Abstract
Focusing on the UK case, this essay explores how ideas and political practices around sex as work took root in a particular national space and shifted over time. Sex work helped to alter the political and social perception of sex traders, repudiating their marginality and positioning them in the mainstream of ordinary working lives. Beginning in the 1970s, political activists aligned the idea of sex as work with a defense of female practitioners as “ordinary” women doing ordinary women’s work. Sex work offered substantial rhetorical advantages for rights activists, who linked a work paradigm to practical demands for criminal justice reform and social and health initiatives. At the same time, the idea of sex as work provoked challenges inside and outside the ranks of sex traders. Antiviolence campaigners disputed that prostitution was a “job like any other” and competed with sex work projects for state resources and recognition. The discourse of sex work also occasioned some resistance within the ranks of sex traders, revealing disparate views about identity politics, the state and the market, and even what sex and work meant.
In 1978, Carol Leigh, sex trader, poet, erotic performance artist, and pioneer member of the San Francisco prostitute rights group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), coined the phrase sex work.1 The historical occasion of Leigh’s invention of this new term was telling. As a feminist and “working prostitute,” Leigh attended an antipornography conference sponsored by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media held in San Francisco in November 1978.2 She felt ambivalent about the political objectives of the conference. She was sympathetic to attacking violent representation in the media but was opposed to denouncing pornography per se. She noticed a sign directing participants to a workshop on the “Sex Use Industry.” The wording ticked her off. “As a feminist,” she thought that “sex use” demeaned women in the industry, concentrating only on what was “done” to them by men. Convinced that language could be used to combat stigma and “women’s internalized oppression,” she devised an alternative phrase, “sex work industry,” to accentuate women’s own perspective and their capacity to name their practice.3 Working in a massage parlor at the time, she firmly believed what she did there felt “like work to me.”4 A “sex-positive” feminist, she equally wanted to convey that the work she did entailed sex.5 She further believed that sex work could rhetorically unite women working across different parts of the sex trades. Over the two next decades, the phrase sex work gained wide popularity in prostitute rights campaigns, most of them focused on mobilizing women in the trade. Thanks to the 1987 publication of the anthology Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry, coedited by Priscilla Alexander and Frédérique Delacoste, and the adoption of the term by international health organizations, sex work spread globally as the term of use for activists and NGOs working with a range of sex traders. It became foundational to demands for criminal justice reform and calls for decriminalization.
Leigh’s contribution was certainly pivotal to sex work politics, but the idea of sex as work existed well before her linguistic formulation and the second-wave feminism that helped to precipitate it. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, this essay traces the changing framework of sex as work, concentrating on rights activists’ imaginative revisions of a work paradigm in political debates over prostitution in the late twentieth century. Although scholars have outlined the history of feminist abolitionism and antitrafficking campaigns, a similar historical genealogy of sex work remains underexplored. Most histories of sex work activism have treated the idea of sex as work as self-evident, with little attention to its assemblage from long-standing feminist ideas about work and the occupational vocabulary of female sex traders.6 Nor do these histories explore the dynamic interaction between a work paradigm and other competing interpretations of prostitution.
This essay explores how ideas and political practices around sex as work took root in a particular national space.7 Sex work helped to alter the political and social perception of sex traders, repudiated their marginality, and positioned them in the mainstream of ordinary working lives. In all these ways, a work paradigm offered substantial rhetorical advantages for rights activists. Beginning in the 1970s, political activists aligned the idea of sex as work with a defense of female practitioners of commercial sex, especially those working on the streets, as “ordinary” women doing ordinary women’s work. Over time, activists would revise this narrow definition of sex worker as “woman” to recognize a broader diversity of workers laboring in various work settings. They further linked a work paradigm to practical demands for criminal justice reform and to other initiatives that pulled them into new relations with the state.
Finally, this essay assesses how the idea of sex as work provoked challenges inside and outside the ranks of sex traders. Sex work politics engendered fierce resistance from antiviolence campaigners who disputed that prostitution was a “job like any other” and competed with sex work projects for state resources and recognition. In the UK and elsewhere, the discourse of sex work also occasioned resistance within the ranks of sex traders, revealing disparate views about identity politics, the state and the market, and even what sex and work meant.
Prostitute Rights Groups and the Right to Work
Sporting provocative titles like COYOTE and PONY (Prostitutes of New York), prostitute rights groups first emerged in the United States in the early 1970s, soon to be followed by the founding of sister organizations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.8 Rights activists were also inspired by the 1975 national strike by French prostitutes to protest the police, an event that garnered international attention.9 After 1985, rights-based activism spread to other parts of the globe and led to the formation of transnational and regional alliances of prostitute rights advocates.10 While inspired by gay and sexual liberation movements, early prostitute rights groups explicitly championed feminist demands—for bodily self-determination, sexual liberation, and financial independence—as rights extending to women who sold sex.11 In the same spirit, they vigorously defended the right to work in the face of exceptionally harsh postwar policing regimes against street prostitution. In cities throughout the Global North, including metropoles in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere, policing of sex traders intensified regardless of the precise legal status of prostitution.12
In the United Kingdom, prostitution was not and is not a crime, but most of the practices associated with it—soliciting, advertising, brothel keeping, payment of third parties—remain illegal.13 In the postwar years, the policing of street prostitution intensified with the passage of the Street Offences Act of 1959, which gave greater powers to arrest female prostitutes for soliciting on the streets and magistrates greater discretion to imprison them.14 Negative rhetoric branding “vice girls” as pathological and mercenary accompanied this punitive regime. From the 1950s to the 1980s, British governmental reports explicitly rejected poverty as a factor in a woman’s move into prostitution, dismissing such reasoning as a vestige of sentimental Victorian thinking that held no purchase in a high-employment, modern welfare state.15
Drawing on three feminist frameworks—the prostitute’s voice, the feminist work ethic, and the politics of housework movement—prostitute rights advocates in Great Britain challenged these new orthodoxies and reinserted women’s work and poverty into discussions around prostitution. To legitimate a work paradigm, they pointed to the fact that working girl was a common form of self-description among women in the sex trades. A twentieth-century locution, working girl was undoubtedly linked to a much older language of business and work among prostitutes of past centuries, who described their work as not so much a profession or a set of skills but, to quote one streetwalker, as a way of gaining “a living” and a strategy for “keeping body and soul together.” By contrast, self-identification as a working girl is a comparatively recent development.16Working girl first appeared in English language print culture in the 1930s and 1940s as popular slang for women in the sex trades.17 By describing themselves as working girls, women selling sex repudiated a distinction long held by Victorian commentators between respectable working girls and “fallen women.”18
Alongside working girl, prostitute rights activists also drew inspiration from more positive understandings about work, notably the long-standing feminist ethos that imbued work with legitimacy, agency, and collectivity. As the critic Kathi Weeks notes, the “feminist work ethic” of the first wave of feminism blended moralistic impulses about the transformational power of work derived from Christianity, classical liberalism, and Marxism, with all the uneasy contradictions entailed in that synthesis.19 As liberals, socialists, and Marxists, many first-wave feminists viewed prostitution through the lens of “political economy,” that is, as a question of female labor supply shaped by an economic market that limited female employment. They also viewed male consumer demand, the other side of the equation, to be artificially incited and in need of restraint. At the same time, they tended to bracket selling sex from more “dignified” forms of labor deemed to be central to women’s self-realization, autonomy, and collective organization.20 In the 1970s, prostitute rights activists tried to break down this division when they spoke of sex as work, even though activists of a Marxian cast also stressed that prostitutes were subject to the same exploitative conditions under capitalism experienced by women laboring in other workplaces. While concerned about standard labor issues, early rights activists resisted calling for more state protection and supervision of workers in the sex trades. Finally, building on the 1970s politics of housework movement, activists likened the work done by sex traders to the necessary labor of social reproduction. They treated sexual labor as one example of the undervalued and intimate labors performed by women inside and outside the household.21
Combining the situated knowledge of the “working girl,” the feminist work ethic, and the politics of housework, rights activists argued that selling sex was no better or worse than other forms of low-paying women’s work.22 Their focus on prostitutes’ agency and self-expression contested some conventional assumptions about women’s powerlessness and passivity, but it less forcefully challenged other ideological norms governing the binary organization of genders and sexualities. Activists might acknowledge, for example, that prostitution, like marriage, exists because it “is to men’s advantage,” but they did not dwell much on male demand, particularly the asymmetries involved in a heavy preponderance of women workers sexually servicing customers who were men.23
These generalizations held for three prominent UK prostitute rights groups of the 1970s that broadcast prostitution as a form of women’s work subject to the same inequitable conditions under which other women labored. In 1976, Birmingham’s PROS (Programme for Reform of the Law on Soliciting) emerged out of the efforts of feminist social workers and probation officers to organize their street prostitute clients into a neighborhood-based grassroots movement.24 PROS referred to its members as prostitutes and working girls/women. Even as they campaigned against the legal designation of “common prostitute” they treated prostitute as an appropriate occupational description stripped of its negative and criminal associations.
