Money, Sex and Power 2011-12 Week 15

1. Money, Sex and Power2011-12Week 15 What (if anything) is wrong with prostitution?: feminist debate

2. Outline • Debate is now polarised between radical feminists and defenders of prostitution leading to the use of different terms for prostitution/ sex work • Pateman’s contribution as an example of radical feminist scholarship • Academic critiques of Pateman • GB legislation increasingly shaped by the abolitionist agenda • Alternative views: (1) Regulate to decrease dangers (to society) (2) The problem is social exclusion, the solution is social inclusion of sex workers as full, rights-bearing citizens.

3. Debate polarised between(1) radical feminists • (Radical) feminist perception of prostitution as a form of male violence against women forced into the sex trade. Because they are victimised by men (pimps, clients), i.e. ‘prostituted women’ (S. Jeffreys 1997 The Idea of Prostitution, Spiniflex), the only solution is to end the trade (abolition) and rescue the victimised women. • The true nature of prostitution is seen in trafficking (all migration for sex work =trafficking= force, child prostitution) and street working (deprived women, often on drugs, little choice in life)

4. (2) ‘Sex worker lobby’/ sex radicals • See radical feminists as anti-sex moralists (not, as they see themselves, anti-exploitation) agitating against the pro-sex sexual freedom enjoyed by sex workers. Opposition to prostitution stems from the ideology which divides ‘bad girls’ from ‘good girls’. • ‘Sex workers’ (not ‘prostitutes’- a stigmatising, othering word) are workers choosing to earn a living just like other people, but their work is made unsafe by the criminalisation of prostitution • Coercion is a fact for some women, but it is not the typical mode of entry into sex work. We should not conflate coercion (which should be eliminated) with sex work more generally. Term ‘trafficking’ in any case conflates kidnapping/force and illegal migration aided by cross-border networks

5. Scholarly research and writing on prostitution and other forms of sex work • Refine concepts adequate to understand such a complex phenomenon • Investigate empirical realities for sex workers in different contexts • Examine effects of different regimes of regulation and criminalisation • Scholars themselves involved in public debate and campaigns

6. Carol Pateman’sThe Sexual Contract (1988) • Chapter 7, called ‘What’s Wrong with Prostitution?’ (long excerpt available in Women’s Studies Quarterly 1999, Vol 27,No 1/2, pp. 53-64. Access online through Jstore through Library website in the usual way for accessing journals.

7. Asks question of ‘What’s wrong with prostitution?’ in the context (1988) of • Traditional moralist view that prostitution undermines marriage, tempts women to leave path of purity, tempts men to infidelity, sin • Women openly selling sex are a social nuisance, they are dirty (spread disease), disgusting (immoral) so they should be hidden away, not allowed in the street, but if hidden away in the private sphere where they won’t cause offence, that’s ok (UK- Wolfenden strategy, 1957) • Rise of prostitutes’ rights groups, who reject this conventional morality, demanding decriminalisation (‘Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics’—COYOTE, a prostitutes’ rights organisation, San Francisco, 1970s) See http://www.freedomusa.org/coyotela/coyotela.html

8. Pateman gives a different answer (a feminist answer) from traditional moralists to what’s wrong: • Prostitution is wrong because it is ‘part of the exercise of the law of male sex right, one of the ways in which men are ensured access to women’s bodies’ (WSQ,52) • It is a problem about gender power rather than conventional morality; it does not undermine marriage, but is rather similar to marriage in so far as the institution of prostitution legitimates the prostitute’s subjection to the client just as marriage legitimates the wife’s subjection to the husband. • The problem is not caused by the prostitute, but by men, and their assumption (their agreement in subscribing to the original sexual contract) that they will not infringe each other’s right to access women’s bodies somehow or other.

9. Moreover, for Pateman.. • Appearance of a contractual relation between the man and woman (exchange of money for sex) is illusory because under the sexual contract, women are not free to dispose of their property (including their own bodies) in the way men are. • Moreover, in ‘selling’ sex women sell not something external to the self (labour power) but their feminine sexual identity, which is inextricably connected to the self, inseparable from the self.

10. The problem is not nuisance, but damage to women’s selves. Whether it goes on in public or private is irrelevant, since this distinction is in any case founded through the sexual contract, which awards men control of their own households/women. • Pateman recognises in passing that prostitutes adopt strategies to deflect the power of the client (and even to deceive him) or to distinguish the self from the body, but these are a response to powerlessness within the institution of prostitution, which gives the client control of the prostitute not its defining feature of prostitution as a social institution.

