This is the blog of a historian named Charlotte (she/it/they), known across the Internet as PhD, DSc, MD, PT Discworld. Officially a PhD! (also received a Professor of Thaumology from Unseen University, Ankh Morpork). She has interests in goth music, science, academia, Doctor Who, Discworld, and various other topics. Trans as fuck. GNU Terry Pratchett
i kind of hate that whenever something impacts sex work/pornography/etc people go “theyre gonna use this as a stepping stone to censor things that REALLY matter!” like sex workers arent fucking people that need money to live
Great news! Belgium today becomes the first country in the world where sex workers can sign a legal employment contract and gain access to all employment-dependent social security (which includes saving for a pension, paid pregnancy leave, paid sick leave etc.). It gives sex workers more rights and makes them less dependent on the goodwill of their employer because they now have state protection through a legal contract.
Belgian sex workers have gained the right to sick days, maternity pay and pension rights under the first law of its kind in the world.
Lawmakers voted in May to give sex workers the same employment protections as any other employee, in an attempt to clamp down on abuse and exploitation.
The law, which went into force on Sunday, ensures that sex workers have employment contracts and legal protection.
It is intended to end a grey zone created in 2022 when sex work was decriminalised in Belgium but without conferring any protections on sex workers, or labour rights such as unemployment benefit or health insurance.
Under the law, sex workers have the right to refuse sexual partners or to perform specific acts and can stop an act at any time. Nor can they be sacked for these refusals.
I am fully serious about this btw. not “pro sex work” as in “there are no issues whatsoever within the industry”, but “pro sex work” as in “these are jobs and the workers should be a) allowed to work and b) protected from their customers by the law”
i’ve been a hooker most of my adult life in new zealand where we do have decrim. stigma is still a huge thing, but it really does make things better.
a few months ago, i sat in on a meeting with worksafe, which monitors occupational health and safety. decrim has been in place for twenty years, and worksafe was finally in a position where they thought that maybe they could train their staff to be comfortable inspecting brothels and other sex work establishments for health and safety regulations.
worker after worker, anonymous or activist or academic or none of the above, told stories at least as bad as the ones i’ve had myself: being locked into rooms or buildings, not being allowed off shift, having pay withheld, and of course worse. and what struck me was that the worksafe people invariably understood most of the ways brothel and strip club owners abuse their workers as the same hazards they saw in agriculture or factories: detaining people is a fire hazard. not paying them, or plying them with alcohol on the job to convince them to work overtime, is illegal everywhere.
and with the law in place — with twenty years of proof that sex work decriminalisation so drastically reduced violence against sex workers that it impacted the overall nz statistics for violence against women — worksafe finally felt comfortable with the idea of going into workplaces that still frequently violate absolutely every nz employment law.
fired up strippers is an organisation here that began as unionisation from a single strip club. it’s grown since then to do the things that the increasingly complacent parts of leadership at the new zealand prostitutes’ collective, founded pre-decriminalisation, cannot do: name the whole system as still broken, and call for structural change that doesn’t stop at technical-legal acceptance. they’ve set up stripper poles outside parliament and had supportive MPs pose with it. they’ve called for people to show up in the streets and had crowds, ranging from older white professionals in coats through young queers breaking out the sluttiest gear they have in support, come through.
one of the most toxic instincts in brothels is when people see new workers as “stealing money from my family’s mouths”, as competition. owners encourage that perspective because it makes it a race to the bottom where we’ll accept that they don’t wash towels or the degrading pleather is giving everyone contact dermatitis or they’re pressuring people into providing specific services. solidarity is the answer, on a level more profound than the natural “brothel mom” dynamic that often pops up.
decriminalisation — not legalisation, because if you make something legal the police still get to decide who falls outside that legal box, and their presence still creates fear and violence — is the only solution.
It’s always weird seeing anti-porn content that uses the argument: “This woman went into porn and was successful for a few years. But once her popularity faded and she wanted to move on, she found that her well-known past involvement in the sex industry seriously hurt her career prospects. This is why all pornography must be banned.”
Like you fucking asshole, its people like you that are the reason this happens to people who were in the sex industry!!! This would not have happened if employers would just be like “wow you spent the last few years successfully self-employed in content creations and social media marketing.” Its the fucking conservative who do this.
