Sex workers experience violence at a high rate. Almost no-one expects me to provide sources to back this up, because it’s intuitive to them. From hearing about Samuel Little choosing sex workers to murder because we’re easy targets to dead hooker jokes finding their way into all sorts of cherished media franchises, everyone knows that sex workers are subject to frequent harm. The question is: how frequent, and what does that look like in practice?
Victimization is not necessarily a perpetual state. A person can have a singular experience of violence and an otherwise good experience doing sex work, no experiences of violence but dislike the job, or a constant barrage of violence that leaves them continually re-traumatized. Many of the studies I find or have referenced to me include statistics on whether a sex worker has ever experienced violence but provide very little insight into how often they do. Some will restrict the time period to the last year, still using a yes/no binary as to whether they were assaulted, and I always think about how it doesn’t paint a picture of their daily lives. Others recruit their study participants exclusively from programs which cater to sex workers who are in abusive situations, skewing their data.
I was recently sent a wall of studies and comments about violence in prostitution, as an argument for why it should be abolished (meaning criminalizing clients and brothels, which of course does not actually stop people from buying and selling sex). This was supposed to contrast my own experience, but it does not – I have been raped and otherwise assaulted whilst selling sex, