Sex work

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28. Sex work
Sara Kallock
GENDER AND THE GLOBAL SEX MARKET
The expansion of the commercial sex sector to the global scale has moved in lockstep
with the wider politico-economic trends of globalization, becoming a major force of
cross-border movement and interchange. Globalization has generated international
channels through which sexual commerce can flow, and, indeed, through which many
feel motivated – and in some cases are coerced – to flow because of global currents of
economic opportunity and exploitation, as well as opportunities for personal growth
and social freedoms (Agustín 2007; Jacobsen and Skilbrei 2010; Mai and King 2009;
Safri and Graham 2010; Scambler 2007). For women who find themselves in a position
of poverty, precarity, or debt without any substantial safety net supports, or are unable
to work in ‘mainstream’ employment because of caretaking responsibilities or other
personal commitments, informal means of income generation such as sex work provide
a highly lucrative and flexible source of income (Rivers-Moore 2010; Roberts et al.
2010; Sanders and Hardy 2013). The prospect of lucrative remuneration has generated
expansive informal and sometimes criminal networks for moving – sometimes co-
ercively – women across borders and into national or inter-regional sex markets (Mai
2004; O’Connell Davidson 2006; Weitzer 2011). Yet, for some, the prospect of earning
money on the global sex market is worth the risks and burdens of international
immigration, and for such individuals, the legal, economic, and cultural barriers to
immigration create dependencies on these criminal networks as they vie to cross
borders, find employment, and navigate unfamiliar socio-cultural demands and climates
(Agustín 2006, 2007; Weitzer 2011). Whether by choice or by force, thousands of
individuals – many of whom are women – are contending with the flows of global
capitalism through the sexual mobilization of their bodies, and this alone places them
on the fringe of social respectability. The global trade in sex is not simply a political
force to be reckoned with, but an area of ethical and moral concern that cannot be
overlooked.
The political significance of the global sex trade lends credence to the long-held
feminist tenet that the ‘personal is political’: the ‘bedrooms’, bodies, and affective lives
of individuals matter in our understanding of political and economic processes. In other
words, gender matters beyond the so-called ‘private sphere’. Feminist political econo-
mists have expanded on this insight in their analyses of globalization, arguing that the
broad politico-economic processes of globalization not only involve and impact
women, but are reflective and productive of broader gender relations and the inequal-
ities they harbour at the local and global levels (Anthias 2012; Bedford and Rai 2010;
Freeman 2001; Gottfried 2004; Mills 2003; Waylen 2006; Youngs 2004; Zalewiski
2007). For instance, the norms which historically characterize ‘women’s work’ as
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limitlessly flexible and minimally remunerative have been transposed to the global
mainstream market, leading to both a proliferation of labour precarity as well as the
mass migration of peoples as they pursue the currents of global industry (Chant 1998;
Kofman and Raghuram 2006; Morini 2007; Tyner 1999). The impact of these trends
can be acutely observed in the growth of care-oriented sectors within industrialized
regions, where women, more so than men, have answered the growing demand for
flexible and low-wage forms of domestic labour (Anderson 2000; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild 2003). Indeed, the growth of cross-border trade in sex reflects this demand
for those services, goods, and norms traditionally associated with ‘women’s work’
(Agathangelou 2006; Freeman 2001; Smith 2011, 2012), such as the demand for
affective labour (Bernstein 2007). However, women’s growing involvement in these
sectors coincides with a sharpening correlation between income-poverty, gender, and
class status, as well as a correlation between gender and other markers of poverty, such
as illiteracy and low rates of educational attainment (Fukada-Parr 1999; Giminez 1999;
Pearce 1978). Such trends are further exacerbated by the cross-national dismantling of
social safety-nets for female-headed households (O’Neill 1997). Thus, just as gendered
norms of labour have been reflected in labour relations more broadly, these norms have
also produced a set of labour relations that disempower women as a group, both in and
outside the context of the global sex market. As I suggest above, these gendered
politico-economic dynamics are expressed throughout the commercial sex sector,
making it an appropriate focus of feminist political economy analysis. Making sense of
these dynamics is no easy task, however.
As more women migrate within and across borders and within regions, debates
around sex work have come to the fore but have often been conflated with human
trafficking, leading to a rich but sometimes counter-productive body of scholarship and
political discourse on commercial sex (Kantola and Squires 2004; Schwenken 2008;
Showden and Majic 2014). A key question raised in these debates is whether the trade
in sex should be framed as a mode of human rights abuse, an international crime
phenomenon, or one dimension of a global migration trend (Agustín 2006; Doezema
2002; Munro 2008). The tension between these competing perspectives are transposed
and rehashed in analyses of, and debates around, intra-regional sex markets. Migration
from rural to urban areas has combined with the global expansion of trade and travel,
facilitating the creation and consolidation of sex tourism hot-spots within industrial-
izing regions, such as the Caribbean (Cabezas 2004; Enloe 1989; Kempadoo 2004;
Stout 2014) and South East Asia (Kinney 2014; Truong 1990). Such hot-spots
epitomize the flow of capital from the ‘Global North’ to the ‘Global South’. As Noelle
Stout’s (2014) illuminating ethnography of queer enclaves in post-Soviet Cuba illus-
trates, the rise of sex tourism goes hand in hand with the introduction of capitalism to
Cuba, catalysing both important opportunities for profit, play, and personal growth, as
well as the possibility of cultural gentrification, interpersonal tension, and exploitation.