Visiting the PROS drop-in center in 1975, the author and social inquirer Jeremy Sandford praised PROS for providing a friendly meeting place where “working girls” “can enjoy themselves and feel less alone.”25 PROS committed itself to antihierarchical politics, building diffuse networks across the Midlands and the north of England and staging public spectacles. It prided itself on being autonomous and independent of the state, even though leading nonprostitute activists of PROS had worked in the public sector. At least one of its cofounders viewed PROS as part of a socialist feminist project, exposing the double oppression of class and gender as well as the capacity of women to organize and resist.26 Repudiating suggestions that they provide social services or “do welfare,” PROS activists committed themselves instead to campaigning for legal reform. While critical of the laws against soliciting, and even speculating publicly on the benefits of zoning some streets as “legitimate ‘red light’ areas,” the group ultimately concentrated its successful public campaign on limited statutory reform.27
The group’s agenda called for the removal of the term common prostitute from the statute books and the abolition of imprisonment as a punishment for solicitation.28 Under the 1959 act, women became legally identified as common prostitutes after three police warnings. Lawmakers justified the legal category of common prostitute as part of a preventive warning system, but PROS rights activists condemned it as stigmatizing and discriminatory.29 By 1982, allied with prison reformers, civil rights organizations, MPs, and legal professionals, the PROS campaign scored a notable success when the imprisonment for solicitation was removed from the statute books, though the term common prostitute remained.30 Shortly after this legislative success, the group disbanded.
To gain public support for their legal campaign, PROS highlighted prostitutes’ status as “ordinary” laboring subjects who could speak for themselves. In the correspondence page of Street Beat, the PROS newsletter, “Jayne” deplored the media’s depiction of prostitutes as “high-heeled sluts” and insisted that campaigning prostitutes were simply “ordinary women trying to fight . . . unjust laws. We . . . run home and cook for our friends and family.”31 Similarly, the PROS activist Eileen McLeod began her campaign book, Women Working: Prostitution Now (1982), with a quote from a PROS member named Sally: “You want to get across that we are ordinary women.”32 McLeod’s book quotes other street prostitutes who described themselves as ordinary women laboring to support their families and who serviced mostly married men, “Mr. Average.”33 Although PROS publicity defended the right of prostitutes to “choose their trade,” PROS members rarely celebrated or even detailed their sexual labor, but they did describe it as physically taxing, exhausting, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous.34 They did not see themselves as driven so much by absolute necessity as by what McLeod characterized as “relative poverty”; they worked in the sex trades to gain ordinary material comforts for themselves and their families.35 On some occasions, however, PROS members would acknowledge that prostitution was in fact “a particular kind of a job,” owing to its illegality, secrecy, and physical dangers.36
Stressing the double burden of prostitutes as earners and caregivers, PROS publicity echoed other cultural documents in this decade, including Tony Garnett’s full-length dramatic film Prostitute (1980), based on the PROS community of Birmingham, that cast prostitute members of PROS alongside professional actors. PROS members played working-class prostitutes, mothers and household earners who look out for each other. The film spotlighted female friendships and gender solidarity among women while minimizing the agency and presence of men in the trade. Men were mostly relegated to the background of the action, apart from the police, who appear as menacing predators.37
Via books, newsletters, documentaries, television interviews, dramatic films, presentations before socialist feminist university women’s groups, and public testimonies, PROS publicity featured prostitutes as speaking subjects who unsentimentally detailed their tedious and dead-end working lives. Most of these testimonies were delivered anonymously or with the individual’s identity obscured by a mask or pseudonym. However, in a historic breakthrough in the UK, a PROS member, Kim L., appeared before a parliamentary commission on women in prison in 1979. Describing herself as a “street prostitute,” she presented herself as a mother and caregiver and urged members of the committee to appreciate that “these girls . . . have got children.”38 In a written testimonial, “Val” explained that “prison doesn’t deter me . . . I’m still at it. . . . The money is the reason. I want my kids to look the same as anyone else’s.”39
The politics of housework also served as a theoretical backbone for the English Collective of Prostitutes, or ECP, whose spokespersons included Selma James, the charismatic leader of Wages for Housework and an internationally renowned Marxist feminist theorist. Since 1972, James had argued that if women were paid for what they did, including sex and motherhood, this cost would bring capitalism to its knees and reveal the total expropriation of the productive labor performed by women inside and outside the home.40 By 1975, inspired by the strike by French prostitutes and their occupation of a church to protest police harassment, young prostitute activists in Wages for Housework came up with the idea of organizing with prostitutes in London.41 James soon embraced this initiative, viewing the organization of prostitutes as an extension of the Wages for Housework campaign and a way to expose the racist and authoritarian police regime in the UK.42 Along with a small, racially diverse cadre of political activists, many of them from the Americas, James spearheaded the ECP in Central London. They proudly reported that “prostitute women” and working girls referred to them as the “girls’ union,” although they did not engage in labor organizing among working girls.43 In homage to the French prostitutes, the ECP staged its own 1982 occupation of the Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross to protest police harassment of streetwalkers.44
James extended the logic of Wages for Housework to selling sex.45 She praised prostitutes as a female vanguard of “urban rebels” because they got paid for what they did. Women sold sex to gain more money and do less work. According to Nina Lopez, another ECP spokesperson, women “work twice as hard as men [in other pursuits] and get much less income, hence they become sellers to men who are buyers.”46 Although the ECP insisted that sex was just one of many kinds of ordinary labors performed by ordinary women, it still registered ambivalence about the business of sex. It made it clear it stood “for prostitutes, against prostitution.”47
During the 1980s, the ECP used the politics of prostitution to expose the social cost for women of Margaret Thatcher’s austerity policies. From her office in King’s Cross, London, James observed migrant sex workers from the North of England plying their trade, having arrived on discount, “away day” train tickets. Established street prostitutes in King’s Cross had a name for this racially diverse group of school leavers, housewives, and single mothers: they called them “Thatcher’s girls” to signal the detrimental effects of Thatcher’s economic and welfare policies on women’s lives.48 The phrase Thatcher’s girls gained popularity among journalists and playwrights as a politicized variant of working girls. In performances of the period, the figure of the working girl or Thatcher’s girl carried an ambiguous double meaning: she simultaneously positioned prostitute women as assertive female independent traders like Margaret Thatcher and as economic casualties of Thatcher’s welfare cuts.49
The emerging discourse of sex work replicated this duality. Both PROS and the ECP treated street prostitution as a precarious condition pursued by women trying to escape “relative poverty” and support their families. Both groups targeted the police and the criminal justice system as arbitrary and corrupt. But other prostitute rights advocates interpreted sex work more positively as an expanded service occupation, deserving of recognition and labor rights and linked to the more lucrative and diversifying off-street parts of the sex industry. These expanding areas would include independent operators in flats, phone sex, massage parlors, and escort services.50 In 1975 Helen Buckingham advanced such an argument when she established a call girls’ group in London that also welcomed male sex traders. Emulating the playful defiance and “sex-positivity” of San Francisco’s COYOTE, Buckingham initially called her group PUSSI (Prostitutes United for Social and Sexual Independence) but soon switched the title to PLAN (Prostitute Laws Are Nonsense), a demure acronym in keeping with British political restraint.51
