scholarly journals Why Decriminalise Prostitution? Because Law and Justice Aren’t Always the Same

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Jane Scoular ◽  
Sharron FitzGerald
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Increasing Trend ◽  
Law And Justice

Leigh Goodmark’s work on domestic violence argues for alternatives to criminal justice to ‘solve’ issues of gendered violence. The criminalisation of sex work and prostitution is rarely discussed in this context—a rather odd omission given the increasing trend towards ‘criminalising demand’ and counter-calls for decriminalisation in this domain. In this article, we bring the two debates into conversation, using Goodmark’s work to bring analytical clarity to the prostitution debate and connect sex work to wider social justice debates in feminist anti-violence circles. We aim to move the conversation beyond retribution and the view that law is justice to outline a vision of justice for sex workers grounded in the principles of rights, recognition and representation. By contextualising the decriminalisation of prostitution within the framework of a wider anti-carceral justice movement, we seek to build alliances for social justice that transcend the current divide.

From Victim to Criminality

2021 ◽  
pp. 288-308
Author(s):  
Vipin Vijay Nair ◽  
Sandra Anil Varkey
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Commercial Sex Work ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Society Today

Trafficking of persons, primarily women and children, is one of the growing social dilemmas concerning global society today. Not only is human trafficking a highly sensitive and polarizing subject, but it is also considered a common norm in many countries. Many women recruited into commercial sex work are coerced into the profession exploiting their financial and economic condition but continue to work in the profession to survive through easy money. The chapter focuses on a theoretical framework for understanding the victimization of female sex workers. It also reflects various lacuna in the present criminal justice system and law enforcement mechanism in criminalizing victims within the sex work industry. The chapter narrates the voices of commercial sex workers in India over the prejudices and criminalization by various laws and regulations towards their consensual sex work. The chapter recommends sensitization training and awareness amongst various stakeholders of the criminal justice system.

Sex workers access to health and social care services: A social justice response

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-348
Author(s):  
Leigh-Ann Sweeney ◽  
Leonard Taylor ◽  
Michal Molcho
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Care ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Health And Social Care ◽  
Provision Of Services

This research explores service providers’ views on the barriers that prevent women in the sex work industry in Ireland from accessing co-ordinated health services. A purposive sample of eight service providers in the field of women’s health and social care in the West of Ireland were selected and interviewed for this study. The service providers were asked about their perception of the barriers of sex workers accessing health and social care services. Using thematic analysis, three key themes were identified: (1) lack of knowledge of women’s involvement in sex work; (2) identified barriers to health services; and (3) legislative and policy barriers to providing supportive services. While the service providers acknowledged that they do not knowingly provide services for sex workers, they all recognise that some of their service users are at risk of, and potentially are, involved in sex work. Yet, they were able to identify some of the barriers sex workers face when accessing their services. All these barriers were the result to the services’ limited capacity to support women engaging in sex work. At the time of data collection, the legislative context meant that selling sex under certain conditions was outside the law. This study highlights the consequences that criminalisation can have on the health of sex workers and the need for a paradigm shift in existing health and social care services. In this paper, we propose that a social justice rather than a criminal justice approach has the potential to address sex workers’ right to access appropriate health care. This paper gives due recognition to marginalised women, and advocates for better provision of services for women in the sex industry, while considering the new legislation of 2017.

scholarly journals ‘I Wouldn’t Call the Cops if I was Being Bashed to Death’: Sex Work, Whore Stigma and the Criminal Legal System

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahra Stardust ◽  
Carla Treloar ◽  
Elena Cama ◽  
Jules Kim
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Victim Status ◽  
Systematic Response ◽  
Criminal Legal System ◽  
Licensing Laws

Discourse on sex work is replete with narratives of risk and danger, predominantly focused on violence and disease. However, the risks instigated by police, maintained by the criminal justice system and sanctioned by the state—criminal laws, licensing laws and targeted policing—receive far less attention. This paper responds to this gap in three ways. First, we examine how stigma manifests in sex workers’ experiences of Australian policing, which act to disincentivise sex workers from accessing criminal legal mechanisms. Second, we illustrate how sex workers are denied victim status as they are seen by law as ‘irresponsible citizens’ and blamed for their experiences of crime. Third, we argue that these factors create conditions in which sex workers must constantly assess risks to access safety and legal redress while structural sex work stigma persists unabated. We conclude that ‘whore stigma’ is entrenched in the criminal legal system and requires a systematic response that necessitates but goes beyond the decriminalisation of sex work.

scholarly journals Is it time to drop the term ‘prostitution’ from policy discourse?

