Week 6: Commercial sex and the global economy

Responses to human trafficking and modern slavery can sometimes end up doing more harm than good. They may well be motivated by good intentions, but they nonetheless end up hurting the people whom they are ostensibly designed to help. This recurring pattern has come to be described in terms of ‘collateral damage’. These damages include police abusing those they are supposed to be rescuing, immigration agents deporting migrants captured in raids, and individuals who have been ‘rescued’ being subject to all kinds of incarceration, exploitation and abuse. The problem of collateral damage is especially acute when it comes to commercial sex work, where all kinds of external interventions have been justified in terms of combating sex trafficking and forced prostitution.

In many parts of the globe, ‘human trafficking’ remains synonymous with images of young white women duped into sex slavery in foreign countries where they are repeatedly raped and brutalised. It is this simplistic scenario, more than any other, which is held to epitomise all that is unacceptable about trafficking and modern slavery. After all, who but a coerced person would want to do sex work, and how can sex work be anything other than exploitative?

There are all kinds of problems here. Despite increasing rhetoric about ‘labour trafficking’ many governments and campaigners only really focus on practices specifically related to sex, which can have the effect of detracting attention from the extreme levels of inequality and exploitation associated with neoliberal globalisation. Within this narrow focus on sex, the simplistic scenario of ‘innocence lost’ has been politically weaponised in support of campaigns challenging the legitimacy of all forms of commercial sex work. What too often gets lost here is the ways in which sex workers themselves understand sex work as a form of reproductive labour – like many other forms of reproductive labour involved in biological reproduction, domestic work, child care, elder care and so on – performed by them under conditions of capitalist patriarchy. At times, sex work can be highly coerced. At other times it is resorted to relatively voluntarily, guaranteeing sex workers a level of income which would be rare for most female reproductive labourers.

This session revisits feminist debates on sex work and competing policy approaches to regulating sex work, with particular emphasis on the problems associated with attempting to end trafficking by resorting to punitive, Swedish-style anti-sex work laws. We then consider what an alternative legal approach to sex work and trafficking could look like.