I think wed all benefit if everyone on this website learned that sex work isn’t just part of a feminist issue, it’s part of a modern cultural erasure of sex and pleasure and a class antagonism that has been fostered since the advent of capitalism, and more importantly: I like my fucking job
Whenever I say I like doing sex work, there’s always people who run in screaming about how I must be privileged then because survival sex workers don’t like their work
And then they stuff their fingers in their ears and pretend they can’t hear me when I say I’m disabled several ways and unemployable and that every civilian job I’ve ever had left me with more damage to my various disabilities than irl sex work, online sex work, or phone sex work ever did and that I have been scraping by as a begger for years so any sex work I do is inherently survival sex work
I have a decade of experience with different forms of sex work. Out of all the jobs I’ve done, I like sex work the most. I look back fondly on my time doing irl sex work in ways that I don’t look back at Target or the factory or the resort call center or anything else.
If capitalism didn’t exist, if money didn’t exist, my ideal life would still include being some sort of massive slut. I would still record myself and photograph myself being a slut. I would still be interacting with people for the sake of kink.
hey can you not use literally me as a gotcha against me to score points against capitalism as if it’s my fault. i am disabled and i am poor and the money i get from my work isn’t enough to support myself alone. i absolutely agree that being forced into any work at all, not just sex work (you don’t have to single out sex work to judge capitalism), is a grotesque way to organize a society, but i am also not a prop for you to make that point, especially when you are derailing the conversation from a different point that your prop was trying to make. this is no situation to use the word but buddy, you’re gonna have to accept that even the sluts can like their jobs and that can coexist with forced labor being exploitative if you wanna be anticapitalist
I’m an engineer. My brain is a body part. I sit at a desk most of the time, to the detriment of my physical health. I get paid to do stuff I wouldn’t otherwise do.
If not for capitalism, I would probably be a writer, singer, artist.
dabwax would still be a cheerful self-identified slut.
Seems to me that I’m in a way more coercive relationship with my source of income.
the way people on here talk about the porn ban makes me completely fucking insane honestly.
yes I would love a return to the old ways.
no that isn’t something staff have control over, it’s a systemic issue with puritanical groups intentionally strangling online infrastructure to make adult content impossible to platform.
no that doesn’t mean the ban was value neutral and I will fucking kill you with my mind if you start going on about how ‘it just meant all the annoying people left’
sex workers left, and so did the high spending customers who made tumblr a viable platform for a lot of other small creators
a lot of sex educators and queer outreach groups also left, and nobody seems to remember that they were a huge part of the landscape here
you have to take the eradication of sexual content from online spaces seriously as an issue that affects more than whether you personally can post catgirl balls on one specific platform
there is no 'good social media’ in 2023 that will ever be equipped to solve this problem until the financial/cultural issue is addressed. decentralisation is your best bet. sorry.
btw there is no getting away from the fact that a lot of the Types of Guys you sneer at on twitter and reddit and talk about scaring off with your crazy loco posting are the same types of guys who pay sustainable dollars for the pornography you say you want back. it’s a whole separate issue but you have to make peace with the fact most SWers cater to a lot of cringe middle class normcore freaks. the weird dads who comment on feet subsidise porn for the commune.
Imgur was created in 2009, and has remained one of the most popular image hosting sites on the internet for decades. Its 300 million active users access content on the platform over 60 billion times per month. Compared to other image hosting sites of the early 2000s, such as Photobucket, Imgur has a reputation for being a place to host niche, originally created works, including memes, personal artwork, image macros, fan art, and yes, highly specific porn and fetish content that caters to small yet passionate communities.
Until 2016, the only way to share images on Reddit was by passing them through Imgur first. If you didn’t already have an Imgur account when you were making a Reddit post, you mostly likely uploaded it without bothering to create one, so your image files were posted anonymously. But Imgur is now mass-deleting all images that can’t be linked to an existing account. This means that the vast majority of image posts on Reddit that predate 2016 will be completely broken after Imgur’s new terms of service are adopted. That’s not just posts with pornography or nude photographs that are getting removed, which would be a sizeable data loss itself, but nearly eleven years worth of digital history.
Many of these in-depth Reddit posts are absolutely reliant upon images. And every single one of them that came before 2016 can potentially be ruined following the Imgur purge. Even many posts that were made after 2016 will be destroyed as well, because many Reddit users who upload images to Imgur never create official accounts.