This makes sex tourism a source of economic opportunity but also cultural and political
strain for industrializing regions. All these factors make it difficult to make political,
moral, and ethical claims about the sector, precipitating conflations and confusions
within the scholarship that can be counter-productive in political terms (Agustín 2007).
Too often this tendency culminates in policies that serve as vehicles for state regulation
and oppression of criminalized and immigrant ‘Other’ (Andrijasevic 2007; Carline
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2012; Hill 2014; Scoular and O’Neill 2007) or in policies which overtly target
marginalized groups engaged in sex work, such as LGBT, indigenous, immigrant, and
racialized populations (Bernstein 2010; Blanchette and da Silva 2014; Doezema 2001;
O’Connell Davidson 2006; Stout 2014).
Moreover, such conflations obscure the reality that feminist social researchers have
already developed a diverse body of theoretical and scientific scholarship on sex work.
Since the latter half of the twentieth century, feminist political theorists and activists
have debated the ethical, moral, and political value of sex work, and from these
discussions a plethora of different policy solutions have been proposed and to some
degree realized. Although these discussions emerged as International Political Economy
emerged, the conceptual frameworks they offer are no less relevant, especially as
national discussions around sex work link into – or become entirely displaced by –
international dialogues. Feminist political economists are well positioned to conduct
such analyses and make the important connections between gender, sex, and global
capitalism – to chart, that is, the ways in which labour fucks capital and capital fucks
labour.
In this chapter, I seek to provide both new and seasoned scholars of feminist political
economy with robust conceptual tools for analysing commercial sex and its regulation
from a theoretical perspective and illustrate how these tools can be deployed to develop
insights into the gendered dynamics of sex work policy. In the following three sections,
I outline three primary frameworks that emerge from these debates:
1
abolitionism, sex
radicalism, and sex-work labourism.
2
Fluency in these theoretical concepts is essential
to analysing the political, moral, and ethical parameters of sex work, and formulating
sex work policies that empower sex workers on their own terms (Kallock forthcoming).
Moreover, these clarifications are critical for feminist political economists to make
sense of the commercial sex sector – and its gendered implications – as analyses
increasingly involve other axes of globalization, including international migration, rapid
industrial urbanization, travel and tourism, cross-border crime, and the dismantling of
social welfare.
In the next section I link these theoretical frameworks to my empirical work, which
explores how the discursive norms and political structures around sex work animate the
values and practices of specialized frontline support projects
3
in Northern England. My
work demonstrates that these frontline agencies and their employees work through
these conceptual frames as they interpret policies, obtain funding, work through
multi-agency partnerships, interact with service users, and raise public awareness
around sex workers’ needs and issues. An aim of this section is to illustrate how
feminist theorizations of sex work have been enacted and rehashed by concrete policy
actors. Put differently, it is to demonstrate how feminist ideas can be tapped for
relevant insights into the situated practices of political actors. A second aim is to
demonstrate the importance of including frontline practitioners and agencies in
analyses of sex work policy. Although frontline actors are neither direct participants in
the commercial sex sector nor official architects of domestic or cross-border sex work
policies, they are not irrelevant; rather, they play a pivotal role in how policy is carried
out in the lives of sex working service users. Frontline agencies are often in the
‘trenches’ in ways policymakers are not, and thus contend with and contribute to the
gendered dynamics of the global sex trade alongside their clientele. As more advocacy
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and service-based organizations expand from domestic to international venues, the
‘global frontline’ will become a ripe area of scholarly analysis for feminist political
economists.
The chapter closes with some brief reflections on the ways these frameworks and my
empirical research can be mobilized in feminist political economy analyses of the
global sex trade. Overall, the chapter provides feminist political economists with a
robust starting point to bring their expertise to the table and provide fresh insights into
the global debates around the commercial sex sector. Such insights will be all the more
crucial as the sector shifts and changes with the currents of globalization, making the
feminist political economic perspective a vital addition to the current scholarship.
ABOLITIONISM
Abolitionism holds that sex work embodies and reproduces the system of patriarchal
domination through which women’s bodies are rendered passive objects for male
consumption and control. Derived from a subset of feminist ideas known as domination
feminism, it holds that patriarchy has led sexuality to be ‘entirely constructed in terms
of male sexual desire’ (Sloan and Wahab 2000, p. 463). Accordingly, ‘on this account
prostitution is domination, not representation or sexual negotiation. It is a way for men
to exercise power over women’s bodies and minds’ (Showden 2011, p. 138). For
abolitionists, sex work holds a pivotal symbolic status as the ‘cornerstone of all sexual
exploitation’ (Barry 1995, p. 9).
Abolitionists hold that any agreement to a prostitution ‘contract’ is always made
under the auspices of a system rigged to ensure male domination. Andrea Dworkin, a
former sex worker herself, argues that prostitution naturalizes male privilege over
women’s bodies by rendering her a purchasable object of male sexual desire and power.
Prostitution is thus analogous with rape, as both confirm
that the sexual will of men properly and naturally defines the parameters of a woman’s sexual
being …women are whores …one does not violate something by using it for what it is:
neither rape nor prostitution is an abuse of the female because in both the female is fulfilling
her natural function. (Dworkin 1981, p. 203)
Consequently, abolitionists often conceptualize sex work using the language and logic
of slavery. As Carole Pateman argues, ‘when a man enters into the prostitution contract,
he is not interested in sexually indifferent, disembodied services; he contracts to buy
sexual use of a woman for a given period. Why else are men willing to enter the market
and pay for ‘hand relief’?’ (Pateman 1999, p. 60). O’Connell Davidson claims that the
motivation driving clients to purchase sex is to ‘possess the woman’ in order to gain
recognition, as the master does from his slave (O’Connell Davidson 1998, pp. 158–62,
emphasis added). For her, this fantasy of mastery and subordination is made real by the
realities of prevailing socio-economic relations. On these accounts, sex work is the
literal sale of oneself, an exchange which necessarily results in the alienation of one’s
own humanity.
