The Sex Workers’ Rights Movement: A fight for bodily autonomy
By: Sarah Fingerhood
Tags: Sex Work, Sex, Activism, Social Justice, Labor

Introduction

The sex workers’ rights movement is a movement fighting to decriminalize sex work and for the autonomy, recognition, and protection of sex workers as it is a community that for has suffered from mistreatment, high rates of violence, and social stigmatization. This movement has no definitive beginning. Sex work has been a facet of society and interwoven into history for as long as we can remember, even biblical stories such as Rahab and the Israelis in the Book of Joshua include sex workers. In 1969, a trans-gender, Latina, sex-worker named Sylvia Riveria was one of the first activists to throw a brick at police during the Stonewall Riots. She was later denied the ability to speak at rallies because “the crowd didn’t want to hear from a transgender sex worker” (NSWP). In 1972, French prostitutes tried and failed to occupy the Église Saint-Nizier in Lyon, France, but three years later, were successful and their protest against repression and state abuse gained international attention. Today, massive rallies, protests, and events are organized every year in order to advocate against the criminalization of sex work and its’ unjust repercussions. In between events, groups like Decrim NY, COYOTE (Call of Your Tired Old Ethics), Desiree Alliance, the NSWP (Global Network of Sex Work Project), and SWOP (Sex Workers Outreach Project), work tirelessly to draft bills, raise awareness, fundraise, and support sex workers.

In 1995, New South Wales Australia became the first state to decriminalize sex work, ensuring the removal of “criminal and administrative penalties that apply specifically to sex work, creating an enabling environment for sex workers’ health and safety” (Open Society Foundation). The NSW government actively collaborated with the Australian Prostitutes Collective (APC), a group founded in 1983 in response to mounting anti-sex work sentiments. The APC’s effort began in 1979 “with the removal of penalties for street-based sex workers,” and in 1995, accomplished the decriminalization of brothels (Aroney & Croft 51). The NSW government formed the Select Committee to deliberate and summarize their recommendation regarding decriminalizing sex work into the Final Report. Following this, in 2003, New Zealand passed the New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act (PRA), which fully decriminalized sex work for any citizen over 18 years old and guarantees sex workers their employment and human rights (Fraser). In a review five-years after the introduction of the PRA, studies found that “the sex industry had not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalization of the sex industry have not been experienced…on the whole, the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously” (Fraser).

Since then, countries like Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Canada, Northern Ireland, France, Ireland, and most recently Israel, have adopted a different approach to regulating sex work termed the “Nordic Model.” This model assumes that all sex work is violence and aims to “eradicate sex work both in the short term, via criminalization and fines for buying sex, and in the long term, by creating an understanding of sex work as inherently harmful to both the individual and society” (NWSP). It operates through focusing on ending the demand for sex work by punishing the buyers of sex, but not the sellers or the act itself. Many sex workers find this model harmful because it still puts sex workers at risk by driving the industry underground, maintaining stigmaa, and refuting sex workers’ autonomy and ability to consent. Policies like this fall under the umbrella of “protectionist policies,” which aim to rescue sex workers from their industry rather than acknowledge their rights as autonomous laborers.

The Issues:

A Neo-Liberal, Capitalist System

The discussion of sex workers’ rights is settled in a much larger critique of a neoliberal, capitalist society that is responsible for the neglect and abuse of workers. The rhetoric of “sex work as work” and demands for “the right to work, to work safely, and the sociocultural struggle to refute stereotypes” (Jackson 28), ground the sex workers’ rights movement in a “rights-based framework.” While opposition to sex work currently aims to protect people, and especially women, from being economically coerced into selling their body, a capitalist critique “illustrates how criminalization and poverty are social problems that need intervention,” not sex work (Jackson 38). This theory stems from the Marxist critique of the “silent compulsion of economic relations,” in which all “labor is coercion” (Berg 694). Similarly, sex work activists advocated against “sex-work exceptionalism” by asserting “commercial sex is not exploitative because of anything unique to sex,” but rather, “it is exploitative because it is labor under capitalism” (Berg 694). Thus, the demands sex workers seek regarding access to healthcare and protection from violence are critiques on how a capitalist system treats its workforce.

