It’s Time to Decriminalise Sex Work

0:00There's been so many brilliant episodes of this podcast where we've had celebrities, thinkers, politicians. Some of my favourite episodes, though, are where we hear from workers themselves. And that's exactly what we're going to do today. There is so much misconception, misunderstanding and stigma around sex work, particularly around the difference between decriminalisation, legalisation and different models. Ultimately, we really believe in nothing about us without us. So I'm delighted to be joined by Audrey, who is a sex worker. and very involved with the organization Decrim Now. This episode is sponsored by Crowdfunder.

0:34Bring your bold idea to life at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold.

0:43ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. I'm Kai Wright. I'm Carter Sherman. Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Guardian. We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting. We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Kyan Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, starting May 13th. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:32Audrey, thank you so much for joining me. Viewers will notice that your face is blurred and that's because of your privacy. I just want to confirm you're a real person and we're in conversation together. Lots of people will know lots about this subject. Some people will know nothing about this subject. And we know there is a huge kind of stigma often attached to it. So should we start with what you do for a living? Yeah, sure. So I am what you would call a full service sex worker. so that is an S school that's my kind of main way of earning money I did briefly have an only fans for about three months during the pandemic but it was um actually quite a lot of work so I stopped that quite quickly but yeah so a full service sex worker is like an S school I've worked both independently and also within brothels but on top of that I also work for an organisation called Decrim Now which is a grassroots group campaigning for the full decriminalisation of sex work in the UK and it's not work but I'm also a sex workers union member and I just want to shout them out.

2:32Amazing in fact I saw an amazing exhibition of a sex workers union at the Wellcome Trust last year which is great and if I start with the term sex worker because I know lots of people who work in sex work prefer to be called different things yeah Could you outline what's going on there? Yeah, sure. So sex worker is an umbrella term that encapsulates anyone who exchanges sexual labour for resources, primarily money, but it could be things like housing, food. And within that umbrella, it could be sort of like full service sex workers like me who are working as escorts or on the street, dominatrixes, strippers, all the way on to kind of like online workers, porn creators.

3:12and we use that umbrella term because it is a recognition that what we do is work and that recognition is important because if we are seen as workers if we are able to operate as workers we're able to utilize labor rights and protections like all other workers to be able to improve our working conditions and it's important for us to recognize that sex work is a form of work it's a form of labour and not kind of like an identity, not like this kind of shady underclass of people. And it's important for us to use that umbrella term because the primary thing that affects us all as sex workers, regardless of where we're working, whether we're working indoors in a porn studio, is that the law harms us.

4:01And it's important for us to organise collectively to change that so all sex workers can be working in safety can be working with full labour rights and protections and have the autonomy to change our own working conditions for the better. Lots of people get into sex work for lots of different reasons um would you mind outlining some of some of those reasons? Yeah sure so Decrim Now actually did a study this year or last year of 172 sex workers to find out this exact thing so why do people enter and why people remain in sex work and 76 % of those respondents stated that they entered sex work due to financial need.

4:41And I mean, I don't think that's too surprising. But if we break it down even a bit further, we can see that the reasons why people get into sex work, whilst primarily due to financial need, are also due to a whole host of structural and social issues as well. Primarily policy decisions made by successive governments that have landed us in austerity, that have lowered benefits, have made benefits so much harder to access, including kind of like personal independence payments. In the survey that we did, 77 % of the respondents said that they would class themselves as having a disability or a long-term illness, including neurodivergence.

5:2227 % of the respondents had caring responsibilities and turned to sex work because it offered them the flexibility to be able to work around those responsibilities. And even as well, actually, one of the things that I was surprised by in the survey was that 54 or 55 % of the people who responded, the sex workers who responded, already had another job outside of sex work as well. And I think that just points to, I mean, at the moment, especially, wages have stagnated for what, like 10, 15 years now. We live in a cost of living crisis. We live under austerity measures. the cost of living is rising exponentially, but many people's wages aren't.

6:02And they're not rising in line with inflation or haven't done for a long time. Most people are getting real terms pay cuts. So even if you are in full-time work, you might be turning to sex work to bridge that gap between what you're earning and what you need to survive. And it's the same thing for people on benefits as well. The majority of people who were in receipt of universal credit, who responded to our survey, stated that they entered sex work again to bridge that gap between what they received from universal credit and what they needed to survive so it's financial need but it's also kind of the fact that you know job the job market is inaccessible to disabled people growing increasingly inaccessible to trans people especially you know it's migrant workers who are in sex work may have entered sex work because they're either stuck on a certificate of common sponsorship and trapped in exploitative low paid conditions, or they may be an asylum seeker who is prohibited from working.