Buckingham joined with the ECP and PROS in highlighting prostitute women’s double burden as earners and domestic caregivers. While burnishing her acquired skills as a “sex therapist,” Buckingham simultaneously presented herself as a single mother supporting a child.52 But Buckingham also drew distinctions among women working in different sectors of the sex industry. She acknowledged that call girls like herself labored under radically different conditions than women in the street trade.53 Buckingham challenged the typicality of street prostitutes, observing that most women in the sex trades worked indoors and not on the street. She believed that sex traders could become tax-paying citizens, autonomous free traders, and professionals. She remained optimistic about a free market in sex once the constraints of a punitive state were removed. Her enemies were the police and the criminal justice system.54 There are “two kinds of pimps,” Buckingham declared: the “pimps we choose, that is the men in our lives or who act as agents for us, and there are the pimps we don’t choose, like the state or the police or the internal revenue.”55
Prostitute rights groups projected sex traders as rational workers, skilled in work/time discipline and in the management of clients, although some activists in the late 1980s acknowledged the destabilizing effects of crack cocaine drug taking among street workers.56 Criminal justice reform, they argued, was a first step to allowing sex traders to control the conditions of their sexual labor. Whereas PROS campaigned for limited legal reforms, the ECP and PLAN demanded wholesale decriminalization of the sex trade between consenting adults. These two groups understood decriminalization to mean the removal of all prostitute-related crimes from the statute books, leaving police and the criminal justice system free to rely on general criminal statutes to address abuse, fraud, or violence in the sex trades.
All three groups argued that criminalization impeded the ability of working girls to labor with confidence and safety. They looked to criminal justice reform to remove the shame attached to the sale of sex and as a means of affording legal protection to working girls against predators.57 Moreover, by reducing social isolation, decriminalization diminished opportunities for exploitative labor and women’s dependence on third parties.58 Decriminalization would improve the working lives of individuals in the sex trades in other ways. Without an arrest record, a working girl could more easily seek employment outside the sex trade. Decriminalization had spatial implications for work: the removal of prohibitions against advertising and brothels would allow streetwalkers to move indoors and participate in small worker cooperatives. The ECP even claimed that decriminalization would eliminate the need for red-light districts and the nuisance they imposed on neighbors.59 These multiple assertions involved contradictory views of the state, sometimes as a potential resource for women but mostly as a hindrance to women’s autonomous position in the sexual marketplace.
Outreach Support Services and the AIDS Crisis
In the late 1980s, UK prostitute rights organizations remained small, struggling, and, with a few exceptions like the ECP, short-lived. Meanwhile, another set of frontline activists emerged as the main publicists for the sex work paradigm. They were outreach public health workers working with streetwalkers during the AIDS epidemic.60 The AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s led to the expansion of government-funded projects that reached out to street prostitutes, whom public officials believed could spread the disease via heterosexual transmission. Except for two outreach programs, leadership in UK health outreach programs remained in the hands of nonprostitute supporters, increasingly called “allies” by the 1990s, who forged informal collaborations of varying degrees with sex traders.61
By 1994, a report on outreach work identified eighty-one STD outreach programs in the UK that worked with male and female prostitutes, most of them operated by the National Health Service (NHS). Fifteen programs specifically targeted “working women.” Two projects concentrated on male prostitutes. The same report also noted the increasing numbers of “transvestites” and “transsexuals” on the street who were not easily accommodated in services for women.62 Most of these NHS projects participated in national and transnational networks of “sex work projects.” Many, but not all, became sites of innovative service provision.63 Over time, outreach programs expanded services to include drop-in centers and even help with housing. In the late 1990s, when significant numbers of migrants from Eastern Europe entered the ranks of sex traders in the UK, progressively run services began to arrange legal assistance for migrants (estimated at 41 percent of sex workers in the UK in 2009).64 This meant developing advocacy and services well beyond the limits of the NHS. Such advocacy was just “something you did,” declares Georgina Perry, who ran Open Doors in the East End for thirteen years.65
Some activists involved with health outreach expanded into safety initiatives with police to protect street workers from violence.66 In the early 1990s, for example, Edinburgh’s SCOT-PEP (Scottish Prostitutes Education Project) persuaded local authorities in Edinburgh to extend their campaign against violence against women to include protective services for sex workers. Edinburgh’s prostitution policy included a tolerance zone for street workers and a complaint-based approach policy for indoor prostitution. SCOT-PEP activists carefully noted that, just as campaigns against domestic violence “did not equate to the condemnation of marriage,” the new policing policy and provision of social services for sex traders was meant to eradicate violence, abuse, and exploitation but not the business of sex.67
To show their commitment to rights-based activism, UK outreach health programs embraced the sex work paradigm and the interpretive frameworks that informed it. Outreach workers aligned a public health approach called harm reduction with a labor perspective. Harm reduction tried to reduce the risk of “vulnerable” populations by “meeting people where they are without judgment.”68 Harm reduction seemed to imply a critique of risky behavior among sex worker clients, but outreach workers committed to this strategy insisted they had departed from the “judgmental” approach common in clinics. Instead, they argued, harm reduction pragmatically focused on the here and now and valorized experiential knowledge; to reduce risks, outreach services needed to collaborate with sex worker clients, listening and learning from them.69 To achieve that goal, outreach projects discreetly hired ex-streetwalkers as peer educators.70 Some projects with sex worker leadership, like SCOT-PEP, openly supported decriminalization as a form of harm reduction, denouncing the criminal status of sex workers as an impediment to their well-being.71 Health workers also characterized sex trading as a form of work developed around well-developed routines and disciplines conducted in specific times and places. Treating sex traders as rational workers, health activists publicly documented streetwalkers’ use of condoms as a standard work routine and form of “safe sex.”72
Finally, outreach workers became publicists for the term sex work. Their public advocacy of sex work in turn influenced policy makers, media, women working in the trade, and even the police. This expanding politics replicates a global and transnational pattern whereby NGOs funded by governments or by global health organizations to do AIDS prevention work often served as launching pads for more explicit and autonomous sex worker campaigns, particularly in the Global South.73 In 1989, WHO (World Health Organization) recruited Priscilla Alexander of COYOTE to ensure that prostitutes played a role in shaping policy related to AIDS outreach projects. Alexander, whose coedited anthology Sex Work appeared in 1987, claims to have persuaded WHO to adopt the terms sex work and sex worker in lieu of commercial sex work, a term she deemed redundant. Alexander preferred sex worker because it evoked an “agent” independent of a controlling enterprise.74 More than working girl or prostitute, sex worker asserted a positive occupational identity for individuals in the sex trades. Following the lead of WHO, UK outreach workers began to address their clients as “sex workers.”75 As early as 1990, activists associated with SCOT-PEP also wrote about “female sex workers” and “male sex workers.”76 Rosie Campbell, who worked with female streetwalkers in Liverpool, recalls how quickly the linguistic shift toward sex work in the 1990s took hold among UK outreach workers like herself: the “minute that language [sex work] was there . . . people embraced it.”77 By the late 1990s, she recalls, women working in the sex trade began to refer to themselves as sex workers as well as working girls. The term sex work, Campbell adds, helped to “normalize” the practice of commercial sex, connecting it to “the mainstream of women’s lives.”78
