Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Behind a Bada podcast with me. Paulson, victoria and we're going to carry on reading Revolt and Prostitutes. But before I get into that, this week has been crazy for me and I do apologise. Last week we didn't read the book. That's because I got a letter saying that my case was dismissed. Now you might be asking yourself what case is this?

Speaker 1: 0:31

Well, in the previous episode of Behind the Paddle podcast, um, from this episode, I was charged with brothel keeping. I was charged with brothel keeping Me, an actual sex worker in real life in the UK, in Scotland, was charged with brothel keeping. Not only did the police, in their summary of evidence, lie about certain things, they did not do their due diligence and, yeah, it's been a year of hell for me and so, surprisingly, have that letter a month before I was meant to have a different letter telling me when I was going to be in court for these said charges. Very much was surprising and that's why I took a week off. Well, I I took a not reading revolting prostitutes off because I just wanted to relax and celebrate in some way, shape or form that I, potentially I won't be going to prison not right now, though. Not right now. Um, they could absolutely start a new investigation. They would need new evidence, but I, technically, in a way, I don't believe in free women, but I'm free for now and it's absolutely amazing and I can't believe it.

Speaker 1: 2:04

And yeah, if you want to know more, in more detail, please go listen to that episode. It is heart-wrenching. You will hear me cry because I'm reading, um, the evidence they had against me and I'm speaking from the heart and I was terrified and I still am, if I'm honest. But yeah, I, it's still unbelievable right now and to be reading Revolt and Prostitutes and to have been under that charge for a year and was out on bail and now I'm not, and with what I've done in the year that it's happened, it's crazy. So definitely, please go check that out. Please do go check that episode out, because it is a very raw episode and a real life thing that has happened to a sex worker, to a mum and to somebody who truly enjoys their job, but because of one person not liking it and the police not doing their due diligence officer, officer leroy. Um, then, yeah, this happened and I went into a deep depression and all sorts and yeah, you'll, you'll hear it in the episode. I still can't believe it, as you can hear from my voice I it's crazy. But we're still reading Before and Prostitutes the fight for sex workers rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mack, and I'm reading a real, real life sex worker who has been through shit which is crazy to think and crazy to say openly now that I was charged with brothel keeping and like I do have a criminal record now and you know we're gonna publicize it to the max, um that we can and get it out there that this does happen. I wasn't a pimp. I wasn't somebody who coerced people into doing, um, sex trafficking, like I was doing it by my own free will and having a safe space while doing it, which is illegal and that sucks. But yeah, we're gonna start. I'm so happy.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Page 204 this form of specialized support often comes from within the community. Vancouver-based organizer kerry porch says quote sex work support organizations have been supporting women to exit sex work forever and we generally do that off the side of our desk and without there being any specific funding for it. End quote. This is not a burden that should be placed on sex workers and other communities. It is incumbent upon the government to fund non-judgmental support services that meet the needs of sex workers on their terms, rather than forcing solutions on them that weren't asked for or stigmatising them as lazy, damaged or sinful.

Speaker 1: 5:51

Some feminists are concerned that decriminalisation will make it harder to tackle exploitation and punish abusers. On the contrary, it is criminalisation which means that sex workers must hide from the police for fear of penalties such as arrest, eviction or deportation. Abusers know that sex workers cannot call on the state for help and are unlikely to be taken seriously in the occasional instances that we do. The criminalization of prostitution drives violence against all women. Criminalized sex workers become a quote training ground where violent men can experiment with perpetrating violence, safe in the acknowledge that their targets are unable to protect themselves or to get justice. Having quote practiced on sex workers, such men often then move onto non-sex working women, a pattern we see in predators like Peter Sutcliffe and Adrian Bailey. Many worry that if we allow the sex industry to exist without prohibition, we are condoning it and it will proliferate. This concern arguably reveals an unspoken belief that keeping prostitution dangerous through making it illegal acts as a useful downward pressure that might otherwise be an quote unchecked tendency to sell sex Occasionally. This unspoken belief is spoken when sex workers met with the Irish Justice Minister to argue that criminalisation would make them less safe, the Minister responded by observing that sex workers' increased vulnerability to violence would at least deter women from entering the trade.

Speaker 1: 8:03

It is worth noting that the number of sex workers in New Zealand have remained stable. The quote explosion predicted in some quarters has not materialized. There is no evidence that changes to criminal law, including its removal, have a significant impact on the numbers of people who sell sex. As sex worker jenny tells researchers, I've worked illegally in other jobs. You know I've worked under the table and that sort of thing. So I guess I would say I probably have done it sex work anyway. But you know I certainly felt that because it was legal I felt more safer about it.