A core tenant of the capitalist consumption contract is the notion that “purchasing a thing or service entitles the consumer to ignore the labor required to produce it” (Berg 710). In sex work, the lines between private and commercial sex are purposely blurred because a sex worker’s job demands that they “create the illusion that [they’re] not working (Berg 709). The pressure for sex workers to present as if what happens on screen “just happens to be filmed while [they] participate in [their] usually daily activities of acrobatic sex with a lover,” has significant, negative effects on helping viewers and policymakers “understand [their] efforts to form a union” (Berg 710). Therefore, a rights-based framework, which situates the sex work movement within larger labor rights discussions, exposes further hinderances for the movement to garner public support.

The worker’s protection against capitalist structures is the formation of unions, class-consciousness building, and collective demand. However, “self-employment… is outside the ambit of labor protection and collective bargaining” because “the absence of a shared employer [prevents] institutional arrangements for unionization” and “the lack of recognition of the work [sex workers] undertake [precludes] access to both labor and social protections” (Hardy & Cruz 246). Therefore, previous models for labor movements must be reconfigured to fit the unique distribution of sex workers’ workplace environments.

2. Operating Within a Feminist Framework

In the 1970s, the sex workers’ rights movement coincided with second wave feminism, which adopted issues regarding sexuality, family, workplace, reproductive rights, and other forms of inequalities. The second wave of feminism also began to critique larger, systemic issues of sexism include the patriarchy, domestic violence, abuse against women, rape culture, and the objectification and sexualization of women’s bodies. Maalik, a black queer man with experience in the sex industry, highlights the cross-over between second wave feminism and sex work as “…the issue is not really being about sex or the selling of sex, but about the real, serious cultural and social problems that people have with women having agency [and] their bodies” (Jackson 36). Although not all sex workers are women, many feminist theories remain relevant to the diverse identities within the sex work community who are all afflicted by regulations of the body and mainstream stereotypes of prostitutes that influence policy.

Second wave feminism gave rise to theories of consciousness-raising like “standpoint theory,” which dictates that “knowledge is socially situated, and marginalized standpoints offer epistemic advantages” (Aroney & Croft 56). Standpoint theory helped lead to the recognition of sex workers’ similar social positioning and identifying the “whore stigma,” which posits that “any woman attempting economic initiative, and especially women who do so through sexual labor, will experience strong social disapproval” (Jackson 36). In the context of feminism, the whore stigma was merely another example of the patriarchy’s attempt to regulate and narrow the confines of how women should behave sexually and economically (Jackson 36). The whore stigma also exemplified the two-fold bind that sex workers face: (1) that there is an appropriate display of sexual identity for women, which sex work transgresses, and (2) women should be limited in their capabilities to become economic players. These examinations of women’s limited economic and social freedom exposed how “capitalism has always relied on the affective, socially reproductive paid and unpaid labor of women in the home and community” (Hardy & Cruz 245–246). This pattern of simultaneously depending on, but not recognizing women’s labor is reproduced in the legalization of pornography, but criminalization of prostitution, which then allows “white males to sell women’s bodies but does not allow women to sell their bodies themselves” (Jenness 412).

Nevertheless, there is a division within the women’s movement between feminists who support sex work and those who do not. The opposition believes that sex work contributes to heteronormative gender roles that continue to relegate women to realms of objectification and sexualization. Anti-sex work feminists view the industry and its’ workers as sexual slaves who are victimized, abused, and controlled by the patriarchy. Although there is dissent over in what ways sex work is a feminist issue, it still remains that sex work is inextricably tied to women’s issues, especially discussions regarding a capitalist systems’ regulation of the sexual body.

The Problems

With an understanding of the previous theories around capitalist systems and their impact on gendered labor in mind, the sex workers’ rights movement has organized behind a few key efforts including decriminalization, reducing stigmas, legitimizing sex work as work, and upholding civil rights in the face of disproportional rates of violence.

