Decrim Now: The Campaign For Sex Workers Rights

DECRIM NOW: THE CAMPAIGN FOR SEX WORKERS' RIGHTS!

Decrim Now is an alliance of workers who sell sexual services, sex workers' rights collectives, politicians, feminists, human rights and student organisations who are dedicated to improving the lives and working conditions of sex workers in the UK. (Image: DecrimNow)

Published 16 April 2024

LGBT+ Socialists are proud to have long supported the work of DecrimNow, in 2020 we helped move the motion at the LGBT+ Labour AGM committing the organisation to campaigning for decriminalisation, to campaigning against the damaging Nordic Model and to support inclusion and unionisation for sex workers. Below is an article featuring republished useful information from the DecrimNow site about the campaign:

The problem is the law

The exploitation of women who work on the street could be ameliorated by rehabilitation programmes with real resources and treatment for drug addiction. Jail does not cure drug addiction and it certainly does not give women a route out of prostitution. To reduce the number of women involved in prostitution, the government should develop initiatives which offer training and employment to women, and provide rehabilitative counselling and support to women who are emotionally damaged and addicted to drugs and alcohol. Women who work on the street should be released from the burden of convictions for soliciting, enabling them to apply for jobs outside prostitution. Decriminalising prostitution and offering all trafficked women asylum would have a huge impact on many of these women’s lives.

Criminalisation makes sex work dangerous. Current laws in the UK means that sex workers are unable to legally work together for safety, and are discouraged from reporting instances of violence committed against them for fear of being arrested. When sex workers receive criminal records for offences relating to their work, it makes it harder for them to find other employment. Enabling sex workers to claim the same legal rights and protections as workers in other industries reduces opportunities for those who currently see them as fair game for criminal exploitation.

Believe sex workers

We live in a society that is obsessed with controlling what women should and shouldn’t do with their bodies, particularly when it comes to work and sex. From limiting access to abortion in Northern Ireland, to the UK Supreme Court stopping a woman from being able to divorce her husband, to not believing women when they report rape: the message is clear, women can not be trusted to narrate their lives or decide their own experiences.

They want labour rights

Those who are exploited have the potential to challenge their alienation through collective struggle, which lays bare the hidden realities of how the market dominates our lives and where the real power for change lies. Ultimately, workers have the potential to create a socialist society in which human beings exercise democratic and collective control over their society and every aspect of their lives, including their sexual relationships.

Sex workers are increasingly organising alongside other workers within the trade union movement. The push to criminalise those who purchase sex and to close online sex work platforms is not a ‘progressive change’ from existing, harmful forms of criminalisation. It is a continuation of them. The reality of the sex industry is that people working in it have a range of experiences – good, bad and ugly. What those who support further criminalisation miss is that intensified policing worsens instances of harm and violence. Instead of attempting to eradicate the sex industry through further empowering the police and immigration enforcement, we need other workers to support sex workers in their demands for safety and dignity at work.

The socialist view

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks believed that prostitution was incompatible with the aspiration for sexual equality. They revoked all laws concerning prostitution and the first All Russian Congress of Peasants and Working Women adopted the slogan “A woman of the Soviet Labour Republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot be and must not be the object of buying and selling.” Despite these proclamations prostitution in Russia grew after 1917, mainly due to the harsh economic circumstances that prevailed. It was dealt with inconsistently with brothels operating openly in some areas, while in others prostitutes were arrested.

There was also a lively exchange on the issue of prostitution and sexuality between German socialist and campaigner for women’s rights Clara Zetkin and Lenin. Lenin recognised that prostitutes were double victims of bourgeois society – “victims, first of its accursed system of property and secondly of its accursed moral hypocrisy”. However, he condemned the efforts by a Communist woman in Hamburg to organise prostitutes as a “morbid deviation”. He argued that socialists should focus on organising women where they had collective power, in the workplaces, and thus transform the whole of society. Zetkin was herself contemptuous of the “empty chatter of bourgeois women” who moralised about the evils of prostitution – she argued that without well-paid work for women, any discussion of abolishing prostitution was nonsense.

As socialists we oppose the sex industry, not the women who are involved in it. As long as the industry exists these women should be entitled to the maximum protection and harm reduction that it is possible to achieve. So, if sex workers want to become unionised we would support their right to do so in order to collectively struggle to reduce some of the exploitation which they face and to make some improvements in their working conditions.

To oppose unionisation would be tantamount to arguing that because these women sell their bodies or because their bodies are a commodity they do not have the right to a safer environment. This is a moral, not a Marxist approach. However, we would oppose those who argue that selling sex is a ‘lifestyle choice’, that the sex industry is the same as any other ‘work’ and that jobs should be freely advertised in job centres, for example. We want to eliminate the sex industry, not legitimise it, but we also believe that the women involved in the industry have the right to organise to minimise the exploitation they face.