Whenever sexual content is driven from social media, there is little in the way of public mourning. If anything, there is a tepid acknowledgement of the harm that will befall sex workers, alongside outright celebration that at last these sites will be scrubbed of the most unseemly and dangerous sides of human nature, and at last rendered “safe.” But condemning future generations of queer and kinky people to ignorance and loneliness is not saving them. And exposing someone to sexual content too early in life is not the only form of sexual harm. Denying a person a chance at self-recognition can be equally traumatic, and violent.
Those of us who do decry the sanitization and Disney-Worldification of the internet are frequently likened to predators who wish to expose our bodies and proclivities to children. Our mere existence as adult sexual beings with adult bodies is deemed a threat. Paradoxically, we are also mocked for taking the removal of erotic art so seriously. Porn is somehow viewed in our culture as both frivolously pointless, and profoundly terrifying.
But in reality, sex is not dangerous. And sex is not frivolous. It’s a rapturous, inevitable, and an essential force in human life. Sex isn’t for everyone, but it is one of the most precious ways to experience inhabiting a body, and refusing to acknowledge the existence of sex makes it impossible to fully appreciate human history, identity, or any form of art.
Sex’s removal from public discourse and digital record keeping is a hateful, genocidal destruction of one of the most precious aspects of the human experience. We are right to mourn for it. And we are right to fear what comes next, after our bodies are rendered unviewable and our dreams unspeakable.
the first time i posted this essay link, tumblr removed it for being sexual content and then blurred my account. jesus fucking christ. read the piece, please. our ability to communicate and find one another online is rapidly eroding and this is no light matter
Police:*leading sex workers into a squad car to be taken to jail*
Sex work prohibitionist: “I called the police! You’re all free now! No more patriarchal violence! No need to thank me!”
Prohibitionist: “How does it feel to be free of your pimp?”
Sex worker: “I was an independent worker!”
Prohibitionist: “Yeah right, so how much did the porn industry pay you to say that, faker?”
Sex worker: “Who will care for my kids?”
Prohibitionist: “No worries, they’ll be placed with a nice Christian foster family who will teach them to hate and judge you as harshly as possible.”
Prohibitionist: “This is to protect you. It’s feminism. I’m a feminist.”
Former sex slave: Wait so I went to the police and I got arrest for being sold into sex work?
Prohibitionist: Yup! That way we can make sure people don’t get sold into sex slavery!
Former sex slave: But that just makes victims less likely to come forward?
Prohibitionist: pRoTeCt WoMeN
Former sex worker: I have been arrested and prosecuted and now have a criminal record which greatly reduces my ability to get a non-sex work related job.
Prohibitionist: Yep, but it was to help you get out of the sex work. Now you can get “real” jobs working for minimum wage or less. We did good. Why aren’t you thanking me?
Prohibitionist: We want to implement the Nordic Model: Sex work is not criminalized but those who pay for sex are.
Sex worker: So you mean I’m going to lose most of my customers except for those who are willing to commit a crime? Won’t that make my job more unsafe?
A moralistic program in Phoenix arrests sex workers in massive raids and brings them to a church, where they are held extrajudicially and offered alternative sentences without lawyers, judges, or due process.
In May 2013, Monica Jones, a student and sex-work activist, was arrested for “manifesting prostitution” by the Phoenix police.
Hers was one of more than 350 arrests carried out by Project ROSE in conjunction with Phoenix police since the program’s inception in 2011.
Project ROSE is a Phoenix city program that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion program to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially “arrested” at all.
In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were “programs.” The arrests were “contact.” And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were “lawfully detained.”
“Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem,” Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting “help.”
Project ROSE is the creation of Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. She is the director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research and a tenured professor at Arizona State University, where Monica Jones is a student. Once, she and Monica had even debated Project ROSE.
According to Project ROSE’s website, most costs are absorbed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries of the officers carrying out the raids. Fifteen-hundred dollars more per day goes to the Bethany Bible Church. Volunteers, including students from Arizona State University, fill in the gaps. SWOP-Phoenix, an activist organization by and for sex workers, is filing freedom-of-information requests to discover ROSE’s other sources of funding.
