The Sex Myth: Why Everything We're Told Is Wrong (29 page)

High reoffending rates among some sex workers are at least partly due to the fact that people who have ever broken the law are seen as only criminals, no matter what they do next. It’s
difficult to function in the straight world with a record. All the po-faced feminism in the world is not going to change the fact that many people are (understandably) reluctant to hire someone
with a criminal past. In some places, such as some US states, being convicted of soliciting sex puts you on the sex offenders’ register as well. Illinois, for instance, lists ‘public
indecency’ and ‘indecent solicitation of an adult’ as worthy of sex offender status.

It’s for these reasons I believe the opponents of legal sex work endorse policies that make a person’s life outcomes narrower, harder, and more punitive than is ever necessary. The
mumbled slogans about ‘turning lives around’ is a red herring when all the drop-in centres in the world won’t get you a legitimate job. There’s so much emphasis put on
shelters, transitions, and all the rest of it: then what? The spiral of hopelessness is simply not broken by pat answers and vote-winning ‘tough on crime’ nonsense.

Even groups who say their priority is reducing violence towards women still back a strategy of criminalisation that puts sex workers in danger. The Poppy Project, in its response to the Home
Office’s
Paying the Price
consultation on prostitution, reiterated that its agenda was to continue to support the criminalisation of clients of sex workers and offences not directly associated with prostitution but commonly associated with it.

Policies that address prostitution only in terms of crime have a knock-on effect on how its participants are viewed by the public. If someone who has ever worked on the streets is murdered, her
death is reported in the media not as ‘woman killed’, but as ‘prostitute killed’. Over and again much is made in the press of how isolated streetwalkers are, the problems
they have, their chaotic lives.

In everything I ever read about Michaela Hague in Sheffield, she was described as a good friend, a caring mother, and a nice person. It’s unlikely Michaela would have defined herself
solely as a prostitute. Yet, just for having ever accepted money for sex, laws are written that treat the rights of sex workers as different from those of ‘normal’
people. Fiction, news, and ideology all spend a lot of time emphasising that it’s usual, and even acceptable, to think of these people as inherently different from others. Many
organisations accept money and instead of helping people, support their criminalisation.

Many people who have no first-hand knowledge of what sex work is like claim to be telling the ‘real’ story of prostitution, and shout down anyone who disagrees. It is as if simply by
having taken money for sex, you are rendered incapable of speaking for yourself. To be, as I am, a former sex worker with anything to say that isn’t 100 per cent negative about prostitution,
is to be written off, disregarded, and ridiculed by people who imagine their preconceptions somehow carry more weight than my actual lived experience.

We continually hear how prostitution is dangerous, and death all but guaranteed. Poor handling of investigations like Peter Sutcliffe’s show how, at least in the past, police have
sometimes been less than perfectly careful when investigating the murders of prostitutes. So, when a serial killer emerges who is targeting sex workers, few are surprised.

Violence against sex workers is rarely reported because, seriously, since when have the police ever been on the side of sex workers? On a day-to-day basis, sex workers are more likely to have a
negative encounter with police than they are with a client.

Perhaps, rather than assuming these women are targeted because they are prostitutes, we should consider that they may be targeted because of the message society is sending about their value as
humans. Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, murdered forty-eight women in America in the early 1980s. He later talked about why most of his victims were streetwalkers: ‘I
picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I thought I could
kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.’
¹⁶⁷

It wasn’t the commercial sex angle that was attractive to him, but the convenience. Many such killers are opportunists; they not only target shamed outsiders like prostitutes, but also
hitchhikers and people travelling alone. People whose whereabouts are not exactly known at any given time. And yet no one would endorse a law criminalising solo
travel under
the rubric of ‘protecting’ holidaymakers – that would be ludicrous.

The mental health problems associated with outsider status are well known. Social isolation increases the risk of violence, blackmail, and coercion. Stigma and fear of humiliation and
prosecution exacerbates any existing mental health issues. The current policy therefore is responsible for many of the mental health issues associated with sex work.

Not all is negative. There are some hopeful and encouraging things going on that actually could benefit sex workers and reduce their exposure to harm. In Liverpool, police adopted a policy that
recognises violence against sex workers as a hate crime. The result is that they can approach the police and know that violence against them will be taken seriously. This has led to a dramatic
increase in prosecutions and a decline in assaults. But it’s a model that has yet to be picked up anywhere else.

Perhaps the greatest danger to prostitutes comes when culture promotes the idea that sex workers are less than fully protected by the law. It’s a reality Gary Ridgway knew and exploited,
like many serial killers before and since. And when prostitutes are attacked, it adds fuel to the fire of prohibitionists who believe making sex work illegal and shifting it to industrial parks
will somehow solve the problem. Chicken, meet egg.

The American West may loom large in our collective imaginations, but in reality it did not last very long at all. In the years following the US Civil War, the federal
government started preparing western territories to become fully fledged states. Lawmaking procedures and regional government were standardised. As well as bringing in a considerable amount of red
tape, this also helped pave the way for a population boom.

Increased migration brought more families, more churches, and a greater influence of prudishness to the Wild West. As family settlements began to overtake saloons, new arrivals were shocked by
what they encountered. The inevitable result was social pressure to change the laws in areas that had until then tolerated prostitution. In 1890, an alliance of social reformers pressured the US
Congress to
form a national crime commission to investigate the sex trade. When Congress refused, the social reformers started their own.

The reports produced by these ‘vice committees’ were weapons in the war against prostitution. They were cited in forty-three cities’ bans on the sex trade. The reports claimed
to be objective, yet contained material that was strong-armed from sex workers and used to blackmail political opponents. Social purity movements forced ‘soiled doves’ into workhouses
to ‘rehabilitate’ them. Young women deemed to be at risk were forcibly removed from their homes. With a combination of dodgy methods and underhand tactics, opponents of prostitution
transformed their morality crusades into real political power.