The communication efforts of outreach workers and prostitute rights activists around sex work persuaded others of the legitimacy of prostitution as a form of labor. After the vocabulary of sex work and sex workers gained traction and seemed to consolidate a collective occupational identity for individuals in the sex trades, the general trade union GMB signaled its willingness to address safety and other work conditions in the burgeoning and legal “adult entertainment” sector.79 Even the UK police took stock of this semantic shift. By the new millennium, police often referred to sex traders as “sex workers” when interviewed by the press.80 In 2015 the National Policing guidance adopted the term; by 2019, the new guidance explicitly instructed police to change their vocabulary from prostitute to sex worker as part of a long-term effort to improve police culture towards the “sex work” community.81
Despite these achievements, advocates of sex work increasingly confronted an adverse political climate. This political impasse reflected the ascendancy of right-leaning and neoliberal political regimes and a widespread upsurge of aggressive local vigilantism against street prostitution, along with mounting governmental concern over the migration of sex workers across national boundaries.82 When a public rift simultaneously erupted among feminists over prostitution as work or as sexual violence, this conflict fueled a dramatic shift in public discourse and prostitution politics. Emerging out of one sector of feminism, antiviolence rhetoric provided cover for uneasy alliances forged among anti–sex work feminists, New Labour, and conservative religious activists who targeted the sex trades and migrant sex workers.83
Sharpening Divisions: Sex Work versus Violence against Women
In the 1990s, feminist conflicts over prostitution in the UK grew more acrimonious and public, as antiviolence campaigners denounced the exchange of sex for money as a priori violence against women and endorsed a set of programs to eradicate it. This represented a new political departure. During most of the 1970s antiviolence activists in the UK had concentrated on voluntary services and refuges for domestic violence victims and had very little to say about prostitution. However, in the late 1970s commercial sex in the form of pornography emerged as a prime target of UK feminist antiviolence campaigns during the five-year reign of terror (1975–81) of Peter Sutcliffe, a serial killer operating in Leeds and Bradford, who mostly attacked prostitutes and was dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper by the press.84
In 1978, amid the Yorkshire Ripper uproar, a group calling itself the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists took to the streets to protest the proliferation of pornography shops.85 Claiming to be a vanguard of “angry women” as well as lesbian separatists, they embraced US feminist Robin Morgan’s slogan that “pornography is the theory and rape is the practice.”86 Inspired by German demonstrations, they mounted “Reclaim the Night” marches against pornography that tended to target areas where both sex shops and street prostitution concentrated. These demonstrations provoked conflict between antiviolence campaigners and women working in a proliferating sex industry.87 When feminist protestors strode through Leeds’s Chapeltown or London’s Soho, districts with large immigrant or racial minority populations, sex traders claimed that they did not make common cause with local working girls or invite them to join the actions. Organizers of the marches contest this memory, claiming they canvassed sex workers as residents.88 In some locales, prostitute rights activists managed to negotiate a modus vivendi with antiviolence marchers. The PROS coordinator Louise Webb recalls how she persuaded marchers to avoid Balsall Heath, the red-light district, and head directly to the Birmingham town hall. As participants in the nighttime erotic economy, PROS members took exception to the demonization of the night implied by “Reclaim the Night.”89
Despite these tensions and contested memories, feminist divisions over prostitution appear to have been more permeable in the 1970s than they would become in later decades. Enabling this détente was the fact that early prostitute rights groups and antiviolence campaigners shared a bedrock of critical analysis about the state and male dominance. Both valued autonomous women’s movements and were concerned about male violence against women. Both sides acknowledged that women selling sex on the street were particularly vulnerable to physical danger. Both adopted a fiercely antipolice stance and manifested a politics of anger that spilled into street actions. Feminists of all persuasions understood that the feminization of poverty drove women into prostitution. Antiviolence radical feminists, while deeply suspicious of commercialized sex, had not yet committed themselves to a politics of prostitution that actively repudiated sex as work and demanded the eradication of the sex trades.
Nonetheless, fissures over prostitution began to appear within feminist ranks. In 1980, speaking before an antiviolence conference, Sheila Jeffreys applied to prostitution the same critical analysis of male sexuality and power that she had earlier developed around pornography. Both forms of commercial sex enacted, in her words, male violence against women. Jeffreys urged feminists to shift their gaze away from prostitutes’ economic needs and to focus instead on the men who “used them.” At the same time, Jeffreys spurned cooperation with the police or the criminal justice system, and she reiterated her support for decriminalizing the selling of sex by prostitute women in order to “fight the division of the class of women.” Jeffreys stopped short of making programmatic recommendations for ending demand or attacking the institution of prostitution.90 More than a decade would transpire before feminist antiviolence activists in the UK mounted a robust set of programs that took up that challenge.
These challenges materialized at the end of the 1990s. With the decline of antipornography campaigns and the petering out of disputes among lesbian feminists about S-M sex, radical feminist antiviolence activists turned their attention to prostitution politics. They began to call themselves abolitionists, invoking the heritage of first-wave feminist campaigners against “white slavery,” a tradition carried on by longtime organizations such as the Josephine Butler Society.91 Abolitionists also signaled their allegiance to contemporary global feminist initiatives to eliminate sex trafficking and prostitution in the name of women’s human rights.92 During the 1980s and 1990s, second-wave feminist campaigners, led by the US activist Kathy Barry, had succeeded in influencing international protocols on prostitution and revisions of prostitution laws in various nation states.93
Attacking sex trafficking as the extreme victimization of women and violation of women’s human rights, international feminist abolitionists explicitly rebutted the interpretive frameworks underpinning the ethics of sex as work. First, they challenged the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution to condemn all forms of commercial sex as coercive, in effect saying that all women engaged in prostitution were victims of trafficking and forced labor.94 Second, to eradicate prostitution, abolitionists argued that it was necessary to end male demand.95 “Without demand there would not be the recruitment and trafficking of women and girls into prostitution.”96 This focus on demand justified a new set of criminal codes against male predators and clients, leading to a long-term shift in antiviolence campaigners’ relations with the police and the criminal justice system.97 Finally, alongside legal campaigns, abolitionists organized “third sector” voluntary social services focused on exiting (extricating prostitutes from the sex trade) that competed with the “harm reduction-focused” services offered by NHS outreach health workers. All three initiatives challenged sex work politics.