7:00So there's a whole range of reasons why people enter sex work. And you know, some people also do enter sex work because they really want to do that work. And that's also fine. They should be able to do the work they want to do. And at Decrim Now, part of the reason why we not only advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work, but also for a wide range of social changes, is so that the people who don't want to go into sex work don't have to. They have a welfare state that adequately supports them. They have rent controls, so their housing is an extortionate. They work in jobs where there are, you know, disability provisions that enable them to work, or they work in part-time work that pays high enough that they can work around childcare outside of that.

7:46You laid out beautifully there. a whole range of reasons. And it strikes me whenever I talk about this in phone-in shows, for instance, and talk about why decriminalisation is so important, the response you always get back from someone. And I think it's often well-intentioned is, but people are being exploited, particularly women. And I think it's fair to say that some people are being exploited, right? But it's about finding the nuance between people who want to do it, people who are doing it because they're living financially precariously, but still this is what they choose to do. That's still not the same as exploitation.

8:14And then there are some people who are just being straight up exploited. Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, for me, I think that most people in the UK do work because they need to earn money. And the thing that's often levied at sex workers is that you're getting coerced, you're getting exploited because you're doing this for money. But that's no different to when I worked at McDonald's for two years. It's not a job that I dreamed of doing, but it's a job that I had to do because I had to make money to survive. many sex workers have made the choice to enter sex work because it is the best choice for them to do dependent on their material conditions like you know for instance if you are a single parent you have a lot of child care needs or high child care needs you can't afford child care you have to then make the decision between do i pay for child care and do more work or do i do less work and try and have more free childcare.

9:12And many people then, within that decision, then say, okay, well, maybe I can do sex work because I'm earning money then, but it's flexible enough to fit around my circumstances. So while sex work may not be the choice that people have dreamed of making, it is still a choice that many people are making based on their own circumstances. There is exploitation in sex work. there is exploitation in all forms of work under our current system that's why trade unions exist it's why we have workers rights so workers are able to challenge that exploitation by using labour rights and protections by unionizing by entering collective bargaining agreements exploitation persists in sex work because of the law because the criminalization of sex work prohibits sex workers from being able to access those labour rights and protections so they can't challenge any poor conditions or exploitative conditions.

10:07The law takes away the power from sex workers. Sex workers are more concerned with how they interact with the law often because it's ever-present. It's always there. It's you making the decision between do I work legally and in danger? Do I work legally and alone? Or do I work illegally with someone else and have some safety. So you're always aware of that law. And in many cases, again, the law is what stops you from being able to challenge exploitation. The law creates the exploitive conditions that many sex workers are in. And even further than that, there is, you know, certain types of exploitation like trafficking, coercion, that also again exists within sex work, as they do again, in many other industries like agricultural industry.

10:56and the way again to challenge that exploitation to give those people who are being exploited a better chance of changing their conditions isn't by criminalizing them it's by decriminalizing them enabling them to work without fear of arrest enabling them to report exploitative circumstances without again worrying about arrest unfortunately there is no especially in the case of people who've been trafficked, there is no magic pass for trafficking victims to be exempt from the law within the sex work. If a brothel raid is happening, and brothel raids are often used as de facto immigration raids by the police, if a trafficking victim is caught up in a brothel raid, they don't get a magic card that is like, okay, you don't have to worry about the police.

11:50your earnings may still be confiscated you may then also be detained and deported straight back to the conditions that you were trafficked from so again the law is not protecting trafficking victims just like it's not protecting any other sex worker who hasn't experienced trafficking it is compounding the exploitation that sex workers exist in and i want to talk more about decrim shortly yeah i want to look at some other models around the world so probably the most famous as the nordic model yeah um which i know decrim now and including the green party by the way have uh criticisms of what is the model first of all i guess is the thing and why is it flawed yeah the nordic model or um is sometimes called the end demand model or the swedish model is a system that primarily focuses on criminalizing the buyer of sex work but also both directly and indirectly criminalises the sex worker too.

12:48So within Nordic model countries, it is still illegal for two or more sex workers to work together for safety, just as it is in our system of partial criminalisation. But also under the Nordic model, the increase of police powers to catch these clients also then directly impact the sex worker in many, many ways. So not only under the Nordic model are sex workers put in more danger because obviously their clients are the ones who are being targeted primarily by the police. So clients may not be willing to give over kind of a name or a phone number to a sex worker. So that sex worker has no opportunity to kind of trace them or if something does happen to that sex worker, no evidence to point to who may have sex workers are then forced to meet clients in more isolated and dangerous areas.

