have no power to transform the very nature of sex work.
Let’s discuss instead the model that gets the most support, the Nordic model. Under the Nordic model, it is the clients of sex workers and third parties (managers, brothel-runners, etc) who are criminalised for engaging in the sex trade. This model is often proclaimed to be the most ethical, as it seeks to protect sex workers while simultaneously laying the blame for their exploitation upon the clients, and reducing demand by arresting them.
The Nordic model is used in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, France and Canada.
In order to fully understand the impacts of the Nordic model, it is important to have a grounding in the ways that the state and the police shape the lives of sex workers, especially people of colour, migrants, addicts and trans prostitutes.
For many, the spectre of sex trafficking is that which haunts their decisions when it comes to the sex trade. Prostitution must be stopped in order to prevent this sex trafficking; often times the sex trafficked victim is used as a leverage to invoke policies that harm the domestic prostitute. This type of dichotomy is counter-productive: only a false sense that domestic prostitutes have fundamentally different material interests than migrant prostitutes can lend weight to this, which is based on an imagined narrative that most sex workers who wish to organize must be privileged and middle class, choosing sex work rather than engaging in the sex trade out of necessity.
Earlier it was shown that most sex workers are economically marginalised, and engage in street sex work as a survival strategy. Their networks and organisations are fundamentally and inextricably linked to those of migrant sex workers, just as domestic policing is fundamentally and inextricably linked to border policing.
This system of policing borders and cities is the backbone of the Nordic model, for under this model the police would be empowered to “safeguard” the lives of sex workers from their exploiters, the clients, managers, and traffickers. It is imperative to never lose sight of who is intended to oversee any legislation or administration of policies and laws regarding sex work.
In 1905 Britain established its first modern anti-immigration laws, the Aliens Act of 1905, in response to fears about “the white slave traffic” fueled by anti-Semitic panic in the wake of Jewish immigration.
In the US, some of the earliest anti-immigration legislation included the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Scott Act of 1888, which targeted Chinese immigrants, especially sex workers, and led to a campaign of determining which women were coming as wives and which as sex workers. In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act limited migration based on census quotas, restricting especially Slavic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and prohibited all Asian immigration. That same year, the Indian Citizenship Act imposed US citizenship on Indigenous people., and allowed them to deport those Indigenous tribes that they deemed to be “Canadian” or “Mexican.”
In Border and Rule, Harsha Walia details the history of militarized and policed borders as functions of racial capitalism in creating populations of super-exploitable racialised workers. By leveraging xenophobia to stoke white supremacist nationalism, states are able to secure ever larger funding to increase the policing of borders and expand their militarized influence.
The formation of borders in North America served to remove Indigenous people from their lands, and the first passport system, the Birch certificates that allowed travel between America and Canada, severed Indigenous people from their traditional lands and movement patterns, seeking to divorce them from the cultural and spiritual ties to the territory.
The cementing of borders has allowed capitalist nations to control the flow of migration, which gives them incredible leverage in directing the expropriation of resources and capital. By with-holding legal access to their territories, migrants who seek to follow the flow of capital from their homes—destabilized and exploited by the Global North—are forced to make dangerous and often fatal journeys to the imperial core, where upon arrival they are either detained (sometimes indefinitely) or deported. Those who are able to enter the territory then are disenfranchised and criminalised, and must live their lives unable to access institutions, social services, or the rights extended to the citizens of that territory. Their interactions with the police and state are always coloured by a fear that their undocumented status will be discovered, and they will be detained or deported.
Borders create hierarchies determined by race, caste, class, sexuality, gender, (dis)ability and nationality. Under these dire circumstances, expanding the power of policing has life-destroying consequences for migrants.
What does it mean to expect border police to “safeguard” women from sex trafficking?
Between 2012 and 2018, detainees filed 1,448 complaints of sexual violence against ICE and 33,126 complaints of abuse between 2010 and 2016.
“In immigration detention, as in carceral settings generally, trans women are particularly susceptible to violence and report sexual harassment, strip searches by male guards, denial of access to medical care, and solitary confinement under the guise of protective custody” (Walia). Trans women also face longer detention, averaging more than twice the length of detention as cis people.
With the militarization of Mexico’s southern border, 520 000 Central American migrants were apprehended between 2015 and 2018. Another 70 000 disappeared in what the Mesoamerican Migrant Movements calls a “migrant holocaust.” 80% of the women reported sexual extortion and rape.
Australia’s migrant detention has been shown, through a government-commissioned review, to have been guilty of sexual assault and rape of women and minors, and to have even led to migrant women becoming impregnated by their assaulters.