A real alternative for women who work in the wider sex industry cannot be divorced from the fight for real opportunities in the labour market and the struggle for good quality, affordable childcare and free higher education. Women may “choose” to work on adult chat lines or as exotic dancers, because the reality of their everyday lives is that this fits better with looking after families or study than the badly paid or inflexible alternatives on offer.

However, while reforming the industry could help women, as socialists our aim of such reforms should be to reduce women’s dependence on selling sex and sexuality, not normalising or legitimising that exchange. “Sex work” is not a job like any other. It is not only a symptom of the most degrading and alienated aspects of life under capitalism, but also reinforces that degradation and alienation. Many jobs that people do today would still have to be done in a socialist society, but we believe that the poverty, alienation and oppression that create the conditions in which the sex industry flourishes would wither away.

Sex Workers protesting outside of Instagram HQ

Sex Workers stage a protest outside the Instagran HQ in London

(Image: Sex Workers United/Twitter)

Decriminalisation Vs legalisation
Essentially, decriminalisation means the removal of all criminal laws that are specific to sex workers. Legalisation is government controlled prostitution with separate laws and if women work outside designated zones or brothels they are still criminalised. Across Europe prostitution is legalised (if not criminalised). Ironically many sex workers (often the most marginalised in society) still face criminalisation under legalisation.

Decriminalisation:

• Eliminates all laws and prohibits the state and law enforcement officials from intervening in any sex work related activities or transactions.

• De-prioritizes arrest and reduces interactions between police and sex workers.
• Retroactively seals criminal record and provides a pathway for sex workers who want to transition into other employment.

• Provides allocated resources for people who have historically and currently are being criminalised for sex work.

Legalisation:

• Regulation of sex work with laws regarding where, when, and how sex work could take place.

• Requires sex workers to keep up with registration fees, costs, and licenses, which is difficult for people with little money and resources.

• Provides a pathway for law enforcement interaction and regulation of where, when, and how (criminalisation is not removed).

• Provides allocated resources to law enforcement to regulate consensual, private behaviour.

Decriminalisation Vs The Nordic Model

There is a contentious debate about the best way to address sex work. The options most frequently put forward are either decriminalisation — supported internationally by sex workers and many others — or the Nordic Model, also referred to as the ‘sex buyer law’, or an ‘end demand’ approach. The Nordic Model purports to decriminalise sex workers and criminalise clients and in doing so reduce the demand for prostitution and shrink the sex industry.

The Nordic model in practice:

The Nordic model undermines safety and gives clients more power over sex workers. France criminalised clients in 2016 and a two-year evaluation report found that 42 percent of sex workers are more exposed to violence (insults in the street, physical violence, sexual violence, theft, and armed robbery in the workplace) and that 38 percent have found it increasingly hard to demand use of condoms. The Norwegian government acknowledged that the Nordic model made the the sex industry “a buyer’s market”. As the client bears criminal risk, he can demand the worker meets him in a less safe place, demand unprotected sex and a lower price. This brings risks of violence and STIs/HIV, in addition to impoverishing already precarious workers. A social services report on the Swedish city of Malmo found that as a result of the law, “prostitutes who are still working in street prostitution experience a tougher existence”.

Does not decriminalise sex workers. Claims that under Nordic-model prostitution law, sex workers are supported and not subject to policing or criminalisation are not supported by the facts. Sex workers can be prosecuted for sharing premises or for street work. In Oslo in 2011, a sex worker was prosecuted for ‘brothel-keeping’ for sharing a flat with other workers, despite the judge agreeing that her primary motivation for sharing her space was safety. Amnesty International found that street-based sex workers in Norway were still being fined several years after the Nordic model had supposedly ‘decriminalised’ them. In France, municipal laws against street sex work have been retained, meaning street sex workers are still being arrested and fined. In Northern Ireland, the much-trumpeted ‘first arrest’ of a client was accompanied by the arrest of three sex working women sharing a flat.

Contrary to some claims, the sex industry has not shrunk as criminalisation can never address the reasons people go into sex work, which is to get the money that they need to live their lives.

Decriminalisation has been broadly successful:

Decriminalisation, which was implemented in New Zealand in 2003, means that sex workers are able to work without threat of criminal sanctions. Criminal and administrative penalties on prostitution are repealed. Sex workers’ workplaces are regulated through employment law, enabling workers to hold their bosses to account and form trade unions.