13:46I mean, in France, for instance, after the Nordic model was implemented, 10 sex workers were killed in the space of six months as a direct consequence of having to work in isolated, dangerous areas away from police and public eye. On top of that, in order to find clients, the police actively surveil sex workers. So in Norway, there was a project called Operation Homeless, where the police surveilled sex workers, found out where they lived, who their landlords were, then told their landlords that they were renting to sex workers and that they could be prosecuted. And then thousands of sex workers were made homeless.

14:28Again, under the Nordic model, even kind of interpersonal relationships between sex workers and family members or loved ones can also be kind of indirectly criminalised. There was a case in Sweden where the husband of a sex worker was arrested because he shared a home with a sex worker and they both paid rent on that home. And I think that's one of the main points of the Nordic model is this idea of giving the police increased powers. And I don't think it's a hugely, I don't think it's a huge logical leap to understand why that might be dangerous. We've seen in the Republic of Ireland that one in five street-based sex workers after the Nordic model was implemented have reported being sexually exploited by the police, by the Gardai.

15:18And we can look broader, outside of sex work as well, to see, you know, the way that the police interact with black and brown people, the way the police interact with trans people, the way the police interact with women, you know, cases like Sarah Everard, to understand that giving the police increased power over a marginalised, criminalised community of primarily women, but also of migrants, of trans people, of black and brown people, LGBTQ plus people is not going to lead to a good or safe outcome for those communities, for that population of sex workers, especially when the police are the enforcers of the law, are the enforcers of violence against those sex workers, whether that violence be via the methods of the state by, you know, giving criminal records, by arresting, pushing sex workers the more dangerous areas or whether it's you know that real physical violence that does happen you mentioned that partial criminalization is what we have in this country i think there's so much misinformation about what the laws are yeah could you spell out what the situation is right now for sex yeah of course so sex workers in england scotland and wales um are working under a system of partial criminalization what that means is whilst selling sex is technically legal from one person to another, many of the acts included within that transaction.

16:47And in fact, many of the safety strategies that sex workers use are criminalised. So for instance, in England, Scotland and Wales, any two or more sex workers working together for safety is classed as a brothel. Whether or not there is a manager present, driving someone to a booking is criminalised under third party laws. Acting as security is criminalised under third party laws. If you are a street-based sex worker and potentially you could be amongst the most vulnerable because you have little access to financial resources while you might be out on the street you are the most targeted by criminalization so even the act of a street-based sex worker working on the street is a criminal act and in many cases that criminalization this partial criminalization acts as a trap for sex workers too because if you're found to be working on the street you may get fined you of course then need to go back to working on the street in order to pay that fine off and then if the police catch you again you could be arrested so you get caught in this trap of criminalization and it's the same trap that could even occur to indoor workers if I were found by the police to be working with someone else and then therefore accused of each other pimping the other one out or pimping myself out which is what could happen under the law I could then get a criminal record that would then also make it harder for me to exit sex work because I've got any kind of advanced DBS check or a DBS check at all would catch me out so yeah we exist in that system of partial criminalization in England Scotland and Wales and in Ireland they have the Nordic model or Northern Ireland even And my understanding is there's resistance to full legalisation.

18:32Yeah, 100%. So legalisation, and this is something I want to make very clear because it's something that often gets said, is not the same as decriminalisation. Legalisation is totally different to decriminalisation. I would think that that was quite clear by the two different names, but people often get them confused. so legalization is a system where the state gets to set the terms of who is working illegally but also and importantly who is still working illegally so the resistance to legalization comes from this creation of a two-tier system of sex workers and again the people the sex workers who are most likely to be working illegally or be told they're working illegally by the state are often migrant sex workers, trans sex workers, black and brown sex workers, the unhoused.

19:31And that two-tier system doesn't really solve any of the issues of partial criminalisation or the Nordic model, because as I said, sex workers are still criminalised underneath them. And so we've explored all the models that we think don't work and the flaws in them. I think you've probably given a spoiler that decriminalisation is where we're going forward but what does that model look like what is the model that keeps people safe so sex workers you know you can ask any sex worker-led organisation in the UK including Decrim Now helpfully pointed out by our name but also any sex worker-led organisation from Kenya to Cambodia to India and we will all say that the model we want is the full decriminalisation of sex work the full decriminalisation of sex work means that the current laws and criminal penalties targeting sex workers and sex work will be removed so things like you know two or more sex workers working together safety under decriminalisation won't anymore be against the law and under that system of decriminalisation by removing the criminal penalties that are currently targeted at sex workers.

