“A shield and sickle”: NUM statement on the Home Affairs Committee Report on Human Trafficking
8 December 2023
Update: 1st March 2024
We are pleased to hear that the UK government has rejected the report published by the Home Affairs Committee on Human Trafficking.
In particular, the government response notes that:
- It is important “to avoid stigmatising and excluding those who we are seeking to protect from harm by eliminating certain terms” in reference to the Committee’s recommendation to end the use of the term “sex work” in relation to selling sex.
- “We have yet to see unequivocal evidence that any particular approach would improve tackling the harm and exploitation that can be associated with” selling sexual services, in reference to the Committee’s recommendation to introduce dangerous client criminalisation models across the UK
- That “evidence from international partners has indicated that closing down and/or criminalising adult service websites has had a negative impact on law enforcement’s capability to detect and disrupt serious and organised crime internationally”, in response to the Committee’s recommendation to introduce a FOSTA-SESTA style ban on adult services websites.
- That adult services websites have provided credible and actionable intelligence to the police, which has enabled them to find and prosecute those involved in facilitating harmful and exploitative practices.
While we are relieved to see that no further harmful actions will be taken with regards to sex work on the back of the Committee’s report, our calls from our original post still remain. More must be done to promote the inclusion and equity of people from all marginalised groups, without stigmatisation and with their voices and experiences front and centre. The government response continues to enforce distinctions between the “good” who deserve our support – migrants through official channels and trafficking victims, and the “bad” who do not. Without our most essential safety and support services being available to all without fear of criminalisation or further harm, exploitation will be able to continue.
Our call remains: work with us and the network of sex worker-led organisations across this country to improve the status of sex workers and create a safer and fairer future.
Original post:
We are deeply disappointed to read the report published by the Home Affairs Committee on Human Trafficking, which calls for a number of measures which will cause significant harm towards sex workers. The report makes several recommendations, many of which have been tested across the world, all to the detriment of sex workers’ safety, lives and livelihoods.
These recommendations include a ban on adult services websites, a new law to outlaw anyone profiting from the “prostitution” of another person, a ban on the government and police using the phrase “sex work”, and for the government to do a review of international approaches to sex work (with a view to introducing a client criminalisation approach).
Sadly, these approaches to ‘protect’ sex workers and trafficking victims, are not oriented towards improving sex worker safety, but instead are grounded in carceral logics, aimed to restrict, surveil and punish people involved in legal sex industries. The HASC committee proposal does not offer comprehensive material support to those who make constrained choices about sex industry involvement, who would not otherwise be involved in survival sex work, but for poverty. Dame Diana Johnson and others focus on ‘ending demand’ for sexual services to sidestep the hard work of ‘ending supply’. Addressing structural inequities; feminised poverty; racial capitalism; low wages, benefits and SSP, would go a long way to reducing the numbers of individuals who turn to sex industry work as their best choice to combat poverty, austerity, and the cost-of-living and fuel crises.
That being said, people who make choices about sex industry involvement – regardless of their level of constraint in those choices – have the right to safety, labour protections, human rights, as well as digital and financial citizenship. A ban on adult services websites has been done in Canada, under the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA) 2014 and in the US with FOSTA/SESTA, to disastrous results. The Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Policy Reform have launched a Charter challenge against PCEPA, a law that criminalises communicating for the purposes of selling or buying sexual services and advertising. As a result, sex workers who are negatively impacted by the law have no way to screen potential clients, communicate their terms and obtain consent, or negotiate safer working conditions and reduce other harms. There is no evidence that FOSTA/SESTA has curbed trafficking; in fact, it may have increased it, as sex workers are pushed further underground into more exploitative and vulnerable positions, greater poverty, greater risk, and poorer health. Erased, a report by Hacking/Hustling, documents how the ban on adult services websites in the US has led to greater financial insecurity, higher levels of violence, more sex workers working on-street and worse physical, mental and social health. Sex workers rely on ASWs to advertise, screen clients and negotiate services. All of these safety measures will be removed if such platforms are banned.
A new law to outlaw anyone profiting from the “prostitution” of another person will only serve to harm sex workers. Already, sex workers are forced to choose between engaging in appropriate safety measures, and using their earnings as they see fit, and another threat of breaking the law. Third parties can already face criminalisation across the UK – brothel maids, drivers, security guards, even partners, can be prosecuted for profiting from sex work, regardless of how “exploitative” their relationship with any sex worker is. Similarly, other sex workers may be prosecuted for providing advice and support for inciting prostitution. A new law has the potential to go even further; for example, under similar laws in Norway, sex workers report being evicted from their homes by landlords. Sex workers’ partners or relatives can also be held liable – in one example, a sex worker’s partner was investigated by police due to the two of them sharing a joint bank account, and him looking after their children while she worked. A recent report from Lilith Brouwers, “I feel safe when I’m working with her”, discusses the complexity of sex workers’ relationships with third parties and shares the fact that many third parties are sex workers who may share premises or provide administrative support. Third parties are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but the most effective way of decreasing exploitation and increasing sex workers’ agency is to remove laws which blanketly criminalise third parties and introduce ones which give sex workers greater control over their working arrangements.
A ban on the government and police using the phrase “sex work” not only represents a dystopian limitation on language but removes the ability for sex workers to define themselves in ways that they choose. The continuing insistence of the committee in using “prostitution” and violence-related language is patronising, paternalistic, and offensive. Sex workers must have the ability to conceptualise their experience in their own terms, and to have these terms respected by those with the responsibility to serve and protect them. “Prostitution” and related terms have a long, meaningful and complex history, often used by those in positions of power to deny sex workers agency or respect. The denial of the term “sex work” is to deny the labour of sex workers and exclude them from achieving policies and practices which treat them as workers first (and therefore people with the ability to access workers’ rights and employment protections).