Speaker 1: 8:53

Nonetheless, conversations in feminist spaces become a tug of war. One anti-prostitution feminist organization comments quote there are no advantages to sending the message to men that women and girls are commodities to be bought. The disadvantages to a society that sends this message, however, are severe and very difficult to reverse. At the other end of the argument lies the unheard voice of sex workers like Pania, who speaks to the actual result of punitive quote messaging. I've had clients who have come from countries where it's illegal to be a client, and they have been on edge, scared and difficult to manage.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Whose worries, then, are to be given more weight? The relatively abstract anxieties of non-prostitute women about messaging, or the everyday practical needs of working class people who want their work to be safer? The latter choice is the essence of harm reduction. 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 relatively under-prohibitation in which criminalizing sex work has come nowhere near eradicating commercial sex and violence is seen as a hazard of the job. The criminalization of sex work and the quote 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 criminalization is that people who sell sex exist outside of safety, rights or justice.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Still, one anti-prostitution writer grapples unsuccessfully with the concept of harm reduction. Will wearing a condom reduce the impact of rape? If I quote consent to letting a man penetrate me but he doesn't give me chlamydia in the process, does that mean what happened to me is okay, that I should feel good about it, that society should turn away. Why is it that they refuse to admit that the harm of prostitution cannot be dealt with through condoms and brothels? Those asking these questions would do well to consider posing them with respect and compassion to current sex workers who've survived sexual violence or who live with HIV. They, and not those pontificating in abstract, are best placed to say whether condoms are immaterial to them during their continued time in the sex trade.

Speaker 1: 12:33

It is not a new idea to work on similar measures to mitigate immediate harms while at the same time working towards more radical solutions that target the root of the problem. Feminist campaigners protest for access to abortion, while at the same time organizing for better sex education, more money for mothers and increased access to contraception. And increased access to contraception. We fight tooth and nail for more domestic violence shelters, while at the same time working towards a world where domestic violence no longer occurs. We work towards a world without borders, while at the same time organising against specific incursions by immigration enforcement into homes, schools and hospitals. This process is perhaps slower than many anti-prostitution feminists would like.

Speaker 1: 13:38

For these commentators, nothing short of criminalization and the complete and rapid abolition of prostitution that is assumed to follow is radical enough. But to decriminalise sex work is to treat as important the immediate material safety of people who are selling sex. Material safety of people who are selling sex. In that decriminalization is a deeply radical demand, far more so than throwing the world's poorest sex workers to the wolves in an attempt to annihilate the sex industry through increased policing. A sex worker in south africa understands the far-reaching impact decriminalization will have, describing her fears as she prepares to advocate for decriminalization in a trade union meeting, she recounts I thought about all the bad things that are happening in the streets because of criminalization. What if my daughter joins the sex industry and these bad things happen to her? If I don't say these things to these people, they won't support decriminalization. And then what about my daughter? Decriminalizing sex work will not solve all the injustices of the world. That is too huge a problem for any one legislative change. But it will make people who are selling sex right now and tomorrow safer while they are doing what they need to in order to survive. That is profoundly worthwhile. As Joyce, a sex worker in New Zealand, says, quote it changed the whole street, it changed everything, so it was worth it.

Speaker 1: 15:36

Conclusion the likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. Susan Santog, each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon. If it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the non-absence of any surety that change is coming.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Audrey lord, in the autumn of 2016, the two of us and a colleague attended a feminist conference in Glasgow. A somewhat hostile but curious woman came over to speak to us. She ran an NGO, it turned out, that defended the rights of migrant women across Europe, and she wanted to talk to us about the men, the punters. Weren't they disgusting? She wanted to know how could we disagree that they should be punished. We agreed that clients are often bad, but explained that punishing them produces harms for people who sell sex. We mentioned the evictions of sex workers in Nordic countries. No-transcript women are thrown out of their houses in scandinavia. Yes, in fact. She told us. Migrant women come to her ngo complaining that they have been thrown out of flats or hotels in sweden, sometimes in the middle of the night. She continued, a note of derisation entering her voice. When that happens, I just think of myself she told us mimicking her intentions with these evicted women. I just think, look at you. At least you're not murdered. She rolled her eyes at us. We aren't asking you to love the sex industry, we certainly don't. We are asking that your disgust with the sex industry and with the men, the punters, doesn't overlook your ability to emphasise with people who sell sex.