20:39Sex workers would then be able to access full labour rights and protections, as all other workers do. We'll be able to challenge exploitative conditions in our workplaces, especially those workplaces like brothels that are currently criminalised. Sex workers will be able to work without the threat of arrest. We'll be able to access support services without the threat of arrest and be able to take back power that is currently being withheld from us by the law in order to change our own conditions. And we can see in countries where they already have decriminalisation. So Belgium most recently decriminalised sex work.

21:15And after they decriminalised sex work, the government worked with sex workers to expand labour rights and protections to better protect sex workers. So now there is enshrined in law a right to refusal. Now, many sex workers already do have a right to refusal. I certainly told many clients to get out or that I would not want to do the service anymore. But by enshrining that right to refusal in law, it means that sex workers who work in brothels or managed premises won't have to fear that if they do refuse a client, then their manager or boss might, you know, fire them, dismiss them because they have that protected.

21:59And if something did happen, if their boss did fire them or dismiss them from refusing to see a client, they could then take their boss to an employment tribunal. And we've seen again in New Zealand, where they already have decriminalisation, that sex workers are taking bosses to employment tribunals and they're winning. There was a brothel worker who took her boss to an employment tribunal for sexual harassment and she won. So we see that under decriminalisation, sex workers are already exerting their rights to make themselves safer. And I think, you know, decriminalisation isn't, you know, the end of anything.

22:36It's just the starting point. And any government that seeks to implement decriminalisation should, as governments in Belgium and New Zealand have done, work with sex workers to figure out exactly what it is that sex workers need next after sex workers have been decriminalised. That was so clearly laid out. I think there can be no kind of confusion there. It's not your job to speak to conservatives necessarily. But what I'm interested in your thoughts on is I think there'll be lots of people who watch and listen to this who consider themselves on the left or socialist or progressive who get this entirely and go, of course, this is just obvious.

23:11It's a woman's right to choose or a person's right to choose and they're not doing any harm, etc. There'll be, I imagine, probably a Daily Mail headline that is apoplectic, that I dare speak to someone who does sex work. But do you think there are arguments that, you know, to speak to people who wouldn't necessarily want to get involved with the world of sex work, but actually we could speak to those people in a way that actually this is making everyone safer? Yeah, and I think that's it really. Like the key message is safety. We have so many conversations about ending violence against women and girls, which are necessary conversations to have.

23:47But we also need to include sex workers in those conversations too. Sex work is a very gendered industry. It is, you know, the majority of sex workers are women. But sex work isn't necessarily the cause of that. It's just a symptom of a system that we already live under. We already live under a system of capitalism that is patriarchal. You know, women are the subject of more violence than men, both systemically and interpersonally. so sex workers need to be included in these conversations of violence against women and i think that the one point that even both myself and someone who supports the nordic model or someone who reads the daily mail might all agree on is that ultimately we all want people to be safe and the only way sex workers can be safe is if we remove the thing that is currently doing the most harm to them and that is the law maybe i don't know how much this would fly with Daily Mail readers, but I would look towards other kind of issues as well, like abortion, you know, like drug use and the ways in which we have conversations around how to give more people safety when they're finding abortion care, how to make drug users more safe when they're using.

25:06And again, the same thing is true as it is in sex work, is that the law is the thing that's harming or creating the most harm for people who use substances. The law is creating harm for people who want to find good abortion care. So we need to remove the law that is doing the harm to make sure that sex workers, people who need abortion health care, people who use substances can all be as safe as possible. And I think one of the things that I always think all the time is that it's easy for a lot of us to think about what we'd like to see in an ideal world. And that's great. We should always look to the future.