Sex workers have more rights and power at work. A comprehensive five-year New Zealand government review found: no increase in prostitution; no increase in trafficking; sex workers more able to report violence and leave prostitution if they choose. Since decriminalisation, over 90 percent of sex workers said they had additional employment, legal, health and safety rights. That includes street-based sex workers, of whom 90 per cent said they felt they had employment rights, and 96 percent said they felt they had legal rights.

Sex workers can assert their rights through labour law. A sex worker in New Zealand took her manager to court for sexual harassment – and won – with the judge commenting: ‘Sex workers are as much entitled to protection from sexual harassment as those working in other occupations’. Such a ruling would not be possible in a criminalised workplace.

Decriminalisation is sometimes presented as at odds with anti-trafficking measures – but it should be obvious that giving workers more rights is crucial to tackling exploitation. Research shows that less than 6 percent of migrant sex workers in the UK have been coerced and forced to work against their will; many migrants said they prefer working in the sex industry to the “unrewarding and sometimes exploitative conditions they meet in non-sexual jobs”.

Decriminalisation increases sex workers’ power in their interactions with clients, managers, police and landlords. It makes people safer. It reduces the transmission of HIV. It is for these reasons that decriminalisation is supported by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, Sisters Uncut, and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.

What Decrim Now says decriminalisation will mean in full:

• People have the right to work in the sex industry without threat of criminal sanctions or police harassment. All criminal and administrative prohibitions and penalties on prostitution and other forms of sex work are removed, including anti-social/criminal behaviour orders, civil injunctions and prostitutes’ cautions.

• Soliciting and advertising, including via online platforms, are permitted as permitted for other businesses. Workers can share information and screen potential clients easily.

• Workers can choose jobs in managed premises where they can negotiate for fair conditions through labour law and health and safety regulations.

• Penalties for keeping brothels or disorderly houses and controlling prostitution for gain are lifted, allowing workers to share spaces and costs, look out for each other’s safety and hire service personnel like drivers, receptionists, security guards and others. The activities of these non-sex workers are also decriminalised.

• Landlords can offer ordinary rents and tenant contracts (short- or long-term) to sex workers without facing criminal charges. Sex workers cannot be threatened with eviction on the grounds of their work.

• Sex workers are free to travel and rent accommodation without being subject to criminalisation as ‘pop-up brothels’.

• Sex workers can use the justice system to seek redress for discrimination and abuse committed by bosses, clients and police.

• Police stop raids on suspected brothels and confiscation of earnings and property.

• Sex workers may financially support and live with their partners and families without facing criminal sanctions.

• Prostitution offences are struck from police records, making it easier for workers to find jobs outside the sex industry.

• Buying sex is decriminalised, since workers have the right to sell their services.

• All sex workers feel free to visit public health services, contributing to lower rates of sexually transmitted and HIV infections in society at large.

• Decriminalisation means sex workers can report suspected cases of trafficking to police without self-incrimination. Anti-trafficking and anti-slavery law must not obliterate the right of adult individuals to gain livelihoods selling sex.

• Current laws on rape, sexual abuse, paedophilia, human trafficking and all violent crimes remain in place after decriminalisation. Claims that child grooming gangs are linked to adult consensual sex work have no basis in fact.

• Granting workers legal rights removes opportunities for those who currently see them as fair game for criminal exploitation.

• Privacy and freedom from undue state control over sexual expression are important to democratic tradition. Decriminalisation upholds the human, civil and labour rights of those who earn a living by selling sex.

• Selling sex is no longer defined as violence against women by the Crown Prosecution Service.

USW members supporting rail workers on the RMT picket line
(Image: Sex Workers United/Twitter)

Unionising and Organising

United Voices of the World is a worker-led union, in which dancers and strippers will organise their own campaigns, with support and solidarity from the wider membership. Members will lead on our own struggles not because we think that being a ‘stripper’ or a ‘sex worker’ is a fixed identity, but because those who have experienced the working conditions in the industry are best placed to know how to change it. The union provides legal protection, advice, training and education, workplace and court representation and, mostly, an organising space of collective power for workers to negotiate with bosses, develop bargaining skills and increase our confidence to organise at work and change the industry in the interests of workers.

USW works with strippers, hostesses and sex workers across the UK to improve conditions in clubs through collective negotiation and individual casework. They organise to establish ‘worker’ status, which will enable those working in clubs to claim basic rights at work, such as annual leave, sick pay, a guaranteed basic wage and the right to organise and be represented by a trade union. The sex workers unionisation campaign is organised in partnership with x:talk, a sex workers support project and in conjunction with Decrim Now, the campaign for the full decriminalisation of all sex work.