UK feminist abolitionists set themselves the task of translating global feminist abolitionism into a set of domestic programs to eradicate prostitution. The striking career of Julie Bindel, a prominent UK abolitionist and journalist, illuminates the long trajectory of contemporary feminist antiviolence politics at its most uncompromising end. Skilled in self-promotion, Bindel traced her personal evolution as an influential pioneer of UK abolitionism in her writings for the Guardian and elsewhere. According to her own account, in the late 1970s, Bindel was a young northern working-class woman who came out as lesbian and left her housing estate in Nottingham to join the Leeds lesbian separatist scene. Here she claims to have received her “education in sexual politics” under the shadow of Sutcliffe’s serial sex murders.98 The Ripper effect converted her to political lesbianism and revolutionary feminism, leading her to embrace antipornography and to attack sex shops, battle the police, and train women to appear at rape trials in subsequent decades. By the late 1990s Bindel was working as a researcher at Jalna Hanmer’s Research Center for Violence, Abuse, and Gender at Leeds Metropolitan University. When Hanmer and Bindel organized a 1996 conference in Brighton on sexual violence, they were inspired by a keynote speech by Norma Hotaling, leader of a survivor’s group of ex-prostitutes in San Francisco. Hotaling trumpeted the success of “john schools” in North America, involving the reeducation of men arrested for curb-crawling (driving in cars to pick up streetwalkers).99 According to Bindel, the john school offered a feminist alternative to either decriminalizing prostitution or running “prostitutes out of town.”100 Looking back at this moment, Bindel remembers the effort to set up a john school at Leeds and the Brighton conference “as the beginning of the abolitionist movement in the UK and I was in its forefront.”101
Back in Leeds, Bindel and Hanmer persuaded the West Yorkshire police to fund the “Programme for the Rehabilitation of Kerb Crawlers” as a one-year experiment that the organizers confidently believed would become self-supporting. It was based on anti-kerb-crawling legislation passed in 1985 and 1990 (and vehemently opposed by the ECP).102 Police were receptive to their proposal, having already established a working relationship with Bindel and Hanmer around initiatives against domestic violence.103 West Yorkshire authorities may well have viewed a john school as good public relations. Not only were local police still suffering from a lingering notoriety for mishandling the Yorkshire Ripper case in the late 1970s, but they also faced a new crisis around policing prostitution in the 1990s precipitated by local vigilante activities, sometimes numbering hundreds of young Asian men, against street prostitutes.104 Hanmer’s and Bindel’s proposal for a john school seemed to present police with a new option to mollify angry locals. Cooperating police offered two alternatives to men arrested for the first time for curb crawling: appear at magistrate’s court or pay £110 to attend a one-day reeducation course run by radical feminists.
The john school’s pedagogy explicitly repudiated a sex work framework in favor of a stark melodramatic narrative of female victimization and male villainy. In her introductory speech, Bindel warned nervous middle-class and working-class male attendees that school would not be a “soft option,” that this was not “therapy for them.” “It isn’t about your problems.” “We are looking them in the eye,” she explained to one reporter, “and telling them they are scum.”105 She then outlined two opposing theories of prostitution: first, prostitution was a “job like any other,” a position she vehemently disparaged; second, prostitution was “violence and abuse,” a position she firmly espoused.106 School attendees found themselves listening to the personal testimonies of an ex-prostitute, Fiona Broadfoot, about brutal pimps and punters, and to Irene Iveson, a mother whose young daughter had been murdered on the street. A third lecture zeroed in on the health risks of engaging in commercial sex.107 Another session on masculinity, which the men consistently rated as their least favorite, focused on the difference between love and sex addiction. While the school’s lesson plans castigated pimps and clients as male predators, the curriculum omitted any discussion of police corruption and police abuse of sex workers. By focusing on pimps and clients but ignoring the police, Bindel and Hanmer reoriented the message about toxic masculinity promulgated by sex work activists.
In its first year, the program received positive media coverage in the local and national press. It won the praise of New Labour’s newly established Women’s Unit as a “good practice” project. However, in 1999, when the john school project seemed poised to expand to other districts, a coalition of researchers, policy makers, sex workers, and outreach workers in public health programs mounted a strenuous campaign against it. Under the banner of Cause for Concern, they denounced the West Yorkshire project for pursuing an intimidating pedagogy, depriving local prostitutes of their livelihood, and rendering the street trade more precarious.108 “Defining sex work as intrinsically abusive is a moral judgment . . . not shared by everybody,” including “many sex workers.”109 They recruited street women from Bradford and Leeds to support their position. A Guardian reporter interviewed a Leeds prostitute named “Julie” who echoed the argument set forth by Cause for Concern about sex work. Julie defended “working” on the streets to pay her gas and electric bills. “There’s no way I could afford these things on [welfare] benefits alone,” she explained, “and I would rather sell sex than clean someone else’s toilet.” The “re-offenders” [sic] course, she complained, “puts everyone at risk,” driving women to move out of relatively safe places.110 Local authorities were most persuaded by Cause for Concern’s final argument, that it impeded health workers’ access to them. Cause for Concern here drew on public health’s long-standing claims to authority over sexual matters and sexualized bodies, this time siding with a sexually marginal group.111 In the face of this negative publicity, West Yorkshire police discontinued the project, claiming it was too costly. Other localities would periodically revive interest in john schools, but the project of “ending demand” through the reeducation of “johns” decidedly lost momentum as a national program.112
Despite this setback, the john school marked the beginning, not the end, of the abolitionist movement in the UK. Bindel’s subsequent career illustrates this development. After the john school closure, Bindel moved into state-affiliated NGO employment, working for two years in the UK government’s Department for International Development, training social workers and law enforcers in the Balkans on sex trafficking. In 2004 she was recruited as a part-time consultant for Eaves, a housing and antiviolence feminist charity that expanded its services to migrant sex workers who had been trafficked. Eaves became “the engine room from which the London abolition movement would flourish.”113 Bindel remained at Eaves until 2015, working on a number of surveys and research projects, including the highly influential Big Brothel which detailed the substantial numbers of transnational migrant workers in brothels, parlors, and flats.114 Many of Bindel’s subsequent books, including her coauthored study Exiting Prostitution and The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth, emphatically defend the abolitionist project and excoriate its critics.115
In the new millennium, the abolitionist position, buttressed by antiviolence discourse, dominated political debates over criminal justice reform. It drew considerable support from religious conservatives concerned about sexual morality as well as from some prominent New Labour feminist politicians. Legislators and political authorities looked to the so-called Nordic model enacted in Sweden in 1998. Swedish legal reform criminalized clients while decriminalizing women’s sale of sex—but it also retained most of the criminal sanctions attached to advertisements, brothels, and third party involvement as prostitution-related offences.116 Despite withering criticism from Amnesty International, which passed a resolution in favor of decriminalization in 2015, as well as repeated failures since 2020 to gain legislative passage as an amendment to police bills in England, the Nordic model remains the dominant framework for debating legislative reform of the prostitution laws in the UK.117