Speaker 1: 18:12

A key struggle that sex workers face in feminist spaces is trying to move people past their sense of what prostitution symbolises to grapple with what the criminalisation of prostitution materially does to people who sell sex in these spaces see abstractions like objectification and sexualization as universally relatable every woman concerns. When we point out that the policies which flow from such discussions often lead to sex workers being evicted or deported, we are seen as raising quote niche issues or as obtusely unable to understand the quote bigger picture. We need to push our sisters to grapple with the niche questions. Nobody can build a better, more feminist world by treating sex workers' current material needs for income, for safety from eviction, for safety from immigration enforcement as trivial.

Speaker 1: 19:28

Both carceral and liberal forms of feminism are attractive because they offer seemingly easy answers to complex problems. Women's work is underpaid and undervalued. Ask for that raise. Sexual violence is endemic. Fund more cops. There's commercial sex online. Pass legislation to kick sex workers off the internet. Carceral feminism even styles itself as radical in doing so, radically uncompromising with male sexual entitlement, radically seeking to quote burn down the sex industry. Such radicalism evaporates on closer examination. Cops are not feminist.

Speaker 1: 20:22

The mainstream feminist movement is correct in identifying prostitution as a patriarchal institution. They conveniently miss that policing is too. Attempting to eradicate commercial sex through policing does not tackle patriarchy. Instead, it continues to produce harassment, arrest, prosecution, eviction, violence and poverty. For those who sell sex the Nordic model sweeps trafficking under the rug. Who sell sex? The Nordic model sweeps trafficking under the rug. Poverty and barriers to legal migration are what create vulnerability for migrants. Arresting clients and sending undocumented people home on the next flight does nothing to remedy this, although it purports to take away the power of abusers. No solution that comes in the form of increased power to the police can be a substitute for putting power in the hands of sex workers themselves.

Speaker 1: 21:30

People in the sex trade should not be the focus of the anti-trafficking movement for its leaders. Not even the staunchest anti-prostitution activist has a better incentive to tackle violence and exploitation in the sex industry than someone who's selling sex. A global alliance against traffic in women notes that this divisiveness within the field has deprived global anti-trafficking efforts of a crucial ally who could drastically improve the outcomes of the anti-trafficking response through its valuable insider knowledge of the industry, the people involved in it and the conditions of work. Prostitute activism is never given the foreground in the mainstream anti-trafficking movement and some would consider the very idea absurd. But if they were given the chance, sex workers could capably lead by example. First, do no harm.

Speaker 1: 22:41

In Myanmar, the AIDS Myanmar Association, ama AMA is the Burmese word for big sister Sees poverty and financial disempowerment as a key driver of trafficking in the sex industry, so they provide training on financial management and assistance obtaining identity cards and opening a bank account. Founding member k5 win says our dream is of a sex worker led organization for the community, with the community and done by the community. Ama is a fully sex worker led organization and we can make our own decisions based on need. We are standing by our independence from other organisations and we know best the problems and issues of our daily life as sex workers. Kila, samoan Wayer Committee.

Speaker 1: 23:56

Dmsc, a sex worker group in West Banglia, formed 33 small committees around the state called self-regulatory boards, srbs. Each committee has six sex workers along with a local counsellor and four other health and labour sector professionals. In the space of three years, more than 2,000 people in the sex trade were screened by their local SRBS, with just under 10% of them considered to be minors or unwilling adults. They were offered assistance and support to leave their situation, including being accompanied to their home by another sex worker or housed in DMSC accommodation. Other sex workers screened were provided with counselling, healthcare and the option to join peer-led community schemes designed to reduce sex workers' vulnerability. One of these is a bank run entirely for and by sex workers, which combats debt bondage by helping sex workers open accounts and save money. Borody D of DMSC comments that mainstream anti-trafficking, rescue-style interventions are simply too small in scale to be of any real use. There are organizations offering training to sex workers in stitching, sewing, candle making and so on, with which they can make only around two to three thousand rupees per month, but a sex worker today, even without a family needs needs a minimum of 5,000 rupees to live in Kultkata.