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Such analyses suggest that prostitution always involves the desecration of a woman’s
sexual integrity. As MacKinnon argues, commodified sex is not in tune with the moral
integrity of sexuality because ‘when you are having sex with someone you want to be
having sex with, you aren’t generally paying each other. Being one of those things
money cannot buy, the real thing is neither bought nor sold …where sex is mutual it is
its own reward’ (MacKinnon 2011, p. 281). Consequently, although ‘workers of all
kinds may be more or less ‘bound up in their work’ …the integral connection between
sexuality and sense of self means that, for self-protection, a prostitute must distance
herself from her sexual use’ (Pateman 1999, p. 61). This final gambit is key to
abolitionist thinking. By contending that the moral and social value of a person is
violated when her sexuality is commodified abolitionists imply that a woman’s sexual
integrity is so central to her moral and personal integrity that its violation results in the
total liquidation of her claim to her humanity. Put simply, by commodifying her sex,
you commodify her. And this loss of integrity is depicted as an inevitable psychological
harm. Drawing a causal relation between prostitution and post-traumatic disorder,
sexual and intimacy dysfunction, depression, mood and personality disorders, dis-
association, and Stockholm syndrome, psychologist Melissa Farley contends that the
emphasis on public health within pro-sex work discourse underplays the ‘internal
ravages of prostitution’ (Farley 2003, 2004, 2012, p. xi). This assessment depicts
prostitution as ‘intrinsically traumatizing, wherever it occurs’ (Farley 2003, p. 267)
because it inculcates a distorted sense of self by demonstrating to women their
inferiority as both persons and women.
Since prostitution necessarily involves a loss of the self, one can never authentically
choose to engage in sex work. For Kathleen Barry, the subordination entailed by sex
work is so acute that any appearance of ‘choice’ within the context of prostitution can
only be explained by appeal to false consciousness:
women actually do not consent to prostitution [rather] appearing to choose is an element of
survival …for without it they could …lose their selves entirely …this is the prostitution
contract, which ‘protects’ women by involving them, invoking their self-acceptance in what is
essentially the terms of their objectification, thus intensifying the harm and abuse of
prostitution. (Barry 1995, p. 33)
Women engaged in prostitution are thus best conceptualized as victims rather than
agents: they become ensnared in prostitution because they are victims, and their
engagement in prostitution further facilitates the multiple ways in which they can be
victimized by others. Abolitionists often emphasize the prevalence of young people in
the sex industry, arguing that this demonstrates the reliance of the commercial sex
sector on exploiting persons who lack reliable support systems or awareness about
exploitation (see Barry 1979, 1995; Farley 2003).
On the basis of these premises, abolitionists argue that prostitution is a form of
violence against all women: it facilitates the widespread dehumanization of women by
providing a symbolic and literal space where gender-based violence and domination
can play out, thereby naturalizing and expediting the victimization of all women.
Moreover, prostitution is gendered violence, conceived from within a nexus of
misogyny, patriarchal power, and female objectification, making its existence within a
society a hazard for all women.
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SEX RADICALISM
Derived from sex-positive feminisms and queer theory, sex radicalism holds that the
norms and institutions governing sexuality can be – and need to be – contested and
subverted, and that one way of doing this within the context of heteronormativity is for
women to engage in unconventional sex for the sake of erotic, not merely reproductive,
gains. In this vein, sex radicals do not conceptualize sex work as a straightforward
medium of gendered domination, but a ‘site of self-definition, a way to contest, not just
reiterate, patriarchal assumptions about what women want and are worth’ (Showden
2012, p. 7) that needs to be ‘engaged directly rather than refused’ (Showden 2011,
p. 142). Whereas abolitionist feminists argue that the eradication of sex work is the
only way to unshackle women from relations of gender subordination, sex radicals
argue that engaging in sex work is one way to ‘liberate women and men from the
repressive effect of a puritanical heritage’ and reorder gender relations for the
betterment of all (Showden 2011, p. 143).
There are two main strands to the sex-radical perspective. The first is the ‘whore
sexuality’ strand, which holds that embracing ‘bad’ sexuality, such as sex work,
implicitly destabilizes the presumptive virtues of ‘good girl’ sexuality. The origins of
this view can be traced back to Gayle Rubin’s contention that sexuality has become
‘burdened with an excess of significance’ (Rubin 1999, p. 155). For Rubin, Western
notions of sex frame ‘virtually all erotic behavior [as] bad unless a specific reason to
exempt it has been established’ (Rubin 1999, p. 150). This leads to a hierarchy of
sexual value, along which those who practice ‘good’ sex are culturally legitimated,
whilst those who engage in ‘bad’ sex are penalized. For Rubin, the best way to interrupt
and unsettle this hierarchized notion of sexuality is to ‘play down the importance of
sexuality’ (Zatz 1997, p. 293) and advocate for a tolerance of ‘benign sexual variation’
(Rubin 1999, p. 150).
