- Position‹3 of 3
- Sex work should not be decriminalised
Due to sex work's current illegal status in many countries, sex work support clinics have been essential in supporting the workers where the law will not. If sex work is decriminalised, those support networks will be invalidated.
The argument
Sexual exploitation and criminality will exist within the sex work industry regardless of the legal status of prostitution, and sex work support services are essential to providing a barrier between sex workers and the social and legal consequences of their occupations. The premise is that the harms and the law are separable. If exploitation is a feature of the industry rather than a product of its illegality, then a change in legal status leaves the need for support exactly where it was, while changing the public understanding of whether that need still exists. These services are frequently underfunded and stigmatized. Decriminalising sex work would call into question the necessity of these organisations. The risk is one of perception rather than of policy design: decriminalisation is widely presented as a remedy, and once a remedy has been enacted the problem it addressed is assumed to have been dealt with. Services that were justified by reference to the legal consequences facing sex workers lose the argument that funded them, even though the exploitation they were built to respond to is unaffected by the reform. Theoretically, these organisations could lose their few supporters, who may believe their money should be directed towards organisations helping those who are unfairly criminalised. Support for this work is already thin, and the donors sustaining it are motivated by precisely the injustice that decriminalisation is offered as resolving, so the reform redirects the funding base towards whichever group is then identified as criminalised and away from services whose users no longer appear to be among them. Already, Amnesty International is being taken to task over its support of decriminalising sex work in legislation, which proves that even well-intended services can be taken to task over the complex nature of prostitution and its legality. The controversy shows how contested this ground is, and organisations dependent on voluntary funding are poorly placed to survive a public dispute about whether their work is needed at all.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The existence of those support services indicates that sex workers are not employed in a safe environment. Continuing to expose them to that environment by denying legality in the name of the organisations meant to protect them is, at the very least, deeply ironic.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] If exploitation persists under every legal regime, that counts against criminalisation as much as for support services. The premise also concedes the point the position needs to deny: those services exist because the current environment is unsafe, so preserving that environment in order to preserve the services inverts their purpose. [Rejecting P2] The link from decriminalisation to defunding is speculative, and the argument itself states it only as a theoretical possibility. Need, not criminal status, is what generates demand for health, outreach and exiting services, and decriminalisation tends to make the people who need them easier to reach — which is the evidence funders respond to. [Rejecting P3] The Amnesty episode shows the policy is contested, not that funding depends on criminalisation. The criticism was directed at the organisation's position on the law, not at the provision of support services.