DBS1 check. And this is what sex workers want: pay off their student debt, or put their children into a good education system, move on and start a different job. But because of criminalisation surrounding prostitution and mass arrest raids, deportation, violence, stigma, so many of them end up being a full-time prostitute. Why are you named the English Collective of Prostitutes, rather than sex workers? Paulina: We came out with the term sex workers in order to break down the stigma. People tend to consider that sex work happens in a certain way: drinking, drugs, loneliness, not having a family or children. A kind of person in a lonely place with nothing else to do. We try to show that sex workers can be anyone: a mum, a sister, a brother, your best friend, your auntie, your next door neighbor, your granny. Niki: I think most of us would call ourselves sex workers now, but we don’t want to give up our names either. We’ve been discussing whether to change ECP’s name. And most of us felt that while the stigma remained, we weren’t ready to give up the name of prostitute because, as with the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective with whom we discussed this, we are the two oldest, longest-standing sex workers’ organisations. So we use the term interchangeably, but it’s definitely true that the term sex worker has been used to break down some of that stigma. We don’t often say prostitute, we usually say ‘prostitute women’. That’s what we always used to say because we wanted to make the case that we were women like other women. We decided to keep hold of our name until decriminalisation at the very least, and then we’ll think about it. Another big debate is the one opposing choice and coercion. What is your stance on it? Paulina: It depends on what you mean by coercion, because we sex workers, we normally say that the State is the biggest pimp. Sex workers are forced into prostitution because of poverty. But if you mean coercion as in someone being actually forced against their will to enter prostitution, that’s trafficking. It’s a totally different thing from being a sex worker. When we talk about sex workers, we talk about people who chose to work in the sex industry whether it’s because of poverty, lack of resources, to support education, or pro bono work. Yes, they are coerced, but because of their lack of financial resources. But a trafficked person is not a sex worker, and that’s not what decriminalisation or the ECP stands for. We want those people to receive the right help and support. But being 1
under the criminalisation system, real victims of trafficking do not receive any help and support. They end up being arrested and prosecuted for prostitution, the same as someone who chooses to work within prostitution. Niki: Regarding choice, the most useful thing is to compare it to another job. Agricultural work is quite a good example. What would you say about the farm worker who chose this option because it was the best of all his options? You call them a worker and you wouldn’t even engage in a discussion about choice or coercion because they’re just a worker and it would be accepted that they’ve made a decision to go into that form of work in the same way that everybody else made the decision about their employment. And then at some point, if you saw any people who are literally being trafficked, and held in slave-like conditions you wouldn’t call them farmers, you would call them slaves. And you would expect the state to mobilise to protect people from that kind of abuse. That’s the easiest way to get clarity on that issue because other workers don’t even get asked that question.
‘Criminalisation is the signal to violent men that they can get away with it.’ The ECP presses for prostitution and trafficking to be dealt with as different issues. But this has been absent from the public discourse, and a lot of the repressive laws that we are now suffering under have been introduced in the context of a sensationalised campaign which implied that all sex workers are trafficked or coerced. There’s also a new kind of moralism which has really taken grip. It’s an unholy alliance between what we would call the fundamentalist feminists, and the moral religious fundamentalists. And there’s a letter on our website which is an open letter to gay organisations, LGBT organisations,
Disclosure and Barring Services, previously CRB (Criminal Records Bureau)
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