Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

by Molly Smith

A glance at the names chosen for police operations and NGOs highlights this: Lost Innocence, Saving Innocence, Freedom4Innocence, the Protected Innocence Challenge, Innocents at Risk, Restore Innocence, Rescue Innocence, Innocence for Sale.16

The vast, vast majority of people who end up in exploitative situations were seeking to migrate and have become entrapped in a horrifically exploitative system because when people migrate without papers they have few to no rights.

border controls are a relatively new invention – they emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of racial domination and exclusion. (ICE, the brutal American immigration enforcement police, was only created in its modern form in 2003; the previous iteration of it is as recent as the 1930s, an agency called Immigration and Naturalization Services.) The

You can see this dynamic in action at the US–Mexico border. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. Two million Mexican farmers were forced off their land and into destitution while food prices within Mexico rose.

they channel our energies to support a law-and-order agenda of ‘getting tough’ with ‘traffickers’. In this way, anti-trafficking measures are ideological: they render the plethora of immigration and border controls as unproblematic and place them outside of the bounds of politics. [emphasis ours]

Trafficking anxieties have always been deeply tied to white nationalism. White women’s bodies – threatened by prostitution – come to stand in for the body politic of the nation, threatened by immigration.

Historians note that journalists’ breathless reportage of white slavery ‘provided virtually pornographic entertainment to the reading audience’.66 It was amid this obviously racist freak-out over swarthy men luring white innocents to their ruin that one of the first recognisably modern US anti-trafficking laws, the 1905 Mann Act, passed. The bill, which was ostensibly against forced prostitution, criminalised Black men in romantic relationships with white women.67 In

slavery names a specific legal institution created, enforced and protected by the state,

Indeed, the direct modern descendant of chattel slavery in the US is not prostitution but the prison system.

Slavery was not abolished but explicitly retained in the US Constitution as punishment for crime in the Thirteenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that ‘neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within...

There are more Black men in the US prison system now than were enslaved in 1850.81 Seeking to ‘end slavery’ through increased policing and incarceration is a bitterly ironic proposition.

Homeland Security officially ban anyone who has sold sex in the previous ten years from entry into the United States, along with spies, Nazis, and terrorists.

Instead of asking questions about how the state makes women like Daria and Paula unsafe, media coverage tends to channel the worldview of their aggrieved neighbours.* The fact that selling sex is technically not a crime in Britain does little to render sex workers as relatable – or grievable – in the eyes of police, residents or journalists.

However, as Finch found out, sharing work spaces is illegal in Britain where two or more sex workers constitute a ‘brothel’. This penalty applies whether or not both people see a client at the same time – or even on the same day – and regardless of whether one person has greater power than the other.

Through the intensifying militarisation of police departments, there is a direct link between the foreign wars at the frontiers of the contemporary American empire and the hyper-carceral

As the New Yorker reports, since the 1990s, ‘local governments have received approximately thirty-four billion dollars in grants from the Department of Homeland Security to buy their own military equipment … That brings the total [spent by American police departments on military equipment] to thirty-nine billion dollars – more than the entire defense budget of Germany.’

The same trend is visible even in the histories of policing; early-twentieth-century American policing drew on the US Army’s experience imposing brutal colonial rule in the Philippines, just as UK policing explicitly drew on tactics d...

Communities feel the police are an occupying army; the police feel themselves to be an occupying army, and the police respond to the people they encounter with the hostility that engenders.

reducing sex workers’ ability to connect with clients always increases scarcity and makes workers more vulnerable.

SESTA-FOSTA is

Anti-trafficking work done by the state invariably starts with an arrest. The US media generally reports such arrests as ‘rescues’, thus framing the arrest of people in the sex trade not just somewhat progressive but actively humanitarian.47 Few could object to fighting trafficking.

PEPFAR is the largest source of government funding for HIV/AIDS in the world, but requires recipient organisations to be explicitly anti–sex work (the ‘anti-prostitution pledge’).

In Kenya, three hundred sex worker activists, carrying brooms and mops, marked World AIDS Day in 2012 by cleaning a hospital.

Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark

capacious,

The clients who are deterred are disproportionately the ‘nicer’ clients, or at least those with something to lose.

