Molly Smith (4)

To say that prostitution is work is not to say it is good work, or that we should be uncritical of it. To be better than poverty or a lower paid job is an abysmally low bar, especially for anyone who claims to be part of any movement towards liberation. People who sell or trade sex are among the world's least powerful people, the people often forced to do the worst jobs. But that is precisely why anti-prostitution campaigners should take seriously the fact that sex work is a way people get the resources they need. [...]
People with relatively little are right to be fearful when their means of survival is taken away. British miners in the 1980s didn't strike on the basis that mining was the most wonderful job - they were simply correct in their belief that, once mining was taken away from them, Thatcher's government would abandon their communities to desperate poverty. Likewise, few sex workers would object if you sought to abolish the sex industry by ensuring that they got the resources they need without having to sell sex.

Hard-right politicians are keen to enact anti-trafficking agendas. [...] Theresa May is positioning the 2015 Modern Slavery Act (passed when she was home secretary) as central to her image and legacy. Uncritical use of the term trafficking is doing the ideological work required for these contradictions to 'make sense'; it hides how anti-migrant policies produce the harm that we call trafficking, enabling anti-migrant politicians to posture as anti-trafficking heroes even as they enact their anti-migrant policies.

Those who advocate for the Nordic model are correct that the client benefits from a huge power imbalance; what they miss is that client criminalisation worsens this power imbalance. This can seem surprising; as human rights lawyer Wendy Lyon writes, 'The criminalisation of only one party to a transaction might intuitively be expected to benefit the other party.' However, this overlooks that crucial fact - which cannot be repeated enough! - that the sex worker needs to sell sex much more than the client 'needs' to buy it. This 'asymmetry of need' is essential to understanding the actual impact of the Nordic model. [...] [The sex worker] will take on the burden of [the client's] need for safety from arrest, which will entail compromising any safety strategies she might otherwise seek to deploy. After all, he is safer from arrest when he is more anonymous, and when their rendezvous is more clandestine. [...] She needs his custom more than he needs to buy sex, right? The Norwegian government itself acknowledges that the situation for sex workers is now a 'buyer's market'.

We can work towards a more feminist world by making women less poor - but not through bolstering the patriarchal power of the carceral state. [...] When journalists write that the Nordic model 'decriminalises women who sell sex' and campaigning organisations repeat the claim that Sweden's law 'completely decriminalises all those who are prostituted', it's hard to draw any other conclusion than mainstream feminism simply doesn't count the criminalisation or deportation of mostly Black migrant sex workers in Nordic countries.

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Time and again, sex workers watch as mainstream feminist intervention and commentary neglects workplace power relations and the need to earn a living. In these analyses, forced health examinations are nothing to worry about, and making sex workers carry an ID around that reveals their real name to potential predators is fine.

Real, daily violence against sex workers happening all over the world today cannot be held up for comparison with a feminist forecast of a yet-to-happen future. Compare these concerns to the reality under prohibition, in which criminalising sex work has come nowhere near eradicating commercial sex, and violence is seen as a hazard of the job. The criminalisation of sex work and the 'messaging' flowing from it - that 'women's bodies are not for sale' - clearly has not prevented people from Stockholm to New York to Harare from selling sex. It should be obvious that the real message of criminalisation is that people who sell sex exist outside of safety, rights, or justice.