25:44But we also need to recognise what is happening right now. And the reality is that people are sex working right now. That isn't going to change overnight, unless, you know, someone can magically come up with a solution for poverty, or the government just has a radical overhaul and starts to make real radical reforms to the social welfare net, or, you know, maybe forget a new government. Until that happens, and that's going to be a long, long process, people are still going to be in sex work they're going to remain in sex work and we need to figure out how to make those people safe rather than having conversations about oh well in an ideal world no one would do sex work it's like perfect in an ideal world i'd make pottery all day but unfortunately i can't so sounds like a nice day though it sounds like a lovely day i'm recreating ghost and it strikes me there's some libertarian arguments as well though that approach sex work and we're speaking at a week where I don't know if you saw there was a reform counsellor who has an OnlyFans yeah and reform responded I thought it was interesting how they responded they said they might not be to everyone's taste I can't remember what the rest of the sentence was but they didn't actually condemn him okay and that was pleasing to see yeah I also thought oh that's interesting that that reform for instance they're kind of going well actually what what people do is up to them yeah I think it is interesting and I think the thing that I find interesting about like that response of reform coming out and being like, oh, well, it's, you know, it's their choice, is that when I look at sex workers' rights and the movement for sex workers' rights, ultimately it is a working class movement, primarily of women, but also including within that disabled people, people who are using benefits, people who are using drugs, people who are unhoused, migrants, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, LGBTQ plus people.

27:33Those are the intersections within the sex workers' rights movement. Because again, due to policy decisions, due to a system that we currently live under, these are the people who are most likely to have to find an alternative form of work that is outside of traditional job market. So I raised this because I find it interesting that reformer may be having a stance of oh well he can do whatever he wants because when you look at that group of disabled people migrants trans people sex workers and the larger working class reform aren't very friendly to any of those groups and that's putting it very lightly so I think when there's like libertarian arguments that are pro-sex work whilst i enjoy any argument that is pro the safety of sex workers i'm wary of having that kind of like personal like oh we can just do whatever we want because especially when it's coming from a party like reform we know that for the majority of sex workers they're going to be enacting policies that are going to worsen the conditions they're going to go directly against what sex workers and the people within the sex workers movement need like reform aren't a party that support the working class reform increasingly are becoming a party of abortion hardliners they want to completely dismantle or dismantle as much as they can the rights of trade unions the rights of workers and you know more broadly the rights of the working class so yeah i feel like maybe it's kind of one rule for a councillor and one rule for everyone else when it comes to reform on sex work well played this episode is brought to you by crowdfunder there's a street in walthamstow where nobody used to talk to each other old victorian houses freezing in winter and gas bills going through the roof then hillary and dan at number 44 had an idea what if they turned the whole street into a power station solar panels on every single roof so they got their neighbors together and they fundraised for it and at the same time they built a community.

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31:10I want to ask you about technology because my working assumption is that things like only fans or webcams have made people safer because they're less likely to be out and about and putting themselves in vulnerable positions I can also imagine maybe it's lonelier and yeah I'm just wondering about the technology no definitely so yeah things like um you know having websites where people can advertise themselves on independently whether that's are doing kind of like full service work or coming websites like OnlyFans have given more independence to sex workers. It has in many ways given sex workers another choice that isn't just potentially relying on an exploitative labour relationship in a brothel or working on the street.

31:52It has then also at the same time done the same thing as you can see within many workforces that are moving to work from home, moving to work online. It has, as you said, isolated and atomized workers. Now, when I said that it has given sex workers another option from being able to work without relying on exploitative labor relationships in a brothel, these platforms still also have exploitative labor relationships with workers. OnlyFans charge a cut of earnings. The same goes for if I was to advertise on a website independently to sell my services, I would have to pay that website for certain things.

32:34And by isolating and atomising workers, as many people in the workforce have also done, it's also made it more difficult for us to be able to challenge those conditions. Just as the law by criminalising the workplace of a brothel has made it difficult for brothel workers to be able to organise in those workplaces. The isolation and atomisation of sex workers on platforms, on OnlyFans, has also made it more difficult for us to challenge any conditions that we want to change on there. Like there was one adult service website that over COVID, I think, suddenly decided for no good reason other than their own profit to start charging workers for advertising our phone numbers, which is quite a key factor in getting a booking.

33:28But because sex workers are isolated on those platforms, because we don't often work together, again, primarily due to the law, because it prohibits us from working together for safety, it's very difficult to be able to kind of like organise on those platforms. And I mean, in the Sex Workers Union, we've been talking about pulling off a strike on a platform for a long time. but we're running into difficulties uh by trying to get the amount of work as necessary to make a financial impact due again yeah to the atomization isolation of how we work on those platforms it's like super difficult and one day i would love to be able to go on strike from that platform but i think it's going to be a long way off and again like sex workers primarily due to the law can't do what traditional workers do in trade unions where like we want to pick at our workplace we don't know where like we don't know where they are you know this particular platform i've seen like five seven different addresses for where their head office is and they're doing that again because of the law the law prevents us from collectivizing a lot of our issues and you know the functions of those websites also do that as well but sex workers have for many years come up with strategies where for our own safety primarily, where we are sharing information, where we are trying to connect with each other.

