Sex industry legislation and its impact on sex industry culture and the practices of sex workers.

Sex Industry legislation impacts directly on the culture of the sex industry and the work practices of sex workers. Poor policy results in individual sex workers forced to make decisions based on avoiding detection rather than placing their health and safety as first priorities. Equally taking steps to avoid stigma, discrimination, and the protection of the individual sex worker, their family and friends, outweighs a sex workers’ ability to report crime or discrimination. Legislation that enshrines Police as the regulators of the industry creates unnecessary and unacceptable opportunities for corruption. In the development of sex industry legislation the impacts referred to are more often ignored, overlooked or misinterpreted in the haste to ensure ‘protection’ of sex workers or more often the general community. This paternalistic approach both singles out sex workers as separate/different to the general community, endorsing discrimination and creating new, policy determined impacts on sex workers lives and work. Sex workers own safer working strategies and mechanisms for self protection (and increased earning capacity) are often directly reduced by poorly informed laws. This may be seen by some as a secondary outcome however for sex workers these impacts are immediate and direct. Whilst acknowledging that these, often unintended outcomes, may not have been considered by policy makers, or may have been written into law as a political compromise in order to see other aspects of sex industry law adopted, this paper will cover direct sex work examples and question whether sex industry legislation developed without effective involvement of sex workers can meet expected outcomes. Consideration is given to how policy can provide incentive to participation by sex workers and reduce the likelihood of negatively effecting important sex work cultural and historic safer working practices.

Conflict of Interest: None disclosed
Financial Support/Funding: None disclosed
Recorded: Sydney, Australia, April 2007