Policing often harms sex workers. That’s not up for debate – copious academic research and sex worker-led advocacy and research demonstrate that. But we’re not actually sure why law enforcement behaves the way it does. Few researchers have seriously studied the motivations and justifications for police action when it comes to sex work, or asked what lies behind the police’s continued reliance on methods that hurt the people they claim to help.
Our laws around sex work need serious overhaul. The current quasi-legal system just doesn’t work and necessitates unnecessary risk to workers, and the fact that some aspects of sex work aren’t legal discourages an open and trusting relationship between sex workers and police.
New Zealand has a decent framework of sex work laws. That is what we should be emulating IMO.
I’d say just let sex workers run brothels and hire security and much of the problem will disappear, but I fear if it were just legalised in the UK, corporations would want to run the show and would cause a whole set of other problems for sex workers.
I have similar reservations about the legalisation of cannabis too, for I fear it would just be legalised without any effort to bring people out of the black market, pushing them to deal in harder substances.