Seeking Legitimate Recognition

Sex work activists campaign endlessly for the recognition of sex work as legitimate labor in order to create reform that accurately reflects the community’s needs. Historically, policymakers “[speak] for and about sex workers, rather than being informed by the lived experiences of sex workers and the kind of reforms that sex workers want and need” (Aroney & Croft 52). Most policy regarding sex workers portrays the community as “inert, helpless objects to whom men do an endless number of things” (Jenness 413). If sex work was legitimized as labor this could change wide-spread perspectives of sex workers as autonomous rather than victimized and therefore enable them to be considered valuable voices to inform future policy towards decriminalizing.

Without being viewed as legitimate laborers or referenced as experts during policy making, sex workers are subjected to harmful policies intended to “protect” sex workers and treat them as victims. Many activists conclude that “the neoliberal politics of protection are less about protection of individual rights and more so about the abilities of the state and state-sanctioned actors to police gender and class” (Jackson 29). Sex workers oppose protectionist policy like “end demand” which the state frames as a “strategy to promote gender equity and combat trafficking through eradicating sex work,” without targeting or criminalizing sex workers. (NWSP) However, end-demand actually serves to maintain victim-frames, “define sexual labor itself as a form of violence against women” (Jackson 30) and make “women more vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and exploitation.” (NWSP) Presently, “sex work activists fear [that] being labeled victims effectively silences their voices” and limits their ability to participate in drafting policy (Jackson 34). The legitimization of sex work could enable sex workers to enter the mainstream media as experts in their own field, to inform effective policy that creates safe and healthy workspaces, and advocate for decriminalization.

2. Destigmatize Sex Work

The sex workers’ rights movement is working to garner greater social acceptance for sex workers in order to decrease rates of “public harassment, rape, violence, denial of healthcare, denial of protection by and under law, and denial of alternative job opportunities” (Jenness 406). Stigmatization creates an “invisibility” of workers and clients, which sex worker and activist Mirha-Soleil Ross claims is “perhaps the political missing link to the obtainment of prostitutes’ rights” (Berg 70). The “whore stigma” has limited “people’s ability to mobilize, both because it is ‘discrediting’ to other political actors and because it limits workers’ ability to speak publicly (and therefore ‘out’ themselves) as sex workers” (Hardy & Cruz 248). With majority of the industry pushed into the shadows, a vacuum is created that allows outsiders to take control of crafting a narrative of the sex work industry. The result is policies, like end-demand, that do not reflect the needs of the industry and were crafted without consent or input from those affected.

Many sex work activists in the United States believe the stigmatization and criminalization of sex work stems from American Puritan roots that informs a current sex culture and a “fascination with intimacy as private, sacred, and uncommodifiable” (Berg 697). Current policy reflects this traditional moralism and reproduces stigma through policy that “positions sex workers not only as ‘other’ and not like us, but a toxin to be eliminated from the social body” (Aroney & Croft 51). This outward rejection of citizenship invites public disrespect towards sex workers and ultimately causes disproportionate rates of violence and harassment.

3. Uphold Civil Rights

The criminalization, delegitimization, and stigmatization of sex work denies sex workers their civil rights by limiting professional opportunity, social acceptance, and protection by and under the law. COYOTE, a sex workers’ rights organization, spoke out against issues of police abuse by claiming, “police harassments of prostitutes, not illicit sex, makes prostitution problematic” (Jenness 407). Even today this problem persists as in 2016 more than a dozen Oakland police officers were involved in a sex scandal with an underage sex work who, after escaping an abusive pimp, ran to a nearby police car and was taken advantage of rather than helped (Albarazi). This instance is only indicative of a larger trend of police abusing sex workers’ status as criminals to elicit demands of personal pleasure. Activist organizations like DecrimNY are working to repeal laws like the “Walking While Trans” bill in New York, which unfairly lead to the arrests of transgender folks for wearing skirts, carrying condoms or loitering for the purposes of prostitution. The sex workers’ rights movement is attempting to prevent further injustice, violence and protect both sex workers and their civil liberties through decriminalizing the industry.