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Mulvihill
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Policy Discourse ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Policy Action ◽  
Survival Sex ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
Loaded Term

In this paper, I wish to explore whether it is time to drop the use of the term ‘prostitution’ in English policy discourse. I argue here that ‘prostitution’ is a culturally loaded term and is insufficiently precise in describing the different contexts in which the exchange of sex for money or other resources between adults takes place. This lack of clarity has implications for policy action, which in turn materially affects the lives of those involved in the sex industry. I draw on MacKinnon’s (1989) thesis of the eroticisation of dominance as a productive framework for explaining why violence, harm and coercion are possible within the exchange of sex for money (or other resource), though not inevitable. I propose that we distinguish four categories: sex entrepreneurship, sex work, survival sex and sexual exploitation. For some scholars, such categorisations overlook how disparate practices are connected (Jeffreys, 2009), most obviously by patriarchy or economic inequality. However, I believe we need to see both the connections and the distinctions: if we conflate different practices, we lose the particularity of the contexts of practice and weaken the rationale for policy action. Worse, policy interventions may be harmful. I suggest these four categories can help us identify and distinguish between structural and interpersonal harm and structural and interpersonal coercion and help to formulate attendant criminal justice and social justice measures.

scholarly journals Aesthetic Grammars of Social Justice: Sex Work Reimagined

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Formed Part

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of the persistence of coloniality through structural forms of privilege and bias across socioeconomic manifestations, inequality and racial stratification of labour in South Africa, creative activism offers a lens, voice and perspective of sex workers. We relate these glimpses to rehumanisation and re-membering, challenging historically distinct modes of turning humans into objects as part of decolonial possibilities. We seek to make decolonization a praxis of making human and hence we ask two central questions: what provocations arise from aesthetics of creative activism? And what might rehumanizing/re-membering concretely mean? We consider these questions through an analysis of the activism, exhibitions and performance with participant sex workers that formed part of the GlobalGRACE project launch in South Africa. Ultimately, we argue that art practices fundamentally engage the imagination and open up possibilities for re-imagining, re-storying and re-centering marginalized knowledges.

scholarly journals Governing Sex Work Through Crime

2017 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Graham
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
The State ◽  
Border Control ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
And Control

This article uses Jonathan Simon’s concept of ‘governing through crime’ as a framework to argue that the state has framed sex work, and its surrounding problems, as issues of crime. There has been a privileging and proliferation of criminal justice responses to sex work in England and Wales, at the expense of more social or welfare-based responses and at the expense of creating safer environments for sex workers to work. Criminal law is used to manage and control sex work, to reinforce other policies, such as immigration and border control, and to appear to be doing something about the ‘problem’ of sex work without providing rights to sex workers. By framing sex work as an issue of crime, with sex workers being both the perpetrators of crime and the potential victims of exploitative crime, the state is able to legitimise its actions against sex workers, while ignoring the harm done to sex workers by the state.

scholarly journals Decriminalizing Domestic Violence and Fighting Prostitution Abolition: Lessons Learned From Canada’s Anti-Carceral Feminist Struggles

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Balfour
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Carceral Feminism