Advocates of ‘whore sexuality’ see themselves as answering Rubin’s call to depose
the ‘single standard’ (Rubin 1999, p. 153) of sexual respectability by contesting the
Madonna/Whore dichotomy. This norm designates sex work as a form of ‘bad’ sex
because it involves both promiscuity, sex outside the bounds of marriage, women’s
sexual autonomy, and the mixing of ‘sex’ and ‘money’, all of which contravenes
modern notions of intimacy by divorcing desire from sex (Zatz 1997). By engaging in
a form of ‘bad’ sex, sex workers implicitly undo the conflation of sexual desire with
long-term monogamy, reproductive function, romantic intimacy, personal and psycho-
logical dignity, and moral integrity. Dislodging sex from its pedestal of cultural import
puts it on par with modes of sexual desire that are not entangled with such features,
thereby creating a more permissive sexual ethic. This openness benefits women in
particular. Advocates note that the compulsory demand to be the ‘Madonna’ rather than
the ‘Whore’ requires women to ‘sublimate their own sexual needs and desires to those
of a husband’ (Showden 2011, p. 144) in order to avoid the aggressive advances and
harassment which accompany being seen as a ‘Whore’. By contrast, Whore sexuality
encourages women to embrace their desire to engage in multiple, casual, and diverse
sexual acts without shame, and this sex-positive re-framing of female sexual desire
implicitly demotes the cultural value attached to Madonna-oriented sexuality. This
extends to notions of ‘respectable work’ as well: Showden (2011) argues that the
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performance of ‘“whore sexuality” by poor women destabilizes the norms of economic
respectability’ by ‘refusing to remain poor and to work “acceptable” minimum-wage
jobs because that is what respectable women do’ (Showden 2011, p. 145). By
challenging both the sexual and economic order of respectability, advocates of ‘whore
asexuality’ argue that they can transform the norms underpinning current sexual
practice.
The second strand of sex radicalism is the therapeutic strand, which holds that sex
work provides the space and means by which people can develop healthy interpersonal
approaches to sex and to gender relations more broadly. Proponents claim that sex work
not only offers a valuable medium for disseminating sexual knowledge and infor-
mation, it also provides a platform for personal growth and satisfaction for sex workers
and clients alike. For instance, Carole Queen, a sex worker activist, argues that sex
workers provide a service to clients whose personal circumstances render their desires
unacceptable, writing pointedly that ‘until the climates in their bedrooms change, sex
professionals will be among their only outlets’ (Queen 1997, p. 130). Along these lines,
Schwarzenbach suggests that sex work realizes the ‘power which grows out of
[women’s] traditional roles as nurturer and healer, as caretaker not only of the soul, but
of the body as well’ (Schwarzenbach 1990, p. 129). She contends that ‘frequent and
satisfying sexual experiences which [are] free of domination [could be regarded as] a
healthy, even necessary component of a good life’ (Schwarzenbach 1990, p. 124).
Given this ‘healing power’, sex work could serve as a medium for resolving the
personal issues which undermine fostering healthy sexual attitudes.
However, sex work can only be personally therapeutic if its current social meaning is
decoupled from its prevailing models of male desire and geared towards new normative
ends. On this view, it is heterosexual desire itself which is ‘in desperate need of therapy’
(Schwarzenbach 1990, p. 130). Proponents contend that this function could be carried out
by creating the conditions in which sex work can serve as a ‘therapeutic process which
frees sexual gratification and erotic desire from their present fascination with domination
and subservience’ (1990, p. 124). Such conditions would entail, at the least, the decrimin-
alization of sex work. Additionally, they would require sex working women to ‘work
together, and not in isolation, towards the goal of a general insistence on personhood’
(Schwarzenbach 1990, p. 126), for example, by campaigning for decriminalization or by
unionizing. Such platforms would ‘bestow a greater respect for the prostitute herself and
for the nature and the art of her trade’ (Schwarzenbach 1990, p. 126).
The sex-therapy and ‘whore sexuality’ views comprise two different ways in which
the radically transformative potential of sex work can be conceived. Both purport the
importance of challenging the consolidation of the heteronormativity in which hetero-
sexual male desire is currently embedded. Whereas challenges to heteronormativity
have generally emerged from LGBTQI movements, sex radicals offer a compelling
case for including sex work as an additional apparatus of political transformation.
SEX LABOURISM
The abolitionist and sex-radical perspectives constitute the main poles of feminist
debate. However, a bourgeoning body of scholarship has emerged which I call sex
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labourism. This model assumes a more ‘ambivalent’ view (Scoular 2004) of the ethical
and moral value of sex work itself. Rather than the oppressive or transgressive potential
of sex work itself, sex-work labourists focus critique on the structures regulating or
impacting sexual commerce, on the conditions under which sex workers labour. These
include gender norms, and sex-work labourists often examine and contest the ways in
which these conditions impact sex working women (and men). On this account, the
gender inequality which pervades the sector is not intrinsic to sex work, but must be
challenged both within and independently of the context of sex work. Proponents often
claim that the legal decriminalization of sex work and recognition of sex worker’s
collective labour rights will lift crucial institutional burdens and create spaces in which
such challenges can be wrought.