Campaign Tactics to Address Problems

The sex workers’ rights movement has used a range of communication tactics in order to progress towards decriminalizing the industry and address issues of illegitimacy of the industry, stigmatize of sex work, and abuse of civil rights. In recent years, the sex workers’ rights movement has generated significant and inspiring headway as politicians have begun to vocalize support, add decriminalization to their platforms, and champion bills that sex workers support. In 2019, bills were introduced to the New York and Washington, D.C. Senate that were “the most comprehensive sex work decriminalization measure in the country” (Grant). The bill in New York was helped drafted by DecrimNY and is supported by state senator Julia Salazar, senator Jessica Ramos, and assembly members Catalina Cruz, Ron Kim, Yuh-Line Niou, and Dan Quart (Grant). Part of this bill aims to repeal the “walking while trans” bill and removes other penalties associated with adults buying and selling sex. In 2018, when Salazar was campaigning with decriminalization on her platform, “sex workers in Brooklyn and Queens turned out for her in significant numbers, throwing pizza parties in packed bars, and going door-to-door to tell voters why Salazar had their support” (Grant).

Solidify a Common-Base

The first goal in advocating for decriminalization of the sex work industry is consciousness-raising and coalition-building in order to forge a united front that represents the collective needs of the community and demand change from the establishment. COYOTE, an activist group founded in San Francisco in 1973, uses methods of local out-reach and protection of members to foster a sense of reliability, loyalty, and care between workers. COYOTE provides sex workers with community benefits through “numerous services for prostitutes, including a hotline for prostitutes, immediate legal assistance for prostitutes who had been arrested, suitable clothing for prostitutes making court appearances, and classes on survival skills for prostitutes in jail” (Jenness 407). These tools not only help individuals fight back against an unjust system but was also generate community support. Through newsletters, meetings, and rallies, sex worker activists encouraged the proliferation of diverse sex worker narratives and “sex workers became increasingly aware that their individual predicaments were all too common” (Aroney & Croft 56). This process of collective recognition and acknowledgment of a shared social place enables sex workers to identify their issues as systemic and widespread rather than individual, isolated abuses.

Similarly, AMMAR, a sex workers’ advocacy group in Argentina, practiced tactics to collectivize and build an “intimate union” that was based on shared standpoint perspectives on society and their identities not just as workers, but as the marginalized (Hardy & Cruz 246). AMMAR fostered intimacy through speaking with sex workers about their personal lives before offering “condoms, lubricant, and the latest leaflet or information about legal issues and campaigns” (Hardy & Cruz 250–251). They also “invited women to workshops, parties, and other events [in order to] speak to them about their rights as workers, women, and citizens” (Hardy & Cruz 250–251). One AMMAR member noted how, “you meet all the girls that you never see, because the police always disperse us” (Hardy & Cruz 252). The community efforts of AMMAR is a form of “affective organizing” that results in strong sense of familial belonging and solidarity. AMMAR bestows upon each woman working in the street the “status of compeñera,” to signify that all of them are “worthy of solidarity and to occupy a place in the emergent shared class identity” (Hardy & Cruz 252). These practices have transformed the local sex industry community into one of companionship and care rather than hostility and competition. AMMAR and other activist organizations emphasize efforts to unite individuals in order to foster strong bonds that raise moral, ensure loyalty, and strengthen the base of the movement for the cause.

2. Legitimize Sex Workers and the Movement

By educating, promulgating, and working across movements, the sex workers’ rights movement have used the rights-based framework to influence public perception of sex workers as legitimate workers. Activists have attempted to position sex workers as experts in their field by generating primary research and educational sources that accurately depict the realities of sex work. Bound, Not Gagged (BnG) is “one of the very few multi-authored blogs used by and for sex workers,” and helps mitigate sex workers’ unequal access to mainstream media (Feldman 244). BnG provides a platform with the protection of the Internet’s anonymity that allows sex workers to “collectively deliberate issues and events, share diverse sex worker experience and perspectives, and [provide] a space for challenging dominant public and political understandings of their work and industry” (Feldman 258).