Even without formal abolitionism, a variety of “creeping neo-abolitionism” has taken hold in Britain.118 This creeping abolitionism is the cumulative effect of new policies and laws around public order and public space. Such initiatives include the introduction of crime legislation that tightens laws against curb crawlers, especially clients who use the services of trafficked women, as well as the intensification of policing of migrants under new antitrafficking legislation.119 Meanwhile, local councils in the UK increasingly rely on administrative laws governing “antisocial behavior orders” to punish street sex workers. At the same time, outreach health-support services for sex workers have become casualties of Conservative austerity assaults against the NHS. Support services committed to harm reduction have increasingly lost governmental financing in favor of faith-based and abolitionist projects focused on exiting, that is, providing social services to sex workers on condition that they immediately “exit” the trade.120
In the face of this creeping neo-abolitionism, proponents of sex work decriminalization have seen their clout diminish in both local and national political spaces, while the services they provided to sex workers have been similarly curtailed.121 Nonetheless, outside parliamentary and political circles, a strong defense of sex workers’ rights persists. The ECP has expanded its boundaries as a tight-knit advocacy group to coordinate campaigns in favor of decriminalization and in opposition to the criminalization of clients and the use of antisocial behavior orders. It continues to defend the rights of “prostitute women” who are victims of assault and rape and vulnerable to loss of custody of their children.122 Over the past two decades, sex workers’ rights activists have increasingly gained a sympathetic hearing from younger progressive activists as part of an intersectional feminist policy committed to police reform, migrant rights, and social justice. This new wave of sex worker groups, such as SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement), Decrim Now, and the x:talk project have drawn attention to the ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender diversity among sex workers. They have underscored the disparate work settings and work conditions in the sex trades, especially highlighting the needs and vulnerabilities of migrant sex workers.123
Although local authorities continue to apply policies intent on removing street workers from public spaces, national policing guidance has taken cognizance of harm reduction and sex work politics. The 2019 National Policing Guidance pointedly ignores the Nordic model approach. It urges police to concentrate on the safety of sex workers and to acknowledge the diverse typologies of sex work. It further admonishes police to put aside their moral judgements and to distinguish between “autonomous” individuals in the trade and those victimized by sexual exploiters. It also calls on police to work with sex worker–led organizations like Ugly Mugs.124 This top-down approach has its limits: as one researcher commented to me, police leadership has very little “internal control” over forces on the ground (pers. comm., Teela Sanders, August 31, 2021).
Troubling Sex Work
As an inclusive term first emerging in English-speaking countries and then circulating across the globe, sex work countered the stigma traditionally associated with the term prostitute and became foundational to arguments for legal reform and public health initiatives. In the early years, echoing the politics of housework campaign, UK prostitute rights activists sought to align sex work with “ordinary” women’s work; but increasingly sex work has come to signify a firm occupational identity. It now functions as a broad umbrella term to convey an increasingly diversifying group of workers—cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals of multiple races and ethnicities—who labor in myriad sites under different conditions across the globe.
Even as sex work advocates adjust their politics to the changing face of sex work, they have had to contend with new political challenges, including opposition from feminist abolitionist groups who question sex work activists’ right to speak for women in the trade. Abolitionists attack the language of sex work, insisting that prostitution is not “just a job” but coercive violence against women. In turn, rights activists and their academic allies roundly critique abolitionist politics that inform antitrafficking, ending demand, and exiting initiatives. Such policies, they argue, only intensify punitive surveillance of sex workers and national borders, pushing the sex trades underground without really offering sex workers alternative material options and services. These initiatives, moreover, rely on an invidious distinction between mercenary prostitutes and those who claim victim status, ignoring the positive agency exercised by some sex workers in the choice of their trade.
At the same time, rights activists and abolitionists have also appropriated strategies and vocabulary from each other.125 Abolitionists, for instance, have adopted a rhetorical tactic previously deployed by sex work activists: invoking the prostitute’s voice by presenting “survivors” who deliver first-person testimonials about their abuse.126 They also claim to pursue both harm reduction and exiting strategies.127 Meanwhile, sex work activists have tried to wrest the cause of “human rights” away from abolitionists to buttress their own defense of the labor and social rights of sex workers. Some activists on both sides have also shifted their relation to the police. Despite a long history of antipolice sentiment, UK abolitionists and a few rights advocates have tried to establish working relations, albeit different ones, with the law, ranging from abolitionists joining with police to combat the trafficking of migrant sex workers and rights activists embracing anti–hate crime campaigns and managed zones. Some sex worker groups have been able to combine a campaign for decriminalization with efforts to fight structural and direct violence against sex workers in the sex trades. They still struggle to convey the complex entanglement of coercion and consent involved in sex work. In the face of polarizing politics, rights advocates have had to walk a tightrope between defending sex workers from “violent men” and resisting the abolitionist argument that prostitution is male violence against women per se.128
The discourse of sex work has also met with some resistance from grassroots practitioners of commercial sex. Even when sex traders embrace the identity of the sex worker, they may differ over the meanings of work, whether, for example, what they do is “simply work” or the practice of a skilled professional engaged in a creative activity.129 Practitioners also voice different views of the “sex” of sex work. Some activists laud sex work as an expansion of positive sexual expression, but others challenge sex positivity as an ideological effect of “white privilege” among individuals located in the higher end of the sex trades, preferring instead to ground the collective identity of sex traders in labor and livelihood.130 Some practitioners deny they are engaging in sex, which they interpret to be an intimate act with partners, while others dispute that the practice of selling sex creates an identity. Numerous observers have noted resistance to the language of sex work in many parts of the Global South, where the phrase has traveled via political activists and NGOs.131 In the UK and elsewhere, there are workers in the sex trades who claim a work identity distinct from sex work, notably strippers, lap dancers, and porn actors who identify as entertainers and artists. Others prefer the older, more gendered work identity of working girl to sex worker, which they find to be too generic and synthetic. These category distinctions replicate and compound the social divisions of race, ethnicity, class, genders, and sexualities that divide sex traders. These distinctions suggest that intersectional solidarity in the sex trades might be a necessary goal but one not easily achieved by eliding differences.132
If sex workers do not fully agree about the meaning of sex or work, neither do they concur on how the state and the market shape working conditions in the sex industry. To be sure, many activists vigorously demand social and labor rights for sex workers. But historically they have paid less attention to imagining changes in the economic organization of sex work after decriminalization. In the 1980s, PROS and the ECP endorsed an artisanal craft model of small worker cooperatives. In doing so, they overestimated the power of small traders to survive in an era of a heavily capitalized sex industry. Like many sex worker campaigners of succeeding generations, they imagined that decriminalization of prostitution statutes would result in “a blank page,” thus underestimating the power of the administrative state to regulate prostitution outside criminal codes.133 Their view of the state centered on the criminal justice system but tended to ignore state governance of work and the economy.134 They evinced little sense of the state’s positive capacities to protect and provide resources or of its full workings.