This article offers a cautionary tale for efforts to decriminalize domestic violence through a retrospective analysis of Canadian feminist legal activism to decriminalize sex work. Both domestic violence and sex work are contested terrains of activism, litigation, and scholarship and have come up against the disparate views of criminalization as necessary to protect women from violence, versus criminalization as compounding women’s potential risks for violence. Through the example of Canadian feminist jurisprudence in R v Bedford, wherein the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the endangerment of women as resulting from the criminalization of sex work, I explore the liminal space following this decision, and how regressive legislation was introduced to re-entrench carceralism in the breach of a seeming feminist victory. My focus is on how carceral feminism continues to occupy the liminal space as a force of colonial violence, further endangering Indigenous women. I draw linkages between several violent murders of street-involved Indigenous women and the severing of allyship among feminists, sex workers, and Indigenous women over the potential decriminalization of sex work. Finally, I suggest that opposition to the decriminalization of sex work is successfully argued by an emerging force of carceral feminism: neo-abolitionist feminists who have appropriated a politics of abolition and, yet, may have deepened carceralism in the lives of Indigenous women.

scholarly journals The Economic Consequences of Decriminalizing Sex Work in Washington, DC—A Conceptual Model

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Amanda Srsic ◽  
Katarzyna Dubas-Jakóbczyk ◽  
Ewa Kocot
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Tax Revenue ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Income Tax Revenue

(1) Under repressive policies, sex workers are at disproportionate risk for violence and sexually transmitted infections. The decriminalization of sex work provides increased social and health benefits to both sex workers and society. This is the first research that complements human rights-based messages with a quantifiable economic impact of such a law and a model for future calculations. (2) This research assesses the potential economic consequences of decriminalizing sex work in the District of Columbia (DC) in three areas: (A) income tax revenue, (B) criminal justice system savings, and (C) health sector savings (due to averted cases of violence, HIV, gonorrhea, and herpes). (3) An economic model is developed and utilized based on data from a literature search and agency records. (4) Decriminalizing sex work in DC will generate USD5348.68 per sex worker and USD2.53 per client annually, plus USD20,118.48 in criminal justice system savings a year. Per sex worker, USD5058.08 will be gained from income tax revenue, and USD290.60 will be generated through health sector savings (USD274.65, 0.02, 15.64, and 0.29 from averted cases of violence, HIV, gonorrhea, and herpes, respectively). Per client, decriminalization will generate USD0.05, 2.32, and 0.16 from averted cases of HIV, gonorrhea, and herpes, respectively, or USD8462.35 annually, after considering the total number of clients. Estimates are reported in 2020 USD. (5) The potential economic impact of decriminalizing sex work is widespread. The presented model, in conjunction with a rights-based foundation, should urgently be used by advocates, sex workers, decision makers, and other researchers.

Sexual health principles and the procurement of sexual services: evidence of the interface between sexual health and criminal justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-157
Author(s):  
Philip Birch ◽  
Doug Braun-Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sexual Health ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sexual Services ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between sexual health principles and the procurement of sexual services. Most that has been written about sex work has been done so from the perspective of deviancy; in contrast, recent work examining the practice of sex work has explored and evidenced how emotional and intimacy needs are met through procurement. Recognising the conventional aspects of procuring sexual services, this paper seeks to examine and understand this social practice through applying Braun-Harvey and Vigorito’s (2015) six principles of sexual health. Design/methodology/approach Based on a mixed method approach, this paper presents findings from a survey consisting of a sample of 309 men who procure sexual services and 20 interviews from a sub-sample of the men who were surveyed and female sex workers who provide such services. Findings The findings illustrate the reasons for men’s procurement of sexual services, which corroborate with the accounts of women who sell the services and reflect how the procurement of sexual services align with principles of sexual health, which, in turn, challenge the stigma of buying sex. Practical implications The practical implications of this study are: provision of examining and understanding sex work through the principles of sexual health; provision of a framework to examine and understand sex work in a less stigmatising way; support for the growth of sexual health and criminal justice research; and provision of a platform for further research examining sexual health, sex work and decriminalisation. Originality/value This study is unique as it brings together principles of sexual health as a tool for examining the procurement of sexual services, a practice that is demonised in many parts of the globe. A consequence of this study is its presentation of a novel understanding for the social practice of procurement that aides in both challenging the stigmatisation and criminalisation of sex work.

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