Under sex labourism, sex work is conceptualized as one of many modes of economic
exploitation within capitalist economies. As Maggie O’Neill argues, ‘selling sex takes
place within the context of wider social processes and structures, such as global
capitalism, consumerism, the growth of the broader sex industry that makes huge
revenues, and the feminisation of poverty. People make choices, but not always in the
conditions of their own choosing’ (O’Neill 2009, p. 49, emphasis added). She and Jane
Scoular (2007) identify the dismantling of the social welfare state as an additional
economic burden because ‘the state [now] offers only a modest safety net with
narrower forms of (conditional) entitlement’ (Scoular and O’Neill 2007, p. 770). For Jo
Phoenix, these conditions mean that sex work constitutes a form of ‘economic survival’
because ‘in this context, sex remains – as ever – a marketable commodity in women’s
attempt to provide for themselves without recourse to dependency on the state or
individual men’ (Phoenix 2007a, p. 25). Quoting former sex worker and current activist
Gloria Lockett, Showden writes that for many women sex work ‘is not just a means to
an end; it is …a ‘means to a different end’ – an end that isn’t abject poverty and the
different forms of indignity that attend to underpaid menial labor’ (Showden 2011,
p. 148). By framing sex work as a predominantly economic undertaking – that is, a
‘job’ rather than a form of gender violence or sexual-empowerment – sex labourism
discharges sex work of the political and moral connotations it has acquired under
abolitionism and sex radicalism, making it possible to conceptualize sex work along
exogenous axes of oppression and exploitation, such as the prevailing gender and class
disparities shaping economic, legal, and cultural institutions.
In focusing on institutional conditions, sex-work labourists are able to show how
institutions facilitate and reproduce the gendered social norms that shape how sex is
bought and sold. For instance, Zatz argues that the ‘criminalization and public
denigration’ of sex work has actively cultivated the ‘whore stigma’ by fuelling ‘a
process that quarantines prostitution from the legitimate world of business and
commerce, [and keeps] the domains of sexuality and economy symbolically separated
[whilst] shaping each in the process’ (Zatz 1997, p. 300). Sex workers suffer from
stigma because prevailing institutional processes actively produce sex workers as actors
who disrupt the social or moral order; in turn, this socially produced ‘whore stigma’
materializes into a range of political and institutional responses that exacerbate the
perilousness, isolation, vulnerability, and deprivation under which many sex workers
labour.
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Proponents argue that zero-tolerance responses cause many sex workers to avoid
outreach support services, to work in isolation, and bypass assessments of clients
(Brewis and Linstead 2000; Sanders 2004a). Similarly, the policing of clients exacer-
bates the vulnerability of sex workers by compelling sex workers to move underground
in order to maintain a client-base. Urban ‘regeneration’ agendas and community-based
safety initiatives, such as Neighbourhood Watch schemes, also reify the social
perceptions that sex work represents ‘urban decay’ and must be displaced to more
remote areas in order to make neighbourhoods safe and prosperous for bourgeoning
middle-class interests (Hubbard 2004; Hubbard and Sanders 2003; Hubbard et al. 2008,
2009). John Lowman has documented how the mutually inflecting processes of
stigmatization and criminalization have engendered a social milieu where ‘primitive
market forces’ and the ‘brutal forms of manager-exploitation’ they engender ‘can take
root’ (Lowman 2000, p. 1006). He argues that the ‘discourse of disposal’ that underpins
criminalization produces an ‘ideological context’ in which ‘predatory misogynist
violence’ can flourish (Lowman 2000, p. 1004). His argument resonates with the
claims of sex worker activists who contend that the ubiquity of violence towards
sex workers can be attributed to the ‘power imbalances that criminalization either
creates or reinforces’ (Zatz 1997, p. 291). These institutional, legal, and political
structures simultaneously re-inscribe the whore stigma and render sex work ‘worthy’ of
that stigma by normatively constructing sex work as ‘dirty’, ‘criminal’, ‘violent’, and
‘uncivil’.
For sex-work labourists, these normative and institutional structures are problematic
because they make it hard – if not impossible – for sex workers to work safely, access
routes of legal redress, contend for labour rights, or even use public spaces (Gall 2014;
O’Neill 2009). Restructuring the institutional structures regulating sex work would
catalyse changes in how sex workers are normatively perceived. For example, decrim-
inalizing sex work, providing sex workers with viable means of legal redress both for
workplace disputes and criminal activity, and recognizing their rights to be present in
public spaces would send the much-needed cultural message that those who engage in
sex work are respect-worthy citizens (O’Neill 2009).
4
Providing sex workers with the
means by which they can control their workspace and contracts, seek legal redress for
violations from fraud to assault, and purchase appropriate and secure facilities, one
challenges the power disparities that disproportionately disadvantage women within the
context of sex work – and sex in general. By addressing sex work as a multi-faceted
labour issue, sex-work labourists claim to offer a solution to the problematic attributes
of the sector.
RE/FRAMING SEX WORK POLICY AT THE FRONTLINE
Researchers working through the perspectives outlined above generally focus their
analyses on policymaking debates, the lived experience of sex working, media and
other cultural representations of sex work, and the sex working laws and their
enforcement. This range of focus gives the impression that frontline
5
health and social
agencies are peripheral. My work suggests otherwise.
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This has particularly been the case in the field of sex work research, where a focus
on overarching policy processes and discourses, the policing of sex work, or on sex
workers themselves has been emphasized.
6
This gap omits a rich and important area of
analysis: a political ‘coalface’, one might say, where policy is filtered and implemented
by state and non-state actors, and where the lived experiences of sex workers are
interpreted and shaped. My research – of which I can only provide a brief overview
here – aims to fill such a gap (Kallock forthcoming). Focusing on frontline social
services in Northern England, I investigate the ways in which frontline projects
navigate and mobilize the gendered institutional and discursive dynamics circum-
scribing sexual commerce. Although this research focuses on frontline projects working
within a specific national context, understanding how discourses and institutions frame
sex work at the national level can illuminate continuities and distinctions from how sex
work is framed at the global level.