Speaker 1: 26:02

The feminist movement should be paying attention to groups like DMSC. They pose a significant threat to exploitative pimps. Only a few decades ago, the entirety of the sex work industry in Sonogachi, a large red light district, was controlled by mercenary gangs headed by Hediya or madams bargaining and union meetings. Dmsc has brought 80% of Sonogachi's brothels bosses to heel. They now abide by a fairer fee and commission system. Indian sex worker group Vesha Anyari Mukti Parishahad, which is Prostitute Injustice Liberation Council, but also known as VAMP, is coming up with similar solutions called TMS, vanta Mucti Samifis or conflict redress committees that intervene when a sex worker is being harassed or exploited in and out of the workplace. Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women observed that through the TMS process a madam, a brothel owner, raised a dispute with a pimp who tried to bring a minor to her workplace. The minor was reunited with her parents and given counselling and support in making a police referral. Meanwhile, the PIMPS details and description were shared among the TMS groups in neighbouring areas.

Speaker 1: 27:59

Thai group Empower also adopts a pragmatic approach to dealing with managers. Some, a migrant sex worker who attended their English language classes, eventually disclosed that her employer was restricting her movements, docking her wages and had confiscated her passport. She was scared to antagonize the employer by attempting to run away and leave her travel debt unpaid, as he knew where her family lived. She was also frightened of detainment or deportation and refused to make a report or identify herself as a trafficking victim to the police. She actually wished to continue doing sex work and repaying her debt, but with more freedom and flexibility in her working conditions. She asked Empower for backup in negotiating this with her boss and they successfully helped her establish a new agreement with him the same repayment scheme, but working independently elsewhere.

Speaker 1: 29:11

There is a sense among carceral feminists that justice has not been served if there are no bad guys in jail. But in a community-led approach means putting sex workers first. G-a-a-t-w comments quote. The solutions are not always obvious or conventional. In some cases, sex workers have to get creative in order to find the best first. Do no harm solution to the concrete solution. These practical and effective approaches are a world away from ill-conceived and abusive humanitarianism sometimes forced onto sex workers in the global south. For example, sex workers in Cambodia and India are regularly subjected to quote raid and rescue operations in which women seized from brothels are assigned minimum wage jobs in garment factories. Sex workers simply want to be asked what they think is best for them, rather than being forcibly rescued from the life they are trying to build for themselves. As the slogan of Cambodia's sex worker group Women's Network for Unity states quote don't talk to me about sewing machines, talk to me about workers' rights. No throwaway people.

Speaker 1: 30:45

Sex workers' rights cannot be disentangled from other rights movements. Human rights for all sex workers means tackling injustice across a broader spectrum than just prostitution law, and so decriminalization is one step on a long route. For example, as we saw in chapter the, war on drugs is a sex worker issue. If some brothel workers can take their boss to court for wage theft, but these same workers are still spending every penny of those wages on dangerous drugs that could be made cheap and safe, then our movement has much further to go. Safe, then our movement has much further to go. Likewise, as chapter three made clear, borders are a sex worker issue. Our movement's work isn't finished if the police are letting some sex workers go about their business on the stroll, but arresting and deportating their migrant colleagues. Arresting and deportating their migrant colleagues, stigma and discrimination in the wider healthcare system, too, are sex worker issues. It's going to take more than a sex worker friendly STD clinic to remedy the many other ways sex workers have been failed by racist, transphobic and ableist medical gatekeeping.

Speaker 1: 32:15

For as long as people continue to navigate the margins by selling sex, all the social issues affecting them are sex workers' rights issues. As former sex worker Janet Mock writes, quote we will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, end. Quote. These frontiers are key for sex worker activists because decriminalization alone will not, quote solve the things that marginalize people and drive them into sex work. Decriminalizing sex work will not simply make anyone less poor.

Speaker 1: 33:05

Sex work is an effective strategy for resisting poverty, but it doesn't address poverty systematically. Neither criminalizing nor decriminalizing the sex industry eradicates, for example, homelessness. The way to end homelessness is to get people into stable and affordable housing with support that's appropriate to them. What the removal of criminal law can do is help ensure that people are safer while they're doing what they need to do right now to survive. Decriminalization can also simply prevent life getting worse for sex workers, unlike all other models we have considered.

Speaker 1: 33:50

Unlike all other models we have considered, decriminalisation needs to be implemented in tandem with other vital policies that remedy the precarity of marginalised sex workers. The idea that it would work by itself is a self-serving expression of the interests of privileged sex workers whose lives would be more or less fine if they had access to labour rights in the sex industry. For them, criminalisation is the only problem. So lifting that criminalisation is enough. Just as we remind non-sex working feminists that there is more to sex workers struggle than bad clients, so too should the sex worker movement be aware that for poor sex workers, for migrant sex workers, for disabled sex workers and many more, it is not enough to overturn soliciting laws or brothel keeping laws.