Moreover, groups like the Australian Prostitutes Collective (APC) in NSW was instrumental in the decriminalization of sex work there as they sourced and provided ample research that informed the Select Committee’s decision. The government’s Final Report included on almost every page “quotations from individual workers and the APC, [or] primary research produced by the APC” (Aroney & Croft 57). However, the previous role that the APC assumed during the AIDS crisis is what officially legitimized their status and undeniably expedited the decriminalization of sex work in Australia. While in the U.S., the AIDS crisis led to increased social control and stigmatization of sex workers, the NSW government responded by funding the APC to task sex workers with educating clients and the industry on safe sex (Aroney & Croft 56). This decision not only led to safer conditions, but also legitimated the APC and funded their ability to increase outreach, media presences, and garner necessary resource to support decriminalization. The APC used the funds to appoint staff, rent premises “where those in the industry could attend for legal advice and support,” develop trainings, skills, and gather data to educate the public (Aroney & Croft, 56). Groups in the U.S. have recently attempted to assume similar positions of expertise and primary sources of research as in 2017, COYOTE Rhode Island “conducted the first national sex worker-led survey of trafficking and the sex industry in the United States in collaboration with the Sex Workers Outreach Project Behind Bars” (COYOTE).

3. Destigmatize Sex Work

The sex workers’ rights movement has facilitated numerous campaigns with the intent of destigmatizing their work in order to foster pride within their community, provide powerful counternarratives to dominant mainstream media, and increase visibility by emboldening workers to openly speak on their experiences. An important part of destigmatizing the sex work industry is selecting and using purposeful language that instills new values and meaning to define themselves and their work. For instance, in 1979 Carol Leigh aka Scarlot Harlot coined the term ‘sex work’ in order to “prioritize the work of the provider rather than the customer” and further ground the movement in a labor rights and work framework (NSWP). In the context of a capitalist society, questions regarding labeling something “work” or not, “are not simply semantic, but determine access to worker protection, benefits, and the right and ability to organize” (Berg 698). For many sex workers, the use of specific language has been a seminal strategy to provide a new collective identity surrounding their class and work in order to help unlearn internalized stigmas and prevent further isolation of women’s experiences. In Argentina, studies showed that “the adoption of self-identification as workers has had an important role in raising self-esteem, self-respect, and for contribution to the change in the affective and emotional lives of many” (Hardy & Cruz 256). These affective, collective identities have proven powerful to unite workers, provide a sense of community, and unite shared experiences in order to demand change.

In San Francisco in October of 1974, COYOTE hosted the first Hookers’ Ball, a night dedicated to honoring the “Trick of the Year,” fundraising, and drawing attention to the organization. The annual event was marketed as “the social event of the year for heterosexuals, bisexuals, trisexuals, nonsexuals, homosexuals, and other minorities who feel discriminated against” and attracted the attention of media and local politicians. (NWSP) As an attendant recalled, this was a “very important part of sex positive history because whores are at the forefront of this movement… the parties were remarkable events because sex workers were coming out and making themselves public” (NWSP). For sex workers attending the Hookers’ Ball, COYOTE’s campaign against stigmatization represented “deviants ‘coming out all over’ not in acts of confession, but rather to profess and advocate the lives they live, along with the worth and values of those lives expressed” (Jenness 416). Similarly, in Australia in 2015 the #FacesOfProstitution campaign circulated through Twitter in which thousands of sex workers revealed their faces in order to demonstrate how “there is no singular story or person to present the varied and complex experience of all sex workers” (Middleweek 343). When activist organizations destigmatize sex work, they embolden workers to “come out” and therefore, disrupt stereotypes of what or who is a sex worker.