In 2012 MSF treated 697 migrant survivors of sexual violence in Morocco.
Europe’s largest refugee camp, the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, which was meant to house 3000 detainees, holds over 19 000 people, over 40% of whom are minors. The UNHRC received 174 reports of sexual and gender-based violence.
There are countless statistics about the abuses women face in the militarized borders of the world. Rather than get bogged down in unending statistics, I would like to question the logic that empowering border agencies to fight trafficking could help in any way to reduce sexual violence and exploitation.
Trafficking, and thus sex trafficking, is broadly interpreted as any attempt to bring a person across a border illegally. The easiest way to address this is to remove the legal obstacles in crossing the border. People will migrate regardless of the law: this is especially true considering the imperialistic leveraging of capital that destabilizes Global South nations in favour of the North. The militarized border then serves to prevent those people from entering legally where they do not meet criteria of ability, gender, class and race. Thus people are forced to enter through dangerous and illegal means. Anyone who helps them to do this is considered to have engaged in trafficking. If the migrant, precarious and economically deprived in the new nation does sex work, that was now sex trafficking.
In the cases in which the trafficking actually is exploiting the migrant (the migrant is lied to, abducted, indebted, forced into sex work etc), the migrant can not seek help for fear of deportation and detention. Thus anti-trafficking initiatives actually serve to increase the amount of trafficking by increasing border security, and decrease a migrant’s recourse when trafficking happens. Meanwhile, people who are genuinely just helping migrants cross a border (often times even family and friends) are also labelled as traffickers, arrested, and the migrant is still detained and deported as a “rescued victim.” Anti-trafficking laws are never concerned with whether or not the migrant wished to be rescued, or whether they would rather have stayed in the country they are now in (which they usually indebted themselves and risked their lives to enter).
In Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives, as well as Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, we can see the myriad ways that police in Canada and the US (and abroad) enact sexual violence on women, and reinforce systems of violence in the streets. In the US the police are much more likely to perpetrate domestic violence. Sexual assault is the second most commonly reported form of police violence. On duty police commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general US population.
Countries that have adopted the Nordic model have seen what prison abolitions like Beth E. Richie, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Mariame Kaba have been saying all along: the carceral punishment system does not reduce crime. Police enact systems of surveillance, violence, and criminalisation, and they can not be the solution to exploitation or violence.
Rather than lower the demand for sex work, Nordic models have instead empowered police and border agencies to increase surveillance of sex workers. Sex workers must work in more precarious positions than before: their clients are afraid of getting caught, and so sex workers are forced into working in more isolated locations, or agreeing to go to second locations. They are less able to negotiate the boundaries of consent, as the client is unwilling to sit around in case of police. In the cases where there are fewer clients, sex workers don’t have less need of money. Instead they lose bargaining power, and must accept doing things they would otherwise prefer not to, or else risk not finding another client.
Sex workers are also more likely to go to a client’s home rather than bringing a client to a room she rents, as that could result in eviction, and clients know that is when they are at most risk of being arrested. Clients are less likely to agree to divulging personal information for screening, as they wish to remain anonymous so as to avoid prosecution.
Meanwhile clients, knowing that what they are doing is already illegal, are more likely to engage in violent behaviour. Sex workers have need of the money they make, and clients do not need to have sex with sex workers. Because of this discrepancy there will always be a power imbalance, and limiting the amount of clients does not reduce demand for sex work, but it does reduce the individual sex worker’s power to negotiate.
In Norway, a government report found that the price of sex work went down after the introduction of the purchase ban, showing the weakened negotiating power of sex workers and indicating that sex workers were put into even more economically precarious positions.
The Norwegian Ministry of Justice and Public Security found that “more abuse takes place than previously. . . for those working on the street life has become much harder . . . The law on the purchase of sex has made working as a prostitute much harder and more dangerous.”
In Ireland, sex worker safety organisation Ugly Mugs says it received 1 635 reports from sex workers with concerns about violent and abusive clients in the five months following the sex purchase ban in 2017, a sixty-one per cent increase on the same period in 2016.
Migrant sex workers in Nordic model countries are still deported. The police still harass and extort sex workers. If two sex workers choose to work together for safety, they are both open to being charged as pimps, as each is considered a “third party” to the other’s sex work. Landlords are threatened by police into evicting sex workers, as the landlord is considered to be “running a brothel” if a sex worker brings a client back to her apartment.
We can see then that the Nordic model doesn’t offer any solace for the sex worker. It is based on an idea that sex work must be stopped, that through performing sex work a woman is losing something or being violated, and that therefor her clients must be punished. This is achieved regardless of the impact it has on the sex worker, an impact that is in many cases absolutely ruinous. How could the safety of sex workers be guaranteed through the very systems that makes the sex worker’s life so dangerous?