Speaker 1: 34:56

Our movement must center the experiences and the activision of sex workers of color who bear the brunt of extreme interpersonal and state violence. The lives of these workers, particularly black women, are often seen as disposable. The novelist and poet Aya D Leon writes In an era where we in the US fight for the idea that black lives matter, to be black and female, african and a sex worker is to inhabit a location of deepest neglect and disregard. Whether African, african American or members of the African and Caribbean diasporas suffer from the violent alignment of radicalized poverty, societal stigma and abandonment and abuse at the hand of the police. This compounds the violence committed against them when perpetrators receive the signal that black prostitutes are nobody's priority and can be brutalized without accountability. Black sex workers continue to be incarcerated, deported and evicted simply for trying to survive.

Speaker 1: 36:21

Advocates for decriminalization must take care not to overemphasize the potential of small changes in policing. Decriminalizing sex work will not only magically end police profiting off black people. All it can do is roll back police powers in specific ways and give sex workers some recourse when police overstep those powers. We should be wary of harsh bylaws that effectively recriminalise sex workers, devolving power back to police officers by a different route, where police still retain power over sex workers via routes other than prostitution law, for example, the prosecution of migrants or those in possession of drugs they abuse it, of migrants or those in possession of drugs they abuse it. Sex worker advocates need not feel defensive about this realistic view of decriminalization.

Speaker 1: 37:19

The limits of legal reform are not unique to sex work. Spousal rape law reform has not ended rape in marriage, nor has access to legal abortion achieved complete reproductive justice. These measures are just the necessary first steps on a longer route that all feminists should be traveling in collaboration. Decriminalization is necessary but not sufficient for sex worker justice, just as abortion access is crucial but not sufficient for reproductive justice. Opposition is not that the sex work industry is valuable or desirable in itself. As feminists, we know the misogyny and violence we've experienced in the sex trade to be abhorrent, but the real end of sex work can only happen when marginalized people no longer have to sustain themselves through the sex industry, when it is no longer necessary for their survival To make sex work unnecessary. There is so much work to do Winning rights for freedom of movement, labour rights, access to services and to work without threat of deportation, employment alternatives, better welfare provisions, cheaper housing, support services for single mothers and so on, cheaper housing, support services for single mothers, and so on. If everybody had the resources they needed, nobody would need to sell sex.

Speaker 1: 38:58

To be impatient with this goal is to deprioritize the physical and economic safety of sex workers while continuing to use them as cannon fodder in the fight against patriarchy. Hoping for instant abolition and harm eradication by knocking the quote problem of prostitution on the head with criminalization is itself harmful. Instead, a strategy of harm reduction through decriminalization would make sex work safer right now if we are then able to end poverty and borders and the litany of other ills discussed here. Sex work might indeed wither away and effectively be abolished, but the small number who genuinely love it.

Speaker 1: 39:49

Now this is where we're going to end here today, and I'm trying so hard not to get emotional, and I know that I ramped up my volume towards the end of that because it's it's all so true and I just wish we were left alone. I just wish we were left alone to make our own choices. I just wish we could live in a world where the people who do the job actually get a voice and they can actually speak and set our own rules and laws and have our say and we are actually listened to. And this hits a little bit more harder now that my charges are dismissed and now that you know I've been through. Hopefully there is hope in the world where you know sex workers can make their own rules and laws and everything. I'm just repeating myself because right now in Scotland they are trying to get the Nordic model and obviously we do not want a Nordic model. If you've been listening to all the revolting prostitutes. We do not want the Nordic model. Nobody wants the Nordic model. We do not want legalization, we do not want criminalization, we want decriminalization.

Speaker 1: 41:09

So I'm gonna leave it here and I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. If you guys want to learn more, then I would absolutely encourage you to go on to Scotland 4D Crim and English Collective of Prostitutes and Ugly Mugs. There's a few places right now, um that haven't been closed and that are open and are grassroots campaigns and charities, um that are run or supported by sex workers, so please go check them out. And this has been Boston, victoria. We're in behind the battle podcast and I hope you enjoyed this episode and I think one more episode and then we're in behind the battle podcast and I hope you enjoyed this episode and I think one more episode and then we're done with Revolt and Prostitutes and then we will see what we're reading next, but that's all for now. Bye.