At first, Project ROSE may seem similar to the many diversion programs in the United States, in which judges sentence offenders to education, rehab, or community service rather than giving them a criminal record. What makes ROSE different is that it doesn’t work with the convicted. Rather, its raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE’s program without being convicted of any crime. Project ROSE may not seem constitutional, but to Roe-Sepowitz, “rescue” is more important than rights.
In November 2013, Roe-Sepowitz told Al Jazeera: “Once you’ve prostituted you can never not have prostituted… Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy.”
“As a social worker, you’re supposed to see your clients as human beings,” Monica told me. “But her way of thinking is that once you’re a sex worker, you can never not be a sex worker.”
To the best of Google’s knowledge, Roe-Sepowitz has not spoken to any press since Al Jazeera. She ignored my repeated requests for comment, and she has only been willing to engage sex workers if they risked their freedom by speaking to her class alongside members of the police.
Monica is a proud activist. Days ago she spoke to USA Today, comparing struggles against Arizona’s SB 1062 bill (which permits businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals) to those her family fought for their civil rights. On her third year of a social-work degree, Monica volunteers with battered women, works at a needle exchange, and passes out condoms to sex workers. She is a member of SWOP-Phoenix. She describes herself as “homemaker at heart,” a girl who loves to cook, dance, and party, but also as an “advocate.”
Monica fears she was targeted for this advocacy.
On the day cops dragged Monica to Bethany Bible Church, she had posted on Backpage.com, an advertising service used by sex workers, to warn them of a coming sting. The day before, she had spoken against Project ROSE at a SWOP rally.
Monica told me she had accepted a ride home from her favorite bar the night of her arrest. Once inside the car, undercover officers handcuffed her. They were rude, she said, calling her “he” and “it” (Monica is trans, but her ID lists her as a female). They threatened to take her to jail. Like many incarcerated trans women, Monica had previously been imprisoned with men. Frightened, Monica agreed for them to take her to the church.
Ineligible for Project ROSE’s diversion program because of previous prostitution convictions, Monica now faces months in jail and worries incarceration will hamper her pursuit of a degree. She has been questioned on the street three times since her arrest. Once, police handcuffed her for 15 minutes.
“Because I was very outspoken about the diversion program, being out there protesting and also being a student of ASU School of Social Work, I feel like the police knew about me,” Monica said. “I was very loud, so they could pick me out of the crowd.”
Monica was arrested for “manifesting prostitution,” a statute in the Phoenix municipal code that takes everything from starting conversations with passersby to asking if someone is an undercover cop as proof that you’re selling sex. In the state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost massive lawsuits for racially profiling Latinos, “manifesting prostitution” is another way to discriminate. The main victims are trans women of color like Monica, who are seen as sex workers even if they’re buying milk.
Some might say Project ROSE is harmless. After all, those eligible for diversion can have their charges dropped if they’re among the 30 percent who manage to complete the program. But many of the hundreds arrested in Project ROSE’s raids are not eligible, either because cops find drugs or weapons on them or because they’ve been charged with prositution before.
“All persons found to be participating in prostitution activity are breaking the law, regardless of motive,” says the fact sheet Project ROSE gives the media. Those not eligible are criminals. Their freedom is a small price to pay for forcing others into a program that might remove them from “the life.”
To effect this rescue, Project ROSE offers a buffet of services, including emergency housing, detox, and counseling. All these services are available without being arrested, Jaclyn Dairman, an activist with SWOP-Phoenix, told me.
But at ROSE’s heart is DIGNITY Diversion, 36 hours of classroom time run by Catholic Charities.
Catholic Charities’ website boasts a photo of a white girl, a tear running down her cheek. Who could resist opening their wallets before such innocence destroyed? Catholic Charities offers walking tours of the sketchy parts of town. Tender-hearted folk can gawk at sex workers. These excursions are like the slum tours beloved by Victorians. Popular enough in the 1890s to be listed in guidebooks, these tours of impoverished London neighborhoods gave a philanthropic gloss to the thrill of mingling with the poor in brothels, bars, and boarding houses. Then and now, participants got the self-satisfaction of pity mixed with the frisson of proximity to vice.
This cocktail may be why sex trafficking, as opposed to trafficking in maids or construction workers or farm labor, is always a fashionable cause.