Reports that are written today – such as the
Paying the Price
consultation by the Home Office, or any of a number of self-published reports written by NGOs such as Eaves – are
designed precisely to sway government policy and public opinion to fall in line with their agendas.

Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenicists believed that inherited degeneracy and ‘feeble-mindedness’ caused women to enter prostitution. Today, the party line
is that prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and are emotionally unstable, or otherwise incapable of making their own decisions. Therefore it is up to what Laura Agustín has termed
the ‘rescue industry’ to step in.

The assumption that prostitution is a damaging occupation undertaken only by damaged people underpins manipulated reports from the nineteenth century to today. The bias tends towards certain
methods of conducting studies and certain ways of reporting the results. Everything is affected from who is chosen to interview, to how questionnaire content is written. If the
a priori
assumption is that prostitution is dreadful, then it is unsurprising when the results of a study return a picture that is unsavoury.

The recent writings of Melissa Farley are typical of the output. Farley is a director of a non-profit organisation called Prostitution Research and Education based in San Francisco. She has a
handful of papers and self-published books that are commonly quoted in arguments against legalising prostitution. In terms of influence, she’s a classic Constellation Maker, funding and
publishing her own research, then
broadcasting the results through an Evangelising organisation she founded herself.

In ‘Prostitution and trafficking in Nevada: making the connections’, Farley claimed 90 per cent of sex workers ‘wish they could get out’. But prostitution in Nevada is
illegal, except for the highly regulated ‘pussy penitentiary’ brothels in rural counties where the women are often compelled to work long shifts and multiple weeks without days off, and
where they are forbidden even to bring their own cars to the compounds. So, the only people she interviewed were by definition either working illegally, or confined to bunker-like workplaces far
from home. It’s not representative of prostitution in general, and she does not include control groups or interviews with other sex workers anywhere.

There’s also the question of whether such job dissatisfaction is confined to sex work. As it happens, across all employment sectors, less than 40 per cent of under-25s are satisfied with
their work.
¹⁶⁸
Even respectable jobs like teaching have problems, with 40 per cent of qualified UK teachers leaving due to stress and unhappiness within
two years.
¹⁶⁹
Job dissatisfaction is not unique to sex work, and a projected 10 per cent satisfaction rate (in other words, 90 per cent of employees
wishing they could get out) in unskilled work is common. Though, of course, there actually are studies showing far higher rates of job satisfaction in sex workers to contrast with the grim picture
engineered in her study. Farley doesn’t mention any of them.

One of Farley’s other papers, reporting on post-traumatic stress disorder in prostitutes, demonstrates a host of problems. It recruited respondents found at drug abuse drop-in centres,
collecting data from a pool of people one would expect to have higher rates of mental trauma than even other sex workers. Again, there was no control population with other sex workers or other
non-sex workers.
¹⁷⁰
Studies of PTSD in sex workers have been heavily criticised both for their sources of funding (the neo-conservative Bush
administration in the US) and for being carried out by people who do not have the appropriate qualifications.
¹⁷¹

The criticism has gained momentum. In September 2011, Dr Calum Bennachie filed a complaint with the American Psychology Association asking that they rescind the membership of Melissa Farley.

In the complaint, Dr Bennachie lists a number of reasons for doing so.
¹⁷²
The reasons include factual errors in some of her
papers that appear to be misleading. Also mentioned is Farley’s apparent failure to seek ethical approval from the New Zealand Psychological Society (NZPsS). In many countries, when doing
research that involves the participation of specific people or in which individuals could be identified from their answers, such approval must always be sought before research begins. It’s
not a fun part of being a researcher – I once spent nine months of a twelve-month grant just preparing and processing ethics-related paperwork – but it is necessary. Bennachie also
notes that ‘she claimed to be able to diagnose sex workers as having post-traumatic stress disorder, despite using a flawed questionnaire, and not doing in-depth interviews.’

If these complaints are true, and the work is indeed unethical, it possibly breaches sections 5.01 and 8.10 of the APA’s Code of Ethics. With so many anti-sex-work writers and activists
not only referencing her work, but also consulting her as an expert in these topics, it’s an accusation that certainly merits a deeper look. The people who work with human subjects,
particularly in psychology and particularly where they are targeting potentially at-risk populations for their data, should definitely be scrutinised on these kinds of claims.

Such examples show how prostitution is a hard issue for feminists to address. Many continue to equate prostitution with violence against women with little or no supporting data. For instance,
Julie Bindel wrote in 2010, ‘Prostitution is both the cause and consequence of inequality between men and women’
¹⁷³
(a logical impossibility
if ever there was one). Funny, because I can think of plenty of places where prostitution is illegal but inequality between men and women is worse than in the UK. Iran, for instance. Saudi Arabia.
Afghanistan. Imagining that criminalising prostitution levels the playing field between men and women is ludicrous.

Even strident anti-sex-work writers like Julie Bindel can sometimes seem confused about whether the approach they endorse actually works. In a 2003 article, she even appears to admit – in
a roundabout sort of way – that making sex work illegal might do more harm than good. In a lengthy piece on female sex tourists in the Dominican Republic, which does little to demonise the
white, middle-class
women paying for West Indian men, she notes: ‘There are obvious differences between female and male sex tourism . . . they [are not] vulnerable to
criminalisation, unlike female prostitutes whose activities are illegal.’
¹⁷⁴
I tell you my gob was well and truly smacked to think that Bindel
herself might actually be suggesting that criminalisation does, indeed, have a part in making sex workers vulnerable.