Beginning in June 2018, sex workers active in the Women’s Strike Assembly begun a unionisation drive of workers across the UK sex industry with the grassroots union, United Voices of the World. The union organise with both irregular migrants and workers with secure immigration status. Because of how current laws and policies criminalise many aspects of sex work, the unionisation campaign has begun with a focus on organising strippers and dancers in clubs and pubs. Working together, standing up for each other, making each other's voices heard so that they can improve their working conditions collectively.

The union offers workers the ability to collectively negotiate about workplace rules and conditions – with both bosses and also the local councils. The union is also the only way that sex workers will be able to get our bosses and clients to treat them with the dignity and respect that they deserve. The union is also the only way sex workers will be able to put a stop to things like extortionate high house fees, arbitrary changes to commission structures, fines for being late or having to cancel a shift, blacklisting and sexual harassment by managers or bouncers.

For years, strippers and dancers have been made to sign contracts that set out house ‘rules’ but ignore the rights that we have as workers. Under UK employment law it is possible to remain self-employed, while being protected legally as a worker (which is different than employee). With the support of the the union, strippers across the UK can now collectively demand labour rights such as getting the National Minimum Wage, holiday and sick pay, protection from unlawful discrimination and the right to collectively bargain with clubs without facing victimisation. The good news is that most strippers can remain self-employed and be protected legally as a worker.

Join the United Sex Workers union online on www.uvwunion.org.uk

Sex Workers Go On Strike

Sex workers are also withdrawing their labour. On 8 March 2022, the Women’s Strike took place on the streets of the UK for the first time in two years. In London, Hundreds of protesters, activists and members of trade unions gathered, unions present were United Voices of the World (representing low-paid, migrant and precarious workers) and IWGB (founded by Latin American cleaners, now representing insecure workers from delivery riders to nannies), there was also grassroots organisations like the English Collective of Prostitutes, SWARM, Migrants Organise, Sisters Uncut, the Feminist Assembly of Latin Americans, Kurdistan Solidarity Network and more.

Speeches were given by striking workers and sex workers, lashing out at poverty wages, lack of sick pay, lack of maternity leave, and laws that enable unsafe working conditions that disproportionately impact migrant workers, sex workers, trans workers and workers of colour. While each group has its own demands, their fight is the same: to exist. The demand is simple: “We want to live… but we also want more than that.” Mid-way through the evening, LGBT+Socialists member Nadia Whittome MP addressed the crowd calling for the decriminalisation of sex work and for the spotlight of International Women’s Day to be pulled away from CEO’s, brands and individual success stories and thrown back on the collective labour force.

Nadia Whittome MP speaking at the Women's Strike Assembly and sex work strike on International Womens Day (Image: Nadia Whittome/Facebook)

Labour4Decrim's Model Motion for CLP Branches

Labour4Decrim are a grassroots campaign group of Labour Party activists who are active in sex worker collectives, trade unions, feminist and human rights organisations who support the decriminalisation of sex work. Labour Party members can pass their below model motion in support of the campaign.

The Labour Party notes:

• Sex work takes place via phone, webcam, stripping, pole-dancing, modelling and porn and from escort agencies, flats, streets, parks, saunas, massage parlours, peep shows, BDSM venues, private parties and home

• Selling sex itself is not illegal, but many laws criminalise associated activities that leave sex workers vulnerable and deprived of basic rights.

• When sex workers receive criminal records for offences relating to their work, it makes it even harder for them to find other employment, keeping them in the industry.

• Sex workers are increasingly organising alongside other workers within the trade union movement.

• A number of international human rights organisations support the full decriminalization of sex work including Amnesty International, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women; Human Rights Watch; UNAIDS; the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health; Transgender Europe; ILGA-Europe and the World Health Organization.

The Labour Party believes:

• Sex work is work. While it is gendered, stigmatised and often precarious work, it is work that pays the rent, bills, and puts food on the table for thousands of families across the UK.

• Criminalisation makes sex work dangerous. Current laws means that sex workers are unable to legally work together to increase safety, and are discouraged from reporting crimes committed against them for fear of being arrested themselves.

• People have the right to work in the sex industry without threat of criminal sanctions or police harassment.

Instead of attempting to eradicate the sex industry through further empowering the police and immigration enforcement, we need other workers to support sex workers in their demands for safety, labour rights and dignity at work.

The Labour Party resolves:

• To support and campaign for the full decriminalisation of sex work.

• To support the unionisation of sex workers and to respect their demands for labour rights and to improve their working conditions, including occupational safety and health.

• To campaign against any attempt to introduce the criminalisation of clients, often referred to as the Nordic Model, or any law criminalising the advertisement of sexual services (similar to FOSTA/SESTA) in the UK.

• To forward this motion on to the Local Labour Policy Forum, National Labour Policy Forum and relevant Regional (Scottish/Welsh) Labour Policy Forum