Monica is a graduate of DIGNITY Diversion. Forced into this program by another prostitution arrest, Monica sat in a classroom from 8 AM to 4 PM, without food, while vice cops described girls overdosing on heroin. Jail was held over the heads of attendees until they finished the program, though many were going broke from their loss of sex-work income. Monica described the class as having the religious overtones of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In keeping with the program’s Catholicism, no condoms were provided. Neither was child care.
“I wasn’t ashamed about being a sex worker. I kept bringing this up during the diversion program,” Monica told me. “Girls would ask me why I didn’t feel this way. Well, ‘cause I don’t. I have the right to my own body.”
Catholic Charities requested that Monica leave early, fearing her influence on others.
Monica’s trial is in March. The prisons she may be sentenced to are brutal. Arizona is the home of the notorious Tent City, an outdoor complex of bunks and razor wire, where prisoners’ shoes melt from the relentless heat.
In 2009, Marcia Powell, a sex worker serving two years for agreeing to a $20 blowjob, was left in an open cage in the maximum-security yard of Perryville Prison Complex for four hours. Guards ignored her pleas for water. Under the pitiless sun, her organs failed her. Her corpse was covered with burns.
No guard has ever been charged for Marcia Powell’s death.
“There is no gray. It’s illegal behavior,” Dominique Roe-Sepowtitz said, speaking about prostitution to Al Jazeera.
Like Catholic Charities’ hooker tours, her attitude is Victorian. To those like Roe-Sepowitz, there are God’s poor and the Devil’s poor. There are victims Project ROSE can save, and there repeat offenders, unrepentant whores. They can be locked in cages and dismissed.
When the police brought Monica to the Bethany Baptist Church, she saw Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. “She refused to talk to me,” Monica said. “She wanted nothing to do with me.”
Why would she? It’s easier to speak for people if you pretend they have no voice.
There’s literally nothing wrong with sex work, and there’s nothing wrong with people who buy from sex workers like… It’s the implication that people (because it’s not just cis men, it’s not just these sleazy ‘undeserving’ monsters y'all have invented who patronize sex workers) who 'buy’ sex are scum of the work, um. Why are y'all so weird about sex work???
the ever-tightening noose of the internet’s anti-sexuality era continues (x) in part due to bipartisan anti-sex work laws surrounding finance capital - an overtly top-down class warfare
since i’m starting to get people claiming that this isn’t true - here is the actual statement from OF. notably:
they do note that they will allow (implicitly, nonsexual) ‘nudity’, what I imagine must be just ‘artistic’ representations. Obviously, this means a limitation of many of the things that sex workers sell on OF (namely, the depiction of sex acts).
You would think that people who are on Tumblr of all places would get what the failure points of this sort of ‘nonsexual nudity’ vs. ‘sexually-explicit content’ could be. But all of this to say - yes, a large share of the type of videos and images that sex workers create on OnlyFans will start being prohibited!
please do not be so quick to claim something is fake.
A new government report on the impacts of the anti-sex trafficking bill SESTA/FOSTA reveals what sex workers already know: It is not only ineffective but devastatingly harmful. This isn’t just obvious from the felt impacts of the last few years since the bill’s passage; it’s exactly what activists warned would happen ahead of its passage. This week’s Government Accountability Office (OAG) report finds that SESTA/FOSTA has been used one single time in a sex trafficking prosecution, contrary to the bill’s purported aim of holding websites criminally liable for facilitating sex trafficking. Meanwhile, the OAG findings show that SESTA/FOSTA’s 2018 passage, along with the takedown of the classified ad site Backpage, have resulted in a fracturing of the online sex industry, which actually restricts trafficking investigations.
“It was everything we anticipated,” says Kate D’Adamo, a partner at the collective Reframe Health and Justice, of reading the report. “It was everything that we tried to convey to Congress.” Allie Eve Knox puts the findings another way: “No, duh.” She has long stood against SESTA/FOSTA, which “hurts sex workers and honestly helps traffickers.”
Among the obvious harms that activists anticipated was that “there would be massive destabilization in the sex industry,” and “that people were going to move to other sites, that it was going to be harder to communicate,” says D’Adamo. “That it was going to be harder to identify people who needed help.” Now, here comes the GAO report to confirm just that: In the wake of those developments in 2018, “buyers and sellers moved to other online platforms, and the market became fragmented.” Website operators “shut down or suspended operations in the United States,” sometimes moving overseas. “The current landscape of the online commercial sex market heightens already-existing challenges law enforcement face in gathering tips and evidence,” says the report.