When the APC was pushing for the decriminalization of sex work in New South Wales, they pressured the government to provide amnesty on penalties for prostitution in order to allow sex workers to freely discuss reform, organize, and “reduce the traditional power difference between sex worker and client” (Aroney & Croft 57). The APC convinced the government that their voice was valuable in a larger discussion regarding decriminalization because they were “in a key position to offer the world some of the most important analyses in prostitution ever produced in this hitherto shadowy subculture” (Aroney & Croft 55). The activist group continued to be “savvy in representing its research findings to media [by] selectively choosing to present new data that challenged myths and preconceptions about sex workers” (Aroney & Croft 58). Overall, the APC assumed a legitimate role in the effort to educate the public on sex work and sex safety and therefore help deconstruct stigmas of sex workers being destructive to or separate from mainstream society.

4. Advocate for Civil Rights Issues

The sex workers’ rights movement used rhetoric, participation, and awareness-raising of intersectional issues in order to ground their movement within larger, parallel discussions of civil rights abuses. The use of a rights-based framework links the sex workers’ rights movement to those of undocumented immigrants and contingent laborers in the U.S. as they “struggle for both labor rights and basic social rights that humanize them and their struggles” (Jackson 40). Moreover, sex work activist groups today, like DecrimNY, list the Immigrant Defense Project and the New York Immigrant Coalition as partner organizations on their websites (DecrimNY). In 2019, the COYOTE Rhode Island fact sheet stated one of their main accomplishments for the year was translating and transcribing “know your rights” sheets for migrants alongside supporting incarcerated sex workers and providing medical services (COYOTE).

In the 1970s, COYOTE and its affiliates found a home in the second-wave feminist discourse, thereby solidifying a “genuinely alternative conception of prostitution” as a women’s issue regarding autonomy over the body (Jenness 409). With a feminist platform, the sex workers’ rights movement was able to draw awareness to and gain visibility for their issue on large-scale, international stages like the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women and the United Nations Conference on Women held in Copenhagen. They also supported and helped to secure public funding for abortions, and effectively lobby for the passage the Equal Rights Amendment alongside other marginalized groups (Jenness 411). Through these intersectional and multilateral campaigns, the sex workers’ rights movement effectively unified sex workers’ and women’s issues to declare, “an attack against prostitutes is an attack on all women” (Jenness 411).

The sex workers’ rights movement also has strong ties and connection to the LGBQT movement, as represented by the coalition between COYOTE and ACT UP during the AIDS crisis. The state of California passed two bills that aimed to put prostitutes behind bars who tested positive for HIV and in response, ACT UP and COYOTE joined to protest “Speaker of the House Willie Brown and other politicians and lobbyists in Sacramento” (Jenness 415). In the late 80s, COYOTE devoted many resources to educating, covering, and advocating for or against laws that related to the AIDS epidemic. In New South Wales, the APC collaborated with Sydney’s Gay Center to form the Task Group on Prostitution in order to strengthen the weight of their research submissions to the Select Committee (Aroney & Croft 57). As previously mentioned, the government responded by tasking the APC with the responsibility of educating the public, clients, and the community on safe sex. Sex workers’ groups are stilly highly intertwined with LGBQT issues, such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project that campaigns against the intersection of the for-profit prison complex, mass incarceration, and trans rights (SRLP).