34:59So yeah, it's just playing the long game, I think. And I'm really interested in asking about the sex workers union. Before I get there, I think you got into it through the strip club in Bristol. Yes. Do you want to tell that story? Yeah, of course. So I was sex working and I saw that the council were going to implement what's called a nil cap policy on strip clubs and what that means it's an effective strip club ban strip clubs have to renew their licenses every year and if you implement a nil cap on strip clubs it means that you're going to give out zero licenses next year bristol city council in their wisdom decided to try and implement a nil cap ban on strip clubs a nil cap policy on strip clubs over COVID.

35:44So many workers were already out of work, already running through their savings, getting menial loans or grants from the government to survive, and then were then suddenly faced down with the potential that they might not even have a workplace to return to. So I saw that and I'm not a stripper. Unfortunately, I don't have the coordination for it or probably the business savvy but yeah I saw that and I was like okay that's that's not okay like something needs to happen so myself alongside many of the strippers who worked in the club including one of my very good friends put on a campaign to prevent the closure of the strip clubs none of us had ever done anything like that before we were really winging it as we went kind of figuring out how to talk to politicians and councillors as we went but thankfully you know due to us kind of getting media coverage lobbying councillors attending council meetings anytime they are on to like put our you know opinion forward we ended up getting one of the biggest responses to a public consultation in Bristol history that was overwhelmingly in the favor of us the workers and now I mean especially during the campaign one of the things that was consistently levied at particularly the strippers in the campaign was that they were doing management's job for them they were organizing to keep the strip clubs open just for the sake of keeping the strip clubs open and I mean we were all so offended by that because the reason, the primary reason the strippers were organising or we were organising to keep the strip clubs open is so that they could work.

37:31And the other reason was that because strippers work in legal workplaces, strippers could then argue to access labour rights and protections. So the workers in the club actually then, after the success of keeping the strip clubs open, started organising against the misclassification of their work as self-employed contractors. This is something that's seen wide across the gig economy. It happens to Uber, to delivery riders, but it also happens to strippers across probably all of the strip clubs in the UK. And so the strippers then took their clubs to an employment tribunal. They argued that they deserve worker status.

38:17so Limby worker status and they were successful the judge ruled in their favour so now what that means by keeping their workplaces open they can organise to get a formal recognition agreement with the trade union they can access sick pay they can access all of the rights that they're due as workers I think that employment tribunal happened last year so that was like a great end event to the strip club campaign but that was the way that I got into the sex workers union because throughout that campaign it was sex workers were the ones that were reaching out to help there was a stripper who'd won worker status in a employment tribunal against her club in London a few years before there were people in the sex workers union who are reaching out to help us out with our campaign to be like if you need any assistance with any comms here you go if you need us to do anything so yeah all of us i think who are involved in that campaign then join the sex workers union um and i've been a member ever since it's such an amazing story like worker power and people working together um it's probably an ignorant question but it just comes from literally not knowing in terms of to grow the sex union yeah do workers then sometimes phone people's numbers and say you're aware of the sex workers union like how do you do outreach so it's again it's a tricky thing with outreach a lot of sex worker organizations including us can be sometimes a bit wary about um what information we put over um we don't want to be you know told that we're facilitating prostitution which is against the law but we do do outreach again strip clubs are one of the easiest ones strippers can be quite transient in work patterns so if you're working in you know one area if you're working in Bristol you might then travel to Wales to work as well you might then go to Swindon to work too so union members who are strippers could then go to those different workplaces talk to those strippers in those workplaces and the same thing for many other sex workers so people in brothels as well like we can often travel to different brothels to work and then speak to workers there independent sex workers you might you know do a duo like a booking with someone else but also sex workers have thankfully huge community networks there's so many organizations there's so many local groups there's so many you know collectives of sex workers that are popping up across the uk that are you know talking to each other helping each other sharing safety information so it's through those kind of like informal networks that sex workers organize and also you know in our kind of brick and mortar workplaces when we can but one of the things that I'm a bit worried about that might impact that organizing currently is that there seems to be like an increasing censorship of sex workers online alongside kind of like sexual health organizations both on social media but also due to the online safety act on the way that sex workers advertise, the way we use platforms.