7
The framework I develop in my research and
present below could be useful in understanding how support projects working with
migrant and trafficked sex workers frame sex work/ers and their response to the lived
contingencies of global sexual commerce.
The legal response to sexual commerce in the UK has evolved in piecemeal fashion
since the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886 (see Laite 2008; Walkowitz
1980) to a formulation best described as the partial criminalization of sex work: selling
or buying sex is not illegal in itself, but a number of the activities around sexual
commerce, such as kerb-crawling, commercial zoning, advertising, soliciting, or living
off the avails of sex workers, all of which make it possible to sex work (safely), are
illegal (Hubbard 2006; Phoenix 2009; Sanders 2004b, 2009; Sanders and Campbell
2004). Although vice squads
8
have disbanded nationally since the 1990s (Matthews
2005), sex workers and their clients can still be arrested and penalized for violating a
number of public nuisance ordinances (Hill 2014; Scoular and O’Neill 2007). Some
regional law enforcement units continue to periodically crack down on local sex
markets, with some even resorting to the use of ASBOs
9
(Phoenix 2008; Scoular et al.
2009). Such actions are usually justified on the basis of tackling ‘urban decay’ (Howell
et al. 2008; Hubbard 2004; Sanders 2009).
10
Recently, many of these crackdowns have
focused on off-street venues and have been implemented in the name of addressing
human trafficking (Boff 2012). In light of this, the relationship between the sex
working community and law enforcement is fraught, and this can create problems for
support projects, many of which are required to engage in multi-agency partnership
with police, among others. Not only does it entail the perception that projects might be
colluding with law enforcement, it means that projects themselves must negotiate
external agendas that are not always in tune with their values or their commitments to
the well-being of their service users (Kallock forthcoming; UKNSWP 2009). These
overarching patterns notwithstanding, as abolitionist discourses gain prominence and
health-focused frontline projects assert themselves in multi-agency forums, a new
emphasis on ‘victim protection’ is slowly becoming an institutional norm (Matthew
2005).
11
The introduction of fiscal austerity by the UK coalition and Conservative
governments has meant that frontline actors – including police – are forced to
collaborate with diminishing statutory resources on which to draw. Consequently,
certain outside agendas and values have become more entrenched than others. Most of
the practitioners I interviewed exemplified the sex-work labourist approach,
12
but this
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has been significantly strained by the prominence of abolitionist discourse. These
projects tend to emphasize harm reduction, criticize zero-tolerance policing, create
avenues for peer-leadership, assume a non-judgmental approach to the sex working of
their service users, and subvert medico-behaviourist interventions where possible. They
implement what I call ‘practical-empowerment’, a form of service delivery character-
ized by professional rapport, a concern for health and safety, and practical and
emotional accessibility to services. This corresponds with their institutional history,
with many beginning as local health initiatives during the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s
and early 1990s when the harm-reduction philosophy held prominence (Phoenix
2007b).
However, as human rights discourses around child sexual exploitation and human
trafficking amplified during the 1990s and 2000s (Carline 2011, 2012; Kantola and
Squires 2004), the criminalization and social regulation of sex work acquired a new
tone, one which draws on the abolitionist contention that sex workers are victims who
need to be empowered or encouraged to exit sex work. The ‘victim’ narrative
dominated the discursive backdrop of the New Labour governments, precipitating a
number of new legal and social provisions around sex working by firming up the
conceptual links between sex work, child sexual exploitation, and human trafficking
(Carline 2012; Soothill and Sanders 2004). For example, the 2009 Policing and Crime
Act introduced a strict liability clause making clients responsible for ensuring that the
person selling sex is not being coerced by a third party. This intended purpose of the
provision is to deter clients from purchasing sex, but the provision implicitly encodes
all commercial sex work as a form of coercion until proven otherwise. The claim that
sex work is a form of violence or coercion is central to the human trafficking and child
sexual exploitation outlooks. The victim narrative has also prompted policies that
encourage municipalities and street-level bureaucrats to engage sex workers in compul-
sory rehabilitative efforts. The discourse of ‘responsibilization’ recommends a model of
targeted state welfare that vies to transform delinquent individuals ‘into citizens who
can insure themselves against disadvantage by participating in the market’ (Scoular and
O’Neill 2007, p. 772) and engaging in ‘privatized welfare regimes’ consisting of
‘individual re-education, re-training, and entry into the legitimate economy’ (Scoular
and O’Neill 2007, pp. 700–2). Such provisions have been executed in different forms,
from ASBOs, to conditional cautions, to court-ordered Engagement Support Orders, but
in each formulation the goal is to identify and troubleshoot barriers to engaging in
mainstream forms of waged labour. Such programmes are justified on neoliberal
grounds. Commercial sex creates burdens on the state, for example, by contributing to
‘urban decay’, spreading disease, or creating welfare dependencies on the state.
Although individuals may be sex working because of the social dislocations produced
by neoliberalism, these programmes compel – under the possibility of further criminal
penalty – individuals to manage these dislocations and their attendant risks without
relying on the state or contravening the social order. The irony of such policies is that
although they are founded in the recognition that someone sex works for reasons that
may be out of her control, desistance from sex work is something that she alone is
responsible to execute.