As sex workers suffer from disproportionate rates of violence, police harassment, and civil rights violations, the movement has focused on garnering legal protection, coalition-building with other civil rights groups and highlight police misconduct. Through previous efforts of collectivizing and raising awareness, sex workers have exposed wide-spread police misconduct and elevated these scandals in the media. In the 1970s, most anti-sex work laws targeted sex workers and not their customers, so “suits were filed on the grounds that it [was] an invasion of privacy, overly vague, and restricts freedom of expression, and that the state has no compelling interest in regulating sexual behavior in consenting adults… therefore, its selective enforcement violates the right to equal protection” (Jenness 407). Through education and research efforts, COYOTE showed that incidence of venereal disease was at least as high among people 20–24 years old as among sex workers and therefore successfully lifted a “mandatory three-day venereal disease quarantine imposed by the San Francisco Police Department on prostitutes” (Jenness 408). COYOTE’s annual Hooker Ball also presented an award to the “Vice Cop of The Year” to call out the unethical methods of the San Francisco Police Department, including entrapment of sex workers and having sex with sex workers as evidence (Jenness 407). COYOTE brought attention to these issues and pursued their change with rallying efforts like picketing the Hyatt Regency Hotel for “being finky and providing vice-coppers with free rooms to entrap their sisters” (Jenness 407). Current activist organizations are still petitioning and advocating against police malpractice and harassment like the “Walking While Trans” bill in New York. Another group, INCITE!, focuses on protecting women of color in sex work against state violence and has collected personal stories, called to attention violence, built strong national networks, and advocated for legal rights and representation in order to prevent and outlaw state-sanctioned violence. (INCITE!)

Establishment Response

The establishment has been divided on its response to sex work as recently, numerous Democrat politicians have begun to close the divide between policymakers and sex workers by fostering discussion between the groups. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who supports decriminalization, has met with sex workers in the Jackson Heights, an area she represents (Grant). Moreover, two-days after Decrim NY’s rally for sex workers in 2019, California senator and then Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris declared her support for decriminalization (Crabapple). Although not representative of the establishment or their power, large international NGOs also have the ability to sway public opinion with their objectivity and expertise. Groups like Amnesty International and The Lancet (2014) medical journal have come out in support of decriminalization and their stance helps legitimate and support the movement for sex workers’ rights.

Nevertheless, the movement also combats backlash from two main sources: (1) the government that still enforces the criminalization of sex work and (2) anti-sex work activist organizations attempting to persuade the government and public opinion. These anti-sex work groups often have incredible amounts of funding, power, and lobbying leverage in major cities. These groups mainly work to equate sex work to trafficking through fearmongering, misleading statistics, and highlighting a narrow set of sex worker experiences. For example, in 2011, actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher spearheaded an anti-sex trafficking campaign titled, “real men don’t buy girls” (Jackson 36). Sex workers critiqued this campaign for how it framed all sex workers as victims and disavows, “sex work as a service economy,” thereby circumscribing any conversations regarding the agency of sex workers (Jackson 36). Similarly, Rashida Jones helped produce the well-known Netflix documentary “Hot Girls Wanted” that aimed to expose the abusive and coercive nature of the pornography industry. Again, sex workers spoke out about how anti-sex work advocates often cherry pick a few voices and horror stories that do not represent the whore industry or its workers. These campaigns against sex-work culminate in bills like FOSTA/SESTA, which passed in 2018 and were twin bills proposed as an effort to deter sex trafficking networks, but only “stripped sex workers of the ability to advertise or seek support online by making websites criminally liable for their posting” (Crabapple.) Besides celebrity intervention, widespread advertisements, research, and protests that enforce moral proscriptions and critiques of sex work are proliferated by the religious evangelicals or feminist organizations, like NOW-NYC and the international Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Government policy has continued to represent or reproduce these anti-sex work agendas through harmful bills that are presented as anti-sex trafficking, but in practice target autonomous, consenting sex workers. Last March in New York, these groups staged a small rally at New York City Hall to protest the increase of Democratic politicians, like Tiffany Cabán, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jessica Ramos, who have vocalized support for decriminalization.

Through emotional and affective campaigns that conflate sex work and sex trafficking, the anti-sex work movement has effectively and severely altered public perception that the decriminalization of sex work is a prerequisite or invitation for wide-spread sex-trafficking. The anti-sex work movement has not only limited sex workers voices in mainstream media, but also reduced their representation to two stereotypes: (1) the bruised and battered victims in need of protection or (2) the “happy hooker” that is “thrilled with their sex work and have no suggestions on ways to improve” (Jackson 29). An analysis of Canadian media stories from 1980 to 2004 showed that “risk, enslavement, and entrapment remain important prisms through which sex work is viewed from a shifting gender lens” (Jackson 30). During the #FacesOfProstitution online campaign, the hashtag was quickly co-opted by anti-sex workers who displayed images of bruised, battered, or dead sex workers in order to undermine the intention of the protest (Middleweek 355). A difficulty for the sex workers’ rights movement is how the rhetoric of victimizing sex workers is extremely emotional, whereas a “workers’ rights framework may not evoke the same level of emotion” (Jackson 34). Most mainstream media stories that reproduce stereotypes about sex workers only address “the opinions of academic or media ‘experts,’ while overlooking the experiential knowledge of sex workers in the activist community” (Feldman 252).