41:25And sometimes this censorship of sex workers online could in turn impact the way we organise because a lot of our organising will be digital in nature because we don't, you know, we're not on the factory floor anymore. Yeah, so that's one thing I am worried about. But sex workers have been organising for many, many years in way worse conditions. than we exist in right now. So yeah, I have every faith. Find a way through. And when you say there's been online censorship, do you mean kind of websites coming down or what does that look like? Yeah, so we see it a lot across social media. Like a lot of social media platforms are quite aggressive in banning sex worker accounts, even sort of, you know, not just direct marketing accounts, but accounts of sex worker groups who are doing kind of art stuff.

42:16And I think, you know, we can look at that in the growing trend of like even sexual health organizations getting censored queer people getting censored online and Palestine you know you know activists getting censored online it's like this broader form of social control and in terms of websites we have seen that the way that sex workers have to advertise on websites change after the implementation of the online safety act you know on one platform that we use to advertise we are no longer allowed to put on i can't remember what the exact term was but it's sort of like promiscuous photos which seems kind of at odds of the service that we're offering you have to look really dour yeah like wear a smock so but there's also conversations that have been happening recently as well about um banning kind of the websites that we use to advertise on.

43:14I've seen a few pieces here and there from kind of ministers in the government or around banning online platforms that sex workers use to advertise on. And that would, to be honest, be quite disastrous. It happened in the States. There were a set of laws called FOSCESTA. And as a consequence of those laws, lots of the websites that sex workers use to advertise on were shut down. And what happened after that was that sex workers were forced into more invisible spaces. So were forced to work in brothels, were forced to work on the streets because they had no alternative option. And not only did that force sex workers into potentially more dangerous and criminalised forms of work, but there were also reports from organisations that support victims of trafficking saying that their work was made so much harder because sex workers and the trafficking victims that use those websites pushed into the margins they couldn't find them anymore they couldn't locate where trafficking victims were to offer them services so yeah there have been conversations quite worrying conversations around doing that and I think if what we're after is safety if we want to make sex workers more safe then we shouldn't then remove a form of work that enables them to work independently and advertise by themselves.

44:39Too often legislation is made about sex work without sex work. So when we look at the criminalisation of sex work, when we look at the way that strip club licensing regulations were written, these were all written without sex workers but have a direct impact on the lives and safety of sex workers. And I think that any legislation that is going to have a direct impact on sex workers should be written in conjunction with sex workers and sex workers' experiences and voices put centre within that. And finally, to talk about sexual health, which is a good thing to talk about anyway outside of sex work, are there specific things that need to happen or should be happening to make both sex workers safer and indeed people who, I'm looking for the verb, who service sex work or who utilise sex work?

45:29Oh yeah, yeah. Utilise sex work, yeah. So we've seen in any country that has any form of criminalisation, whether that be the Nordic model, full criminalisation, partial criminalisation, that sex workers' health outcomes are worse. In countries like where they have full criminalisation of sex work, things like even carrying condoms can be used as evidence that you're then going to be sex working, which of course means that people don't want to carry condoms on them. criminalization negates us being able to effectively negotiate harm reduction strategies with clients street-based sex workers for instance if you're worried the police are going to come and arrest you you don't have the time to look in the car and check if there's anyone else there or make sure that you've told someone where you're going and when it comes directly to health we've seen especially around conversations with HIV transmissions.

46:28You know, the government set themselves a target that they were going to end HIV transmissions by 2030, but have done nothing to decriminalise sex work. And I mention that because The Lancet, for instance, has said that if sex work was decriminalised, then new HIV transmissions would reduce by 46%. UNAIDS has said that the decriminalisation of sex work is the single greatest intervention that could be done to end new HIV transmissions. And that all again comes down to under criminalisation, condom use is often used as evidence that you are selling sex. Sex workers might not want to go and get tested in sexual health services if they have to be open about what they do and therefore are worried about how that might impact them.

47:18sex workers under any form of criminalisation and more worried in general to reach out for support. Health outcomes are always worse under any form of criminalisation, not just for issues that specifically affect sex workers, like sexual health or like checking our sexual health as we're working, but also more broader social kind of issues as well, like kind of reducing HIV transmissions. You know, condoms and sexual health kits are kind of like the PPE of sex workers, you know, and under decriminalisation, not only would sex workers feel able to go and access kind of like health services without worrying about getting arrested, without worrying about getting deported, but sex workers also advocate for themselves or organise to get given condoms as free PPE by their employers.