Again, to get the client’s money, you often have to cater to his need for safety from arrest – by working alone rather than in a group.

As for having a conversation before getting into his car, that is the time when he is most visible to the police as a client, and therefore he will be keen to speed that process up. Instead of having a conversation about services, prices, and condom use while still on the street, he’ll ask you to hop into his car and have that conversation while you’re already speeding away.

But for the client, going to a sex worker’s flat is when he is most at risk of arrest. So he asks her to visit him instead,

But if a client is criminalised, he may be fearful of the police searching a worker’s phone or apartment and identifying him. As a result, he refuses to give basic screening information like his real name, and switches to calling from a hidden number. A man who wants to carry out an assault or robbery will know he can arrange a meeting with a sex worker and be virtually untraceable; the criminalisation of clients gives him leverage to refuse to make himself identifiable.

Such a scheme could take many forms – most obviously direct economic support, such as help with accessing benefits or other employment. It could also mean help regularising someone’s immigration status so they can get a job in the mainstream economy. It could mean prescription drugs, counselling or other healthcare. It could mean access to childcare, education, housing – anything that addresses or alleviates the factors surrounding the person’s entry into sex work in the first place.

Instead, when a client is arrested, the police take all of her cash as ‘proceeds of crime’.53 This is, it should be obvious, a de facto fine for sex workers. In Norway, street-based sex workers were still being fined several years after they had allegedly been ‘decriminalised’.

In almost every jurisdiction where the Nordic model operates, sex workers sharing flats are criminalised.

In Sweden, landlords who rent property to sex workers can be criminalised for ‘promoting’ prostitution,

The law directly pushes for the eviction of sex worker tenants:

The Norwegian police even had a specific operation to evict sex workers. They would tell a landlord that they suspected a specific tenant to be a sex worker and invite the landlord to either evict the tenant or face prosecution themselves. The tenants were evicted. As if to deliberately dispel any doubt as to what this policing strategy was aiming for, the police gave it the name: ‘Operation Homeless’.71

Police in Nordic countries routinely use sex workers’ reports of violence to deport them.

It is no coincidence that so many of the sex workers deported from Scandinavia are Black women. The Nordic model emerged in response to racist anxieties about the migration of Black sex workers, particularly to Norway, who were depicted through the stigmatising trope of the sexually aggressive Black woman.

alacrity

In the name of folkhemmet’s eugenicist commitment to ‘social hygiene’, 21,000 people were forcibly sterilised before 1975. Ninety per cent of those sterilised were women who were deemed to be ‘inferior, anti-social, dangerously hypersexual … promiscuous or feebleminded’.

During the 1990s, the Swedish state incarcerated people living with HIV without trial,

In order to legally reassign their gender, trans people were subject to compulsory sterilisation until 2013.

Although diverse nations have legalised their sex industry (including Bangladesh, Austria, Senegal, Latvia, Tunisia, Hungary, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, parts of Australia, and some counties in the US state of Nevada),

Liberal support for regulationism is linked to the notion that prostitution is something innate, perennial, inevitable – the dirty job that someone has got to do. This has deep roots: Christian theologians, for instance, have argued that commercial sex is an outlet for sexual impulses that would otherwise result in worse sins.4 The

Then there are those who see in sex work a greater capitalist purpose.

Nevada, the Netherlands, and Germany are typical of places that impose rules on how the sex industry may operate. The most precarious sex workers cannot comply and so must work illegally, forming a vulnerable, criminalised ‘underclass’. Trans women, for example, are barred from work in the state-run brothels of Turkey.

Green, V. (March 1977) ‘We’re not criminals’: Prostitutes organize’, Spare Rib 56, quoted in Kinnell, H. (2008) Violence and Sex Work in Britain, Oxford, UK: Routledge, 22.

Aimee, R., Kaiser, E. and Ray, A. (2015) ‘A short history of $pread’, in $pread: The Best of the Magazine That Illuminated The Sex Industry and Started a Media Revolution,

Otis, L.L. (1985) Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 61.

Roper, L. (Spring 1985) ‘Discipline and Respectability: Prostitution and the Reformation in Augsburg’, History Workshop 19, 3–28.