11. Criticisms from sympathetic feminists (e.g. Nancy Fraser, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Class reading: • Gender power of client is NOT total, and the power of the client is limited to the duration of the engagement (does not define the woman or her subjectivity) • Not all sex workers are women (although most clients are men) • The power of male client over woman prostitute stems not from (mythical) sexual contract but absence of options for earning (so an economic issue rather than only one of male right, of the politics of sex. The wider structural position of women and men is the issue, not simply the sexual power of the individual punter over the individual prostitute. • Empirical variability in way prostitution is organised is NOT irrelevant to women’s capacity to limit the interaction, control the proceeds, or to her experience of what is involved.

12. Radical feminist arguments: from 1990s become conventional wisdom: • All or most of those involved in the sex trade are victims who need to be rescued • The blame should shift from women (for selling themselves) to men (for providing the demand for paid sex) • The purported division between private and public forms of prostitution is untenable

13. Other pressures/ influences give a fill-up to the abolitionist agenda in the UK that seeks to abolish/ eradicate prostitution • Presence of New Labour women ministers and MPs seeking legislation in the interests of women • (Anxieties about) involvement of children/ young people in prostitution • Anxieties about ‘trafficking’ from abroad and, from the Home Office/ police point of view, illegal/ undocumented immigration. • Precedents in Sweden and Norway criminalising the purchase of sex • Result in changes to the law in England and Wales and Scotland…

14. Changes to the law in England and Wales • Policing and Crime Act 2009 (Sections 14 to 21), which came into effect in March 2010 Main thrust of law is to Criminalise the buying of sex (so reverses historical tendency- e.g. Victorian Vagrancy Act, CD Acts to punish the prostitute, who is seen as morally culpable, but not the male client) • (1) Harsher penalties for kerb-crawling, now to be called ‘soliciting for sex’ • Follows earlier Sexual Offences Act 1985 as well as further legislation in last decade

15. (2) Criminalise paying for sex with a prostitute who is ‘subject to force or coercion’ and/ or ‘the exploitation of vulnerability’ on street or in private premises. • Strict liability- doesn’t matter of client knew the prostitute was ‘coerced’ or not • Very broad definition of coerced. • This is a substitute for a much broader clause first suggested, to criminalise the all purchase of sex • Kingston, Sarah (2010) ‘Intent to Criminalise: Men who Buy Sex and Prostitution Policy in the UK’ in K. Hardy et al (eds) New Sociologies of Sex Work, Ashgate.

16. Other clauses Make it easier for the police to close premises associated with prostitution or pornography-related offences, including the offence of causing, inciting, or controlling prostitution for gain. This is extremely broadly couched. This represents a shift from the Wolfenden strategy of the law ignoring sexual activities in the private sphere.

17. 2009 Act also includes Welfarist measures • Removes the term ‘common prostitute’ from statute as outdated and offensive. • Police and courts should seek opportunities to divert people in the sex trade away from prostitution, not only when the person is underage, but also for adult women. The person involved in prostitution will be expected to attend three sessions with a ‘supervisor’ who will address the reasons for their involvement and help them find a route out. If they do not attend, or if they reoffend, there will be sanctions.

18. The law is intended therefore to operate in a more gender-blind way than previously, applying sanctions to the clients AS WELL AS the prostitute, rather than removing sanctions from her. • Summary of the changes and their rationale at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/home-office-circulars/circulars-2010/006-2010

19. Similar legislation put in place in Scotland • Scottish Prostitution Act 2007- • Makes both soliciting and kerb-crawling crimes, follows upon closure of tolerance zones well before this. Like the legislation covering England and Wales is based on a series of public consultations, including complaints by residents and businesses, and feminist groups and individuals adopting an abolitionist position on prostitution.

20. Criticisms of the abolitionist agenda (and new legislation) • It will not achieve the results it seeks because • (1) ineffective and intensive use of resources that could be better utilised. ‘Disrupting sex markets’ makes it harder for punter and sex worker to meet, and therefore more dangerous for the sex worker’ Scoular and Sanders (2010:9). The new act ‘increases, rather than than decreases, the levels of riskiness, vulnerability and poverty of women in prostitution, especially those women who tend to get targeted most– street-based sex workers’. (Sex on the Street, 2002. TV documentary. Policing clients makes streetworking more dangerous for women because must work in most out of the way places, unlit, unable to check out man/ car because fear police will come to arrest him/ her)

21. (2) The new powers to close massage parlours and other indoor sites of prostitution and pornography will send these underground, making it difficult for responsible entrepreneurs to operate or improve their facilities and leading to the further influence of criminal agents seeking to (and with the ability to) evade the law.

22. (3) Welfare measures • Welfare measures are too crude, not adequately resourced, and backed up by criminal sanctions. • Apparently benign welfare measures are also coercive. See Journal of Law and Society special issue March 2010, articles by Scoular and Sanders (easier) and Scoular (showing Foucauldian influence on this critique). These welfare measures represent a broadening and intensification of social control, but through rehabilitation and rescue rather than punishment. Outreach workers, crime reduction officers, therapists and drug treatment workers seek to bring order to the streets and render unruly bodies docile. • This is a form of “moral authoritarianism” (J. Phoenix and S. Oerton [2005} Illicit and Illegal: Sex, Regulation and Social Control, Willan).

