An open letter in support of Amnesty International's recent proposals to decriminalise sex work.
It is too simple to frame children involved in child prostitution in India and ‘sex trafficking’ in Canada as mere victims. Their roles in these phenomena are far more complex.
The US government is using anti-human trafficking laws to intensify the surveillance and criminalisation of migrating women and harden the national security state—as it has since 1875.
Anti-trafficking campaigns have their roots in 19th-century efforts to ‘save’ white women from ‘white slavery.’ Contemporary strategies broaden the stigmatisation and criminalisation, impacting a range of vulnerable communities.
Journalists and researchers writing about sex workers do long-lasting damage to their sources when they treat sex work as an area of exception to their journalistic ethics.
‘Sex at the margins’ and ‘Understanding global slavery’ are, on the surface, markedly different treatments of modern trafficking. However, their common undercurrent is their defence of the market and neoliberal agendas.
Despite efforts to automatically label teen and youth sex workers as ‘victims’ of trafficking, and thereby prevent their prosecution, their often extensive interactions with the legal system continue to leave lasting marks.
The conflation of trafficking and prostitution in antitrafficking discourses not only frames all sex workers as victims in need of rescue, but elides the reasons many include sex work as part of their complex livelihood strategies.
In calling for the Associated Press to stop using the phrase ‘sex worker’, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women makes exaggerated claims about violence against women in order to censor representations of people who consensually perform sexual labor. Español