As a result of this discursive interplay, both law enforcement and social services have
become geared towards what I call ‘lifestyle-empowerment’, an approach concerned
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with creating long-term lifestyle changes by addressing the entrenched psychological
and emotional dispositions that are perceived to motivate and sustain involvement in
sex markets (Farley 2003, 2004). It is characterized by an emphasis on victimization,
therapeutic interventions, and, for faith-based organizations, the Christian politics of
‘compassion’ (Hackworth 2010). The aim of lifestyle-empowerment is to obliquely
compel service users to exit sex work by presenting exiting as the best lifestyle option.
Although law enforcement agencies do not themselves implement lifestyle-oriented
interventions, the creation of Engagement Support orders under the 2009 Policing and
Crime Act created a legal apparatus by which women could be compelled to engage
with support projects (Hill 2014; Scoular and Carline 2014, 2015). Women who fail to
comply with these orders can face fines or/and imprisonment. Thus, by emphasizing
desistance from sex work and reintegration into the mainstream economy, criminaliz-
ation and welfare have been merged into a framework of compulsory rehabilitation that
is punitive in character (Hill 2014).
The emphasis on lifestyle-empowerment has occurred in relative lockstep with the
rise of abolitionist discourse, and this has posed significant constraints on the ways in
which projects respond to the gender dynamics of the sector. Under the Thatcher
government, public sector welfare services came under immense fiscal and managerial
pressure (Gamble 1994), and in order to successfully compete for funding within a
shrinking pool many sex worker support projects drew on the popular frameworks
structuring political discourse. Accordingly, many prioritized the need to deliver
services to the most high-risk populations, such as IV drug users and street-based sex
workers, homeless persons, and at-risk youth. Under New Labour, funding for
initiatives focused on exiting sex workers from the sector proliferated, leading to a
squeeze on sex-work labourist values. This period also coincided with rising awareness
of child sexual exploitation, which abolitionists cited as an endemic point of entry.
During this period sex worker support projects disciplined themselves to these values
and agendas in order to tap into these funding streams. As such, Joe Phoenix observes
that the research produced by these projects tended to promote ‘the issue of young
people’s involvement in prostitution and of the sheer level and realities of the drug
dependency, violence, and exploitation that many women experience – especially those
working from the street’ (Phoenix 2007b, p. 84). This dynamic has meant that support
projects have become complicit in the processes of knowledge production that frame
female sex workers as victims of exploitation in need of targeted and coercive state
intervention aimed at making them ‘respectable’ economic citizens. It has also meant
that projects have pigeonholed themselves into serving the most visible section of the
sex working community – female street-based sex workers – which only comprise a
small proportion of the total commercial sex sector. At the time of my fieldwork
(September 2013 to March 2014) many projects were strategizing to create comprehen-
sive indoor services, but were finding it difficult to square the victim-discourse with the
lived experience of indoor sex workers, who predominantly face less risks and have
less social needs than street-based workers. Moreover, the focus on street-based
populations significantly restricts the reach of service delivery to native women as most
migrant sex workers in the UK tend to work in indoor venues. By focusing on
street-based markets, many projects omit a huge population from their service
delivery.
13
These examples demonstrate that, at least in Northern England, although
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many practitioners and projects espouse sex-work labourist views they sometimes
reproduce the problematic gendered discourses around sex work.
MOVING TOWARDS THE GLOBAL FRONTLINE
To conclude, I want to tie together the various threads this chapter has presented. The
aim has been to outline an approach to analysing sex work that can be deployed by
feminist political economists interested in the global sex trade. Much feminist
theorizing and research, including my own research, does this at the national level, but
as the global sex market grows, and as frontline projects began to work more with
transnational populations, such analyses must look beyond this context.
So, as this shift in scholarly focus and discourse takes place, what sorts of analytical
framings might emerge? For abolitionists, the global sex trade is first and foremost a
transnational slavery nexus (Farley 2003; Jeffreys 2009; Raymond 2004; Skrobanek et
al. 1997; True 2012). It is both the result of world-wide trends of women’s poverty, and
a culminating expression of the neo-colonialist desire to access and use the ‘exotic’ and
‘passive’ bodies of vulnerable women in developing countries (Andrijasevic 2007;
Jeffreys 2009). A number of trafficking-focused advocacy and support organizations are
already working within and across national borders to bring attention to the ostensive
plight of ‘Third World’ sex workers, and to ‘rescue’ them by providing avenues for
exiting (Agustín 2007; Bernstein 2010; Kinney 2014).
The discourses and intervention these proponents have proffered have been exten-
sively chastised and refuted by sex-work labourists on the grounds that anti-trafficking
measures reinforce the stigmatization and institutional disenfranchisement of both
immigrants and sex workers (Doezema 1999; Kinney 2014; O’Connell Davidson 2006;
Weitzer 2011). The sex-work labourist view has also gained traction in analyses of the
global sex trade. For these proponents, sex work is seen as a means of coping with the
gendered impact of globalization. This coheres with the feminist political economy
contention that wo/men are active agents within globalized processes, not just recipi-
ents (or victims) of global processes (Waylen 2006). This is not to say that the global
sex trade is absent of gender-based violence or inequality, but is to point out how the
legal institutions regulating or impacting migration, care/affective work, social welfare,
and migration harbour and reproduce these disparities. These structural disparities
make participation in sex markets the most viable economic option for many women at
the same time as exposing women to a greater risk of coercion and exploitation
(Anderson 2010; Andrijasevic 2003; Outshoorn 2014). Such conclusions have led
international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International to endorse the
decriminalization of sex work and have galvanized sex worker unionization and
activism around the globe (Gall 2014; Kempadoo and Doezema 1998).
