To deem transactional sex inherently exploitative lacks information, and imagination. Let’s imagine an agenda for change for sex workers as a body. The law is the bones. The dynamics of sex workers’ lives are the muscles. Our discourse is the blood.

We would like to thank a number of people without whom this project would not have been possible. First, and most importantly, the sex workers who gave of their time, expertise and interest to this project through the research in the various contributions and the peer intervention work that is ongoing in the diverse contexts described. We are most grateful to Kate McGrew, whose...

Social justice is the idea that everyone deserves parity in terms of opportunities, political rights and distribution of wealth and privilege to participate as peers in social life and lead fulfilling lives. We believe social justice provides a lens to empower sex workers. This collection brings together various voices and research initiatives which ask and respond to new...

Almost twenty years ago, in 1999, Sweden criminalised the purchase of sex with the sexköpslagen, or ‘sex purchase law’, in an attempt to abolish sex work. Since Sweden introduced this law, the legislation has been influential globally (Levy 2015). It would be no understatement to write that in any political or academic discussion vis-à-vis sex work legislation,...

In July 2016, the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) recommended for the first time that the UK government should consider the benefits of decriminalising prostitution in England and Wales, to preserve the safety of sex workers (Home Affairs Select Committee 2016). The recommendation followed Amnesty International’s endorsement of decriminalisation to reduce victimisation and...

Globally, support for sex workers’ rights has gained momentum. In 2014, the Lancet announced that it favoured decriminalising prostitution (Cooper 2014), followed by Amnesty International’s similar declaration in 2015 (Murphy 2015). Feminist scholars and advocates may seem like natural supporters of these proposals. After all, by most estimates, the majority of sex...

Historically, sex workers of all ages have been defined as ‘sad’, ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ and treated accordingly (Self 2003). Sex work is an issue of ongoing social concern, but that concern focuses on how much it is perceived as a public nuisance and how policy and legislation can deal with this. As Hubbard notes, ‘the regulation of prostitution has been used as...

Recently, various studies have investigated sex work among highly educated students in Europe and the United States. In the UK, France and the Netherlands an emerging trend can be observed among those who choose to work in the sex industry due to rising tuition costs or to support themselves financially while studying (Roberts, Jones and Sanders 2013; Motyl 2013; Miller 2011). These...

Amid the polarised feminist politics surrounding sex work, public health is often framed as a pragmatic middle ground (Tucker and Tuminez 2011). As alliances have developed between sex workers, academics and practitioners in the fight against HIV, and concern with the social determinants of health has grown (Marmot 2005), public health professionals are increasingly focusing on the social,...

Social justice has been described as the core value of public health (Gostin and Powers 2006). Public health is committed to improving the health and well-being of all in society through a reduction in socioeconomic disparities. Central to the understanding of justice is that all people are treated fairly and all have a right to good health. In this chapter I draw on...

Over the past decades, researchers (Agustín 2005a; Bernstein 2008; Oso 2006, 2016), governmental and nongovernmental organisations (Albano 2013; TAMPEP 2009a) and sex worker organisations (ICRSE 2016) have reported increasing numbers of migrant sex workers in Europe. In Portugal, migrants began arriving for commercial sex at the end of the twentieth century and now make up a...

In 1984, Gayle Rubin stated that the ‘legal regulation of sexual conduct is [a] battleground’ (294), and this certainly is the case for sex workers. The regulation of commercial sex work has been historically, and is contemporarily, fiercely contested globally.

Globalisation and workplace digitalisation have increased the attention paid to the ‘gig’ economy, an emerging pattern of employment blurring the distinction between organised employment and self-employment. In the gig economy workers get paid for the ‘gigs’ they do, such as a taxi ride or a parcel or food delivery. And depending on their viewpoint, observers might call the...

Eradicating on-street sex work remains a key legal and policy mission in England and Wales. To this end, Engagement and Support Orders (ESOs) were introduced by section 17 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009. Drawing upon divergent and conflicting discourses of prostitution as both violence against women and a public nuisance, the orders aim to facilitate exiting by imposing ‘compulsory...

~Gillian Abel is associate professor and head of department in the Department of Population Health at the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her most extensive research work has been in the field of sex work, which is decriminalised in New Zealand. Her exploration of how decriminalisation has impacted on the health,...

This series brings together scholarship from leading and emerging scholars working on the intersections of gender and sexuality in political economy. It seeks to move beyond the ‘blindness’ of international political economy to feminist, gender, trans*, queer and masculinity studies in order to more fully capture the complex and contested transformations associated with globalization,...