Here’s a passage from the report especially worthy of a highlight: The ability to “identify and locate sex trafficking victims and perpetrators was significantly decreased.”
The report looks not only at the post-SESTA/FOSTA period but also the four years prior and lists some 11 criminal cases brought against platform owners. “Of the charges, they said that the most common ones were racketeering and money laundering,” says D’Adamo. One of the arguments originally given for SESTA/FOSTA was that it was an essential tool for directly targeting platforms for facilitating sex trafficking, and yet the GAO report notes that prosecutors have had plenty of “success” with other tools at their disposal.
What the OAG report fails to highlight is the devastating impact on sex workers amid SESTA/FOSTA’s patent failures. A report from the collective Hacking//Hustling on SESTA/FOSTA’s impact on sex workers found that 72 percent of respondents felt it contributed to their “increased economic instability” and 34 percent reported an increase in violence from clients.” We’ve seen how it’s led to the shuttering of crucial platforms where sex workers can advertise and safely vet clients, and led to reports of an increase in riskier in-person work. That’s not to mention censorship on social media and banking discrimination. “The only payment app that I had left shut down almost two weeks ago,” says Knox. “I’m purely crypto now.”
Of the SESTA/FOSTA aftermath, she says, “It’s a fucking nightmare.” D’Adamo hopes that this nightmare will be laid bare with the re-introduction of the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, legislation for a national study on the bill’s impact.
As much as this report shows that SESTA/FOSTA failed to address its purporting aims around sex trafficking, there are some for whom this is a victory. Melissa Gira Grant notes today in the New Republic, “If SESTA/FOSTA was meant to associate sex workers with allegations of sex trafficking, leading platforms to refuse them service out of fear of increased legal risks, and in turn further marginalizing and stigmatizing sex workers, it was a tremendous success.” D’Adamo, pointing to several abolitionist organizations, says, “There are absolutely people where destabilization of the sex trade, pushing it further underground, invisibilizing sex workers was a goal.”
However, she also notes that many SESTA/FOSTA supporters were simply misled into believing that it would address sex trafficking while doing little harm. “Most staffers, most congresspeople were sold a false bill of goods,” says D’Adamo. Of course, the warnings were there all along. As she puts it, “What I hope people take from this report is that they should probably listen to impacted people who are doing this work.”
That last fucking line. Just listen to sex workers.
Next time we gripe about the tiddy ban, also take a moment to think about all of this and what it did to sex workers, the absolute lie of it, and the people who pushed it.
Ireland adopted the Nordic model in 2017, making the purchase of sex illegal and criminalizing “brothels” (defined to include two or more sex workers sharing an apartment). Sex Workers Alliance Ireland conducted a survey in 2020 to monitor the effects of the law on sex workers. The findings were, unsurprisingly, that it made sex work more dangerous, screening clients more difficult, and so on.
In response to one question, “What have been the major impacts of the change in the law on your work?”, the answers:
83.33% said “I cannot live/work with another sex worker for fear of arrest for brothel keeping” 75% said “I worry that the police will arrest my clients” 70.83% said “I worry that the police might arrest me” 62.50% said “I am now more worried about violence and abuse” 54.17% said “It is now more difficult to screen clients” 33.33% said “It is now too difficult to keep regular clients that I trust” 29.17% said “I feel pressured into performing unsafe sexual practices” 20.83% said “I have had to drop my prices to get clients” 12.50% said “I don’t have time to negotiate with clients”
Only 8.33% (2 respondents) said “I am more likely to go to the Gardaí [police] if a crime has been committed against me”, and 0% selected the (humorously sarcastic) options “I now have too many clients to deal with” or “I feel more empowered.”
To explain why the law makes screening more difficult, SWAI write that it “may be because it is now the client who is breaking the law, not the worker, so clients are more reluctant to submit to screening processes as they are the ones taking criminal risks.”
In response to the question “Do you think sex work is now more dangerous or less dangerous since the law was introduced?”, 70.83% of responders gave the maximum option, “It is a lot more dangerous now.” On pg. 19-20 they review crimes against sex workers and find that all categories of crime have increased since the law was introduced, some quite drastically.