Only the sex-radical perspective has yet to be deployed to a meaningful extent within
analyses of the global sex market. Showden’s contention that sex work serves as a
means of ‘contesting the nexus of economic and gender power’ (Showden 2011,
emphasis added) provides a provisional point of departure: if economic and gender
relations are re-thought through the lenses of global migration and neoliberalism, then
the conceptualization of sex work as a means of ‘erotic capital’ (Hakim 2010) could
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serve as way of contesting the relegation of women’s bodies to the low-wage refuse of
global capitalism by providing women with a means to retain the value of their surplus
labour (cf. Graham-Gibson 1996). The global sex market could also be seen as
providing an avenue for queering identity norms by providing a concrete social space in
which the intersection of national identities, citizenship status, gender, sexuality and
household status can be explored and reworked within a transnational context (cf. Mai
2004, 2012; Schiller et al. 1995; Stout 2014).
As we can see, each of these perspectives provides a rich avenue of analysis for
feminist political economists studying global politico-economic processes. My hope is
that as scholarship around this area grows it will not commit the same omission of
frontline service delivery that has characterized sex work research at the regional level.
As my own research demonstrates, frontline practitioners and their organizations are
key players in both political and discursive processes, and they are active agents in the
lived experiences of sex workers themselves. Scholarly analysis of their impact and
influence must be sustained as frontline service delivery moves from a national to
transnational context. As scholars fluent in the gendered dimensions of global capital-
ism, feminist political economists are well positioned to execute such analyses with
salience and clarity.
NOTES
1. Although there is a growing body of research that analyses how male and LGBT sex work as
productive of gendered and sexual hierarchies, this chapter will focus on frameworks which analyse
commercial sex work as an issue for women and as a predominantly ‘heterosexual problem’ (Showden
2012). If interested in LGBT and male sex work, see Laing et al. (2015), Smith (2012), Minichiello
and Scott (2014), and Aggleton and Parker (2015).
2. Although the term ‘abolitionism’ is widely used, alternative terms include ‘domination feminism’ and
‘radical feminism’ (Showden 2011; Sloan and Wahab 2000). With respect to sex radicalism, some use
the term sex-positivism (Showden 2011). The term ‘sex-work labourism’ represents my own attempt
to rebrand the sex-as-work view in terms of labour politics.
3. Defined as agencies that deliver health and social support to sex working populations.
4. Along these lines, sex-work labourists also emphasize the impressive work ethic, repertoire of skills
and knowledge, and capacity for creativity which sex work demands, offering insights into the ways in
which sex working wo/men manage physical and emotional risks, construct and manage their
identities, sharpen their skills set, communicate with and accommodate clients, occupy themselves
during lulls, and even share sexual health knowledge (Brewis and Linstead 2000; Lalani 2014).
5. The ‘frontline’ is sometimes called the ‘third sector’ and for my purposes refers to a mix of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and street-level bureaucrats. The ‘NGO’ element includes
local and national health and social welfare initiatives that are usually privately contracted by local
authorities, although some are run under the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. There are
some national NGOs, such as the National Ugly Mugs Scheme, and a number of faith-based
initiatives. Street-level bureaucrats include other local authority actors that partner with frontline
projects, such as social workers, police, probationary workers, prison workers, housing workers, and
addiction support teams.
6. Notable exceptions include Agustín (2007), Andrijasevic (2003), Bernstein (2010), Kinney (2014),
O’Connell Davidson (2006).
7. Mai (2012) develops the concept of ‘fractal’ to frame the global sex market as ‘a fragmented shape
composed of parts which are approximately a reduced-size copy of the whole’. This allows him to talk
about the global sex market as a fragmented entity that is nonetheless shot through with continuities.
But it is also useful in discussing the ways in which migrants engaged in sex work embody both
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queerness, by engaging in sexual activity that deviates from their cultural norms, and the prevailing
hegemonic normativities that shape gender and sexual relations more broadly.
8. Investigative law enforcement units that were traditionally focused on policing sex markets.
9. Antisocial Behavioural Orders are legal injunctions given for public nuisance violations. They consist
of fines and other behavioural stipulations, such as attending a counselling service or staying out of
designated area. Breach of an ASBO can result in prisoner time.
10. This coheres with political economy analyses of the criminalization of poor that contend that states are
increasingly deploying disciplinary means to manage populations that are not engaged in waged
labour and thereby contain the social dislocations produced by neoliberal capitalism. Sex work is a
response to two such dislocations: the lack of flexible, stable, and lucrative labour options and the
dissolution of comprehensive and accessible social safety-nets, trends which disproportionately affect
women. Future research in this area could explore how sex work is a strategic response by poor
women to neoliberal policies that coheres with its free-market principles, but is nonetheless
constructed as a threat to the neoliberal order which must be contained. For more on the
criminalization of the poor, see Wacquant (2009) and for a gender perspective, see Roberts (2016). I
thank Adrienne Roberts for bringing this illuminating point to my attention.
11. For evidence of this, note the shift in rhetoric between the 2004 and 2011 guidance of the Association
Chief of Police Officers (ACPO 2004, 2011).
12. With respect to the sex-radical perspective, it tends to be more clearly taken up by sex worker activists
and pressure groups within the UK, such as the English Collective of Prostitutes. Recently, some of
these efforts and energies have translated into peer-run frontline projects, such as xTalk in London.
13. The growing attention to indoor venues has also not translated into the inclusion of male sex workers,
despite the fact that many scholars and activists have been raising awareness around this area. The few
male-focused projects I did interview were established during this discursive era and thus were
significantly focused on child sexual exploitation and lifestyle-empowerment.
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