The current criminalization of sex work severely limits the movement because outing oneself can subjugate someone to surveillance, tracking methods, and imprisonment. Blogs like Bound, Not Gagged or social media that connect sex workers can be used by the state to “suppress political activism… through surveillance and profiling of protestors on sites like Twitter” (Feldman 246). These intimidation factors prevent sex workers from congregating, sharing their common experiences, or physically rallying against the establishment. Moreover, high rates of police abuse and assault contribute to growing fear and distrust of law enforcement.

Assessment of Current & Future State of Movement

Wins & Losses

Although, not yet decriminalized in the majority of the world, the movement has made significant progress towards decriminalization through garnering the support of politicians, advocating to international NGOs, and becoming a major platform in upcoming elections. While the movement was successful in gaining the backing of U.S. politicians like Kamala Harris, she still has supported the Nordic Model, which sex workers adamantly oppose. Nevertheless, there has been more conversation than ever between policymakers and sex workers, which could lead to desired change. For instance, COYOTE RI just helped pass the B5254 bill that will create a study commission to examine health and safety impacts of sex work laws in Rhode Island (COYOTE). Although in 2008, San Francisco did not pass a bill that would decriminalize sex work, more than 10 years later, Governor Gavin Newsome has signed bills, like SB233 that target police harassment of sex workers and were drafted and supported by SWOP. The movement has suffered wins and losses over the many years, but the general direction has resulted in more support, attention, and legitimate consideration than ever before.

2. Critiques

Like most social justice movements, the sex workers’ rights movement has a tendency to overrepresent “white, middle-class, cis-gendered women” as the foci of the movement (Berg 700). This presentation is apparent in campaigns that attempt to shift the stigma and isolation sex workers experience by adopting a new collective identity that refutes the label of prostitution by mobilizing “the emotive identities of mothers and daughters to elicit sympathy for women in the sex industry” (Hardy & Cruz 255). This strategy serves to maintain the link between motherhood and sex worker, therefore relying upon gender roles to garner sympathy from the public. Many sex work activists that challenge this type of campaigning argue that they shouldn’t have to “prove [they’re] worth sympathy” or have to prove their humanity to the public (Habib 26). Similarly, the emphasis on the rights-based framework also subjects the movement to critiques around “[locating] personhood in one’s contributions to systems of value production” (Berg 696). While refuting a victimizing framework and arguing for their autonomy, some sex work activists in the future want to move away from binaries between “choice versus exploitation” in order to make space for more structure critique of the capitalist economy (Berg 702).

3. Recommendation

The sex workers’ rights movement is a symptom of larger issues regarding the treatment and exploitation of workers in a neoliberal, capitalist system and especially the state’s regulation of bodily autonomy, sexual identity, and economic freedom. These issues have been decisive for a long time as sex work activists advocate for the decriminalization of sex work to protect citizens and anti sex work activists push back with the conflation of sex-trafficking and moral proscriptions. The sex workers’ rights movement has divided to conquer issues of lack of recognition, stigmatization, and civil rights abuses. They have done so through solidifying and unifying, calling awareness, raising funds, pressuring politicians, and being loud about the abuses they have experienced. Moreover, the movement has highlighted how sex work is a deeply intersectional issue, touching the lives of the LGBQT community, women’s issues, immigrants, police brutality, and more. While they have refused to remain silent, even in the face of establishment abuse, intimidation, and denial, the sex workers’ rights movement still has much to go before decriminalization.

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