Antistatist political thinking among rank-and-file sex workers may have been a factor here. Surveys of prostitutes in the United States found “that they do not want sex work to be a criminal offence, but they did not want to be regulated by the government or pay taxes either.”135 The anthropologist Sophie Day reported similar findings for London sex workers in the 1980s and 1990s. She noted that her subjects tended to interpret the state negatively as a single alien entity and to hold more confidence in sex traders’ ability to navigate a free market.136 Day and others ascribed this political thinking to the neoliberal Thatcherite environment and the gig economy.137 But Thatcher tapped into a deep vein of working-class antistatism dating back generations.138
While upholding sex work as legitimating, activists still resist the full implications of a work analogy, which in a contemporary context implies some form of governmental supervision. When confronted with the question of state governance of labor, sex worker activists have historically pivoted to an absolutist position about women’s right to bodily self-determination. In effect, they mark off selling sex from a wider range of trades involved in intimate relations with the body—from nail salons to beauty shops and masseuses—that are currently subject to state regulation. Ambivalence over state governance of work runs through a series of prominent rights-based statements, from the “World Charter for Prostitute Rights” ratified at the First World Congress of Whores in Amsterdam in 1985, to Amnesty’s 2015 resolution in support of decriminalization.139 This absolutist stance may be changing, however, especially among sex worker activists who are actively negotiating with governments around decriminalization. In light of the stated commitment by the government of the state of Victoria to remove criminal statutes relating to prostitution, Australia’s Scarlet Alliance has endeavored to negotiate revisions of zoning codes applicable to prostitution so that they are “rational” and “consistent” with other business practices. At the same time, Scarlet Alliance opposes licensing laws for sex work on the basis that they create a two-tiered sex industry and that they hurt many sex workers who are excluded or cannot afford to comply.140
In the last two decades, the new wave of sex worker activism from a younger generation has certainly sharpened a critique of the sexual marketplace under capitalism. In London (as well as Washington, DC, and New York), Decrim Now, an alliance of sex workers, feminists, politicians, trade unions, and student and human rights organizations, has located the decriminalization of sex work at the nexus of campaigns for immigrant rights, racial justice, economic justice, housing, and trans rights. Many activists in Decrim Now have embraced the campaign for universal basic income as a “successor” campaign to Wages for Housework. Decrim Now, for instance, not only positions sex work in relation to other forms of commodified and bodily mediated activities, but it also challenges a political economy that consigns workers in general to precarious living and working conditions.141 Apart from protection and social rights for sex workers, Decrim Now still has little to say, in the short term, about how the business itself should be reordered or how it should operate in urban space, although it has protested the closure of the “managed zone” in Leeds, which operated as a harm reduction safety measure involving multi-agency collaborations.142 As with other activist groups, Decrim Now has also protested crackdowns on online websites.143
More hard thinking might be necessary to address the escalating scale of capitalistic organization of the sex trades that is likely to occur after formal decriminalization. The news media has already reported on the challenges faced by small minority business owners in the face of decriminalizing recreational marijuana in California and New York.144 Decriminalization of the sex industry in Australia’s New South Wales offers a similar cautionary tale.145 Corporate capitalism—in the form of the adult entertainment industry or internet websites—is happy to fill the void when older structures of domination are eliminated. Proponents of sex workers’ rights need to think beyond the horizon of a struggle for decriminalization to imagine more equitable structures of sex work for the foreseeable future.
A short version of this paper was presented at the “Roundtable on Troubling Terms in the Sex Trades,” The New School, October 22, 2020. Thanks to the participants and audience for their comments. Thanks to the editors and anonymous readers who commented on this text, as well as to Dina Copelman, Martha Howell, Frank Mort, Ellen Ross, James Vernon, and Daniel Walkowitz.
Notes
Leigh, “Inventing Sex Work”; “Roundtable on Troubling Terms in the Sex Trades.”
Queen, “Sex Radical Politics.” On the sex positivity tradition in feminism, see Echols, Daring to Be Bad.
On the genealogy of sex trafficking, see Limoncelli, Politics of Trafficking; and Hetherington and Laite, “Editorial Note.” On a history that treats sex work as a given, see Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite. For more critical attention to a sex work framework, see Weeks, Problem with Work; and Berg, Porn Work.
Throughout this essay, I use the term sex traders and sex sellers to denote historical subjects engaged in transactional sex prior to the 1980s, when the term sex work began to circulate widely. I also use prostitute as a form of self-description adopted by individuals inside the sex trades. When referring to practitioners of the 1980s and after, I use the term sex worker.
See Chateauvert, Sex Workers Unite; Majic, Sex Work Politics; Mac and Smith, Revolting Prostitutes.
Aroney, “1975 French Sex Workers’ Revolt.”
Alexander, “The International Sex Workers’ Rights Movement,” in Delacoste and Alexander, Sex Work.
See, for example, Ashworth, White, and Winchester, “Red-Light District,” 210.
Self, Prostitution; Caslin and Laite, Wolfenden’s Women, 1.
Self, Prostitution, 133; “Working Paper on Offences Relating to Prostitution and Allied Offences,” December 1982, p. 6, Home Office Files 291/2019, National Archives, Public Record Office Kew. See also Walkowitz, “Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in King’s Cross.”
Walkowitz, “Politics of Prostitution and Sexual Labour,” 2; Van de Pol and Waters, The Burgher and the Whore, 35, 48, 176; Roper, Holy Household, 128n109; Griffiths, “Structure of Prostitution,” 48.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “working girl, n., sense 2,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1243912093.
Mitchell, “Women”; Dalla Costa and James, Power of Women; Malos, Politics of Housework; Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors.
On situated knowledge, see Hartsock, Harding, and Hintikka, “Feminist Standpoint.”
McLeod, Women Working, 119; Programme for Reform of the Law on Soliciting, 5/5/1980-1983/ MS1579/2/S/1/28, Burrow Cadbury Trustee Meeting, Special Collections, Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, UK.
Connell, “PROS,” 402; Barrow Cadbury Trust, Meeting Notes, MS/1579/S/1/78, Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, UK.
Jayne Maynard, Letter to the Editor, Street Beat 2 (1980), PROS Bulletin, 1100/2/1, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, UK.
“Sally,” quoted in McLeod, Women Working, 1.
“Open Letter from PROS,” PROS Campaign—Programme for Reform of the Law on Soliciting, 1976–1982, 1100/4/1, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, UK.
A Particular Kind of a Job, 1980, PROS campaign film.
Prostitute, dir. Tony Garnett (United Kingdom, 1980).
Kim L., quoted in Connell, “PROS,” 408.
Val’s testimony in Minutes of Evidence, Expenditure Committee (Education, Arts, and Home Office Sub-Committee, H. of C.), Paper 61, xiv, Session 1978–79, April 2, 1979, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.
Dalla Costa and James, Power of Women.
Anonymous, interview by author, July 21, 2022.
The ECP translated a volume of memoirs from French prostitutes who had participated in the strike. See Jaget, Prostitutes. On the global influence of the English-language version of this text, see Aroney, “1975 French Sex Workers’ Revolt.”
Lopez-Jones, “For Prostitutes.”
Hubbard, Matthews, and Scoular, “Legal Geographies”; Hubbard et al., “Away from Prying Eyes?”; Matthews, Prostitution in London; Nott Bower, quoted in Caslin and Laite, Wolfenden’s Women, 126.
Buckingham, letter.
Buckingham, quoted in Sandford, Prostitutes, 73.