The final model of sex work is the one most anti-carceral feminist sex worker organisations ask for. It is one that works within the systems of abolition and societal transformation. This is full decriminalisation. Unlike in the regulatory model, in decriminalisation, sex work is legal by default. With neither sex workers nor their clients criminalised, the sex worker is able to regain some of the power needed to negotiate safer conditions. Sex workers can work together for safety, can rent out rooms to take clients, can take out ads that allow them to clearly delineate the bounds of their consent, can screen clients, and can access social services and institutions without fear of their work being discovered.
Employers at brothels are beholden to labour laws, and sex workers can form unions for organised action. Assault and harrasment can be reported, and sex workers can report exploitative managers for violating their rights. In every employment situation there is tension in the workplace between the workers and the managers; it is essential then that we strengthen the power of the workers to forward their demands and give them as much leverage against their employers as possible.
New Zealand currently operates under the decriminalization model, however it is flawed. This is the first step in a longer process of realizing the safety and rights of sex workers. Along with decriminalisation of sex work itself, it is necessary also to decriminalise migration. Border laws that create hierarchies wherein rights are extended only to those with certain papers must be ended.
“On the one hand, the decriminalisation of sex work is a protective factor against the exploitation of sex workers, since they have the right to challenge exploitation. However, the policy which prohibits migrant sex work means that not all sex workers fully benefit from decriminalisation. . . It is vital that the benefits are further strengthened by . . . extending rights to migrant sex workers who are holders of temporary permits.” - The Global Alliance Against Traffic In Women.
More than that, robust social services are needed. As long as migration is criminalised, as long as Māori, trans and homeless populations are still over-policed, sex workers have struggles ahead. Education, healthcare, mental health and addiction services, housing: these are all essential aspects in realizing a robust reform of the sex trade. All aspects of society that marginalise and disenfranchise segments of the population, that put them into economic need and outside of social safety nets will lead to people engaging in sex work. However, every step taken to lessen the repression of sex workers and to ensure their survival is a step in the right direction. For when sex workers are lifted economically, they can choose to leave the sex trade, either through education or voluntary exit programmes that teach job skills.
Part of securing new employment is eradicating the stigma that socially isolates sex workers: the longer that sex workers are seen as workers in society, the less the stigma will persist, which will allow them to pursue other employment without having to hide their previous sex work experience.
Decriminalisation removes the police as the method of controlling sex workers, and allows instead their integration into society as full citizens. Part of abolition struggle is to remove our reliance on policing and envision new ways of organising society that don’t rely on the punitive carceral justice system. In this way, the issues that sex workers face can be addressed through the introduction of social services that help society as a whole, rather through an expansion of violent prison systems that remove people from society through incarceration or drive them to the fringes.
Much like with drug use, when a market is criminalized it does not prevent the market from existing: rather it creates the purest form of capitalist free market. A market completely devoid of oversight or recourse for the workers. Decriminalising sex work will help to redress the imbalance of power that sex workers face as they are able to openly organise and engage in struggle.
Sex workers deserve our solidarity in this struggle, as they’ve given so much of themselves to struggles through the years.
In medieval Europe brothel workers formed guilds and orchestrated strikes for improved working conditions. In the fifteenth century, prostitutes in Bavaria asserted before a city council that what they did was work. In 1917 200 prostitutes marched in San Francisco to demand the end of brothel closures. A speaker said “Nearly every one of these women is a mother or has someone depending on her . . . They are driven into this life by economic conditions . . . You don’t do any good by attacking us. Why don’t you attack those conditions?”
In 19th century Britain and Ireland prostitutes created mutual aid networks, sharing income and child care (a tradition that is alive in sex worker communities to this day).
When eight sex workers were murdered in Thika, Kenya, in 2010, hundreds of sex workers, including the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance came from around the country to protest police violence. Aisha, a sex worker in Thika, said, “we wanted people to know that we call ourselves sex workers because it is the wheat our families depend on.” Sixty years earlier, in the 1950s prostitutes joined the Mau Mau revolution to free Kenya from British rule.
In the 60s street trans sex workers were at the front of the charge in the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Uprisings, putting their lives on the line to battle police for queer liberation. They also were in the line of fire for the fight for civil rights.
STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), founded by two street sex workers, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who were both on the front lines of the Stonewall Uprising, was a network of radical street queens who worked together in community. Sylvia Rivera joined the Gay Liberation front and the Young Lords, marched to protest Angela Davis’s arrest, and met in conference with Huey P. Newton.