Dr. Raven Bowen, CEO of National Ugly Mugs, said:
‘The term ‘sex work’ was coined in the 1970’s by the late Carol Leigh, also known as The Scarlot Harlot, to recognise sex work as economic activity and reposition sex workers as part of the working classes. Scarlot passed away on 16th November 2022 and as part of her legacy, we cannot allow the erasure of sex workers’ contributions to labour analyses and let politicians take language away from our rights movement to control how people can talk about and define themselves and their circumstances. This is profoundly disrespectful to our movement and Scarlot’s legacy.’
There is also no need for the government to do a review of international approaches to sex work (with a view to introducing a client criminalisation approach). Such a review would be a waste of government time and resources. The Home Affairs Committee have previously conducted a review of sex work laws in 2016, and concluded with a call for decriminalisation. Today’s report names several countries where client criminalisation approaches are used. One of these is Ireland, where the model was condemned by Amnesty International in their report, “We live within a violent system.” Another is France, where 261 sex workers have lodged a case with the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that the French ban violated their rights under Article 2 (Right to life), Article 3 (Prohibition of torture), and Article 8 (Right to privacy and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The case has recently been deemed admissible by the court, meaning that they have acknowledged that such laws may feasibly constitute a violation of these rights.
In every country where client criminalisation has been implemented, sex workers remain at high risk of violence, stigma and a lack of protection. For more information about this, see the recent work from Decrim Now.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, alongside other UN agencies, recognises the importance of protecting the human rights of sex workers and recommends full decriminalisation as an approach to consensual sex work as a means to end violence, arbitrary arrest and exclusion from health, housing and other state services. This policy position is evidence-based and supported by several international bodies, including Amnesty International, UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the Global Commission on HIV, in addition to global sex work scholars, and is implemented in New Zealand, parts of Australia and Europe. We urge the UK to look at these global examples and not to take up an American approach to policing sex work as part of the prison-industrial complex and the ‘poverty to prison’ pipeline, nor to fall for the false promise of “equality” touted by client criminalisation models.
We all want to see the eradication of human and labour trafficking across all industries, but not at the expense of sex workers. The HASC report on Trafficking has not been compiled with the interests of sex workers and as a result, this population will once again be the dispensable causalities of ill-conceptualised government policy. Politicians have the power to improve the lives and conditions sex workers face. They have the power to reduce poverty, austerity and hardship. They have the power to change the conditions for marginalised groups, from migrants and disabled people, to queer, trans racialised people, and beyond. They have the power to uplift and centre those whose voices are so often pushed to the side. And yet here, they have chosen instead to use this power to silence sex workers, and marginalised groups, and to perpetrate further harm against them.
Dr. Raven Bowen, CEO of National Ugly Mugs, said:
‘Dame Diana Johnson and her committee have used trafficking as both a shield and a sickle. A shield to block evidence by sex worker scholars and practitioners about the dangers of conflating sex work with trafficking, and as a means to exclude the voices of NUM and other sex worker-led groups from providing evidence to the HASC committee by citing the focus on trafficking and not sex work. A sickle, weaponising trafficking discourse to invisibilise sex industries and sex workers. Those who speak up about sex worker safety are painted at the ‘pimp lobby’ or promoting organised exploitation, despite the evidence that policies which criminalise sex work (directly or indirectly), and advertising, have been proven to have lethal consequences. Dame Diana Johnson’s aims are not to increase safety and sex workers’ access to 21st century tools and instruments, but to deny digital citizenship to sex workers, sending the industry back to the dark ages.’
In the words of the late Laura Lee, and recently echoed by SWAI: “Supporters of the Nordic Model have blood on their hands”.
Sex workers use online platforms to advertise their services, screen clients, network and access support. Banning online advertising would force the almost 9,400 sex workers NUM support and countless others to use informal and dangerous pathways to access their clientele, forcing the provision of high-risk services in-person and on street sex work. It increases competition in sex industries and sex workers’ risks of violence, promotes survival sex work, increases their reliance on unsavoury third parties to link them with elusive clientele, and exacerbates poverty.
It has also not gone unnoticed that Dame Diana Johnson has released her report just days before the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW). On Sunday December 17th we will mark the 20-year anniversary of this Memorial Day and say the names of the 199 sex workers, who we have permission to name, who have been murdered in the UK and Ireland since 1990. We also acknowledge those who have been lost to us due to criminalisation, stigma, overdose, illness, suicide and other means. We owe sex workers a better outcome than violence and death. We must do more to focus on harm reduction and compassionate strategies that ameliorate the causes of survival sex work and trafficking, while sending the message that sex workers are valued members of our communities and ensuring that migrant sex workers and trafficking victims are met with compassion, not deportation.
We demand the full decriminalisation of all aspects of sex work. We reject the notion that client criminalisation “decriminalises” sex work or sex workers because the evidence proves differently. Full decriminalisation will establish the social and policy climate necessary to grant sex workers power, rights and justice; allowing sex workers to regulate their industry in keeping with labour and human rights legislation, access societal institutions and protections, and leave sex industries without fear, stigma or punishment.
Dame Diana Johnson, we urge you to put aside your divisive ideology and work with us and the network of sex worker-led organisations across this country to improve the status of sex workers and create a safer and fairer future.