23. (4) Based on misunderstanding of the place of commercial sex in people’s lives • Legislation seeks to criminalise what has become normalised, and is not deviant. For instance Hester and Westmarland (2004) found that clients were not ‘deviant’ men but married men, nodal age 39, in full-time employment with no criminal record. See also research by Teela Sanders (2008) Paying for Sex: Men Who Buy Sex Willan (and online through Library site) • Therefore will be little acceptance of this law by the public.

24. What are the alternatives?

25. Regulationist agenda • Permit prostitution to take place in places and forms specified by law so as to limit its harmful effects (especially on community and clients) • Legalisation- provide for the licensing of some forms of prostitution, which are subject to the surveillance of police or other state bodies to ensure that they comply. All other forms of prostitution criminalised. Some Australian states, Netherlands, historically also France. ((Some commentators also include New Zealand, others see NZ as a special case)). • This has had little support in Britain, especially if measures are mainly intended to protect the public rather than the sex worker. Seen to send the wrong message, as it seems to legitimate buying sex.

26. A legalised regime can create some safe spaces for women, but also makes life HARDER for women who cannot obtain places in the legal brothels. This can enable the brothels to exercise more control because the women fear losing their places. • Other sex work forced underground • Legalised prostitution in Australia (and possibly elsewhere) is accompanied by compulsory inspection for VDs for the sex workers, not clients. This therefore perpetuates a view of sex workers as deviant, contaminating, despite and alongside legalisaiton. • Therefore ‘making it legal’- in the sense of distinguishing betseeen legal and illegal prostitution is not a panacea.

27. Inclusion agenda • Term adopted by Maggie O’Neil (2001), Prostitution and Feminism, Polity and in the Journal of Law and Society, 2010 but implicit in other writings too. • The problem with prostitution—what’s wrong with prostitution-- is the social exclusion of sex workers, which makes them vulnerable (to clients, to pimps, to the police), and increases disrespect for them/ legitimates violence against them. • Policies should aim to include sex workers within the community (and regulations covering the labour force as a whole) by rejecting/ challenging the assumed division between us/ them. Hard but brave of women’s groups to go against social norms and . accept sex workers as women struggling against shared oppression as women (S. Huq (2008) ‘Confronting our prejudices’ Development with a Body, ed. by A.Cornwall, et al, Zed.

28. Policy makers should work with sex workers’ organisations and trades unions, who should participate in determining regulations under which their work is organised (e.g. in NZ prostitutes collectives played big role in law reform, see L. Armstrong (2010) ‘Out of the Shadows’ in K.Hardy et al) • Prostitution is work and should be regulated as a form of work. Our efforts should be devoted to making sex work more like other jobs, more secure (rather than less), safer (rather than hard to do), and widening scope for sex workers to control their work and relations with clients, i.e. to reduce their powerlessness.

29. Policy should respect people’s choices to become involved in sex work and welfare should not be conditional on ‘exiting’; indeed many successful projects call on sex workers’ existing skills and knowledges and enable them to evolve their own individual and collective strategies, including making links with other residents in red-light districts (see O’Neill 2010).

30. Quite different and distinct rationales for the inclusive perspective 1) What sex workers do for a living is socially valuable, so should celebrate it (sex worker lobby) AND/OR 2) What sex workers do is no longer outside the norm, so why should they be punished? In the global North sex work is part and parcel of the current expansion of intimate service work in which love and care are now commercially available (nannies, care workers, tour guides, bar workers) involving emotional and body work. ‘It is no longer useful to posit the sex industries as an “other” to late capitalist industry.’ ( Brents and Hausbeck (2007:436, ‘ US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption’ Sexualities vol. 10 There are also similarities on other grounds. Eg. migrants working in the sex industry experience conditions and oppressions that are more similar to than different from the conditions of undocumented migrants in industry and agriculture.

31. 3) Enhancing sex workers rights need not be based on approving of prostitution. Sex workers should have the same civil human, workers’ rights as other people, as members of society; they are owed this whether or not we support prostitution as an institution (J. O’Connell Davidson ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution’ Hypatia Vol 17 (2): 84-98. What is wrong about the debate on prostitution is that it seems to exclude ‘the possibility of supporting the rights of those who work in prostitution as workers, but remain critical of the social and political inequalities that underpin market relations in general, and prostitution in particular’ p.84-85. Reduce harm prostitution causes to sex workers—by increasing rather than decreasing their rights.

32. What do you think?