Buckingham, quoted in Pheterson, Vindication, 172.
Buckingham, quoted in Pheterson, Vindication, 172.
Buckingham, quoted in Pheterson, Vindication, 75; Campbell, “Not Getting Away with It.”
Toynbee, “Legal Paradox”; Guardian, “Union for Prostitutes Sought”; ECP leaflets, 1976–78, COYOTE Papers, Carton 9, File 438, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA; Kantola and Squires, “Prostitution Policies,” 63; Kinnell, Violence and Sex Work.
ECP leaflets.
ECP, “The Abolition of the Prostitution Laws,” press release, November 10, 1992, Papers of the ECP (1975–2019), ECP/1, Bishopsgate Institute, London.
Day et al., “Country Report UK”; Georgina Perry, interview by author, October 2, 2020.
Day et al., “Country Report UK,” 345; Maggie O’Neill, interview by author, April 28, 2021; Morgan Thomas, “From ‘Toleration.’”
Day et al., “Country Report UK,” 340, 343.
According to Day and Campbell, not all outreach programs supported decriminalization and “sex work.” Sophie Day, interview by author, June 26, 2019; Rosie Campbell, interview by author, June 18, 2018.
TAMPEP, Sex Work in Europe. This survey also estimates the transgender workforce in the sex trades in countries belonging to the European Union as 6 percent and CIS men as 7 percent (14).
Perry, interview.
Campbell, “Not Getting Away with It,” Sanders and Sehmbi, “Evaluation.”
Morgan Thomas, “From ‘Toleration,’” 140.
Hilary Kinnell, interview by author, June 12, 2018.
Day et al., “Country Report UK,” 345.
Sex work projects in the UK were connected to European AIDS projects like EUROPAP. See Day et al., “Country Report UK.” On the expansion of sex worker subjectivity and organizing via AIDS work in India and Africa, see, for example, Dasgupta, “Sovereign Silence”; and Mgbako, To Live Freely.
Priscilla Alexander, interview by author, September 13, 2022.
Day et al., “Country Report UK”; Campbell, interview.
Morgan Thomas et al., “Risk of HIV,” 525.
Campbell, interview.
Campbell, interview.
Gall, Sex Worker Unionization; Cruz, Hardy, and Sanders, “False Self-Employment.”
Merrick, “Sex Trade’s Red Light.” On national police guidances, see Sanders et al., “Policing Vulnerability”; National Police Chiefs Council, National Policing. Advocates of sex work politics participated in the deliberations leading to the report.
Kantola and Squires, “Prostitution Policies”; Hubbard, “Community Action”; Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism”; Day, “Re-emergence of Trafficking.”
Belinda Brooks-Gordon, interview by author, June 5, 2018.
See Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, epilogue.
Manchester, Sex Shops; Hubbard et al., “Away from Prying Eyes.”
Sheila McNeill, quoted in Rees, “All the Rage,” 183; Sheila McNeill (pers. comm., August 17, 2017). On sex workers’ views of the marches, see Roberts, Front Line, 15.
Louise Webb, interview by author, February 20, 2019.
Jeffreys, Trigger Warning, 172; Jeffreys, Idea of Prostitution.
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, epilogue; Self, Prostitution, 232–35; Limoncelli, Politics of Trafficking; Laite, “Association.”
See Jeffreys, “Prostitution.” This was originally a conference presentation at the Sexual Violence against Women conference in Leeds, UK, November 1980.
Julie Bindel, Introduction to Kerb Crawlers Rehabilitation Programme, Box 3, Relating to Course Contents, FAN/JH/PR/KCRP/03, Feminist Archive North, University of Leeds Library.
Kilman and Watson-Smyth, “Kerb-Crawlers”; Campbell and Storr, “Challenging the Kerb Crawler”; Majic, “Teaching Equality?”
Bindel, “My Sexual Revolution”; McBeth, “Finally Tackling the Oldest Profession.”
Bindel, quoted in Taylor, “Street Fighters.”
ECP, “Sex Offences Bill—Police Powers Endanger Civil Rights,” 1990, Papers of the ECP (1975–2019), ECP/2, Bishopsgate Institute, London.
Jalna Hanmer, interview by author, July 18, 2018.
Hubbard, “Community Action”; Walkowitz, “Feminism and the Politics of Prostitution in King’s Cross.”
Bindel, quoted in Mills, “In Leeds.”
Bindel, Introduction to Kerb Crawlers Rehabilitation Programme.
Yorkshire Evening Post, “Ahead of the Game.”
Yorkshire Evening Post, “Ahead of the Game.”
Hilary Kinnell to Professor Leslie Wagner, March 26, 1999, “Kerb Crawlers Rehabilitation Programme,” FAN/JH/PR/KCRP, Box 4, Feminist Archive North, University of Leeds Library.
Julie, quoted in Taylor, “Street Fighters.”
Between 1998 and 2012, fifteen john schools opened and closed in the UK. Cook, “Making Links.”
Bindel, Pimping of Prostitution, xvii, 17–19; Bindel, “Obituary: Denise Marshall.”
Matthews et al., Exiting Prostitution; Bindel, Pimping of Prostitution.
See, for example, Levy and Jakobsson, “Sweden’s Abolitionist Discourse”; and Vuolajärvi, “Governing.”
Catherine Murphy, interview by author, November 15, 2015; Amnesty International, “Amnesty International Publishes Policy.”
Scoular and Carline, “Creeping Neo-abolitionism.”
Scoular and Carline, “Creeping Neo-abolitionism.”
Perry, interview.
See, for example, ECP, Decriminalisation of Prostitution; and ECP, “Invite to a Webinar: Protecting Our Children, Defending Our Rights” (email), July 7, 2021.
Stevenson and Dziuban, “Silent No More.”
National Police Chiefs Council, National Policing.
Webb, interview; Priscilla Alexander, interview by author, January 7, 2019.
Yorkshire Evening Post, “Ahead of the Game.”
Liz Kelly, interview by author, May 23, 2017.
ECP, “When Prostitute Women Are Not Safe, No Woman Is Safe,” press release, 2007, Papers of the ECP (1975–2019), ECP/7, Bishopsgate Institute, London.
See Lorraine Nencel, “Selling Sex—Sex Work or Prostitution?,” in this issue.
Carol Smart, interview by author, January 28, 2016; Day, On the Game, chap. 2. On ambivalence about sex work as a work identity, see Česnulytė, “‘I Do Not Work’”; Ruiz and Nencel, “Sex Workers.” On alternative work identities among women in the sex trades, see Gall, Sex Worker Unionization; and Cruz, Hardy, and Sanders, “False Self-Employment.”
Catherine Healey, quoted in Aroney, “Changing Minds.”
Lutnick and Cohan, “What Female Sex Workers Say,” 43.
Day, On the Game, 93; Cruz, Hardy, and Sanders, “False Self-Employment.”
“World Charter for Prostitutes Rights,” in Pheterson, Vindication, 40; Amnesty International, “Amnesty Publishes Policy.”
Scarlet Alliance, “Information for the Consultation”; “Briefing Paper.”
On successor campaigns, see Weeks, Problem with Work, 139.
Decrim Now, “Open Letter”; Sanders et al., Internet Sex Work; Taylor, “Most Sex Workers.”
See Eurydice Aroney and Julie Bates, “Does Decriminalization Do It?,” in this issue.