48:11We could treat our workplaces like other workplaces where they have you know you get given a hard hack you're going on a construction site by your employer because they have to give you one so under decriminalization utilizing those labor laws and practices will be able to benefit sex workers health as well thank you and finally is there kind of the biggest misconception that you'd wish to bust or that people think about sex work that you just think i really want people to know um there's probably a lot to be honest um One of the main ones is that people need to think about why, or at least I think about why, a lot of politicians, a lot of people who campaign for the Nordic model or for the further criminalisation of sex work are so keen to align the reasons why people enter sex work with some sort of shady underworld or with demand.

49:11because that's you know the thing that we most often hear is that people are in sex work because of the demand for sex work that's what a lot of nordic model advocates argue that's what you know a lot of politicians or certain politicians argue as well that the demand for sex work is what is causing sex work to happen and that is just not the case if that were the case then any country where they implemented an end demand model like Norway, like Sweden, like Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland would have no sex work anymore. But that's not true. Sex work has not decreased in number in any of those countries because the Nordic model by tackling demand is tackling the wrong thing.

49:57What makes people enter sex work or what keeps people in sex work is what I mentioned earlier is financial need it is you know structural issues that have not been tackled by successive governments you know like implementing rent controls like bettering the conditions of people on welfare ending benefit sanctions there's a whole raft of you know radical social or not even that radical just social changes that can be made to prevent more people from entering sex work And this focus on the ending demand for sex work, I think, is often a sort of, you know, like veil. So people don't look towards the failures of policy decisions or don't look towards structural issues.

50:46far easier for someone to point and be like well it's you know it's the demand that is causing people to enter sex work or it's you know the criminal gangs that are causing everyone to enter sex work rather than acknowledging it is because we've had you know successive governments that have failed to tackle poverty that have made policy decisions that have actively made people's conditions worse you know being in the sixth wealthiest country in the world and having the rates of child poverty that we do is unconscionable but it benefits politicians some politicians it benefits some people in the media it benefits some nordic model proponents to point at demand rather than acknowledging what needs to happen is radical social change and that's the only thing that's going to prevent more people from entering sex work and i often see it like there's quite a class divide i think as well between people who support the nordic model and people who support decriminalisation, most often sex workers, because sex workers are by and large working class.

51:52We haven't had the luxury of trying to identify what is good work and what is bad work. We just need to do work. We just need to survive. Sex work might not be good work. It might not even for some people be bad work, but it is work. We don't have the luxury of pontificating over those decisions we also as working class as you know as sex workers aren't able to often conceive of police as you know protective benefactors because they are the enforcers of laws against us and if you're working class if you're black particularly if you're trans the police are the people who target you specifically when you look at people who support the Nordic model, and this isn't all of them, but it's certainly the people that I've come into contact with, they are middle class.

52:41They are in occupations that they can consider good work. They're journalists, they're politicians, they're, you know, maybe they're a trustee for a charity. They've never had to stare down the barrel of, do I do something that is illegal so I can feed my family? Or do I, you know, wait out for the next graduate position? Like, and I think that class divide is not only about kind of, you know, whether sex work is work or not, because they can only conceive of work as being good work. But it's also about the way that they view the police. They are able to see the police as, you know, their benefactors, as their protectors, because they're the middle class.

53:23And the police were set up to protect the interests of the middle class. The main thing that I would say is that, yeah, the Nordic model doesn't benefit sex workers in any way, shape or form. And the most important people to listen to in conversations about whether sex workers want the Nordic model, sex workers want decriminalisation are sex workers who are currently working right now. I don't care if you're a sex worker, but you've not sex worked for like the last 10 years. You can have your opinion, but you're not going to be directly impacted by the law so yeah in any conversation around the law is the sex workers who are currently working who should be listened to the most and it's the sex workers who are currently working who by and large want decriminalization finally if anyone listens to this goes i want to help or i want to get involved with campaigning where should they go yeah so you can um come check out our social media i think our instagram is like at decrim now i think our twitter is at decriminal uk or you can look at our website and we've got like a whole range of ways that you can support sex workers you can meet with your mp which is often the most powerful way to enact change we can support you through that process you can also if you are a trade union member you can pass a decriminalization motion in your trade union like you know members in cwu ucu rcn have already done or you can invite us to speak at your trade union meeting or conference.

54:51Thank you so much. It was such a good episode because you covered some deeply personal things, but also a really, really good overview of the law and I think spelt it out really clearly. So thank you so much. No worries, thank you. I hope it was alright. No, it was great. This episode was brought to you by Crowdfunder. What's your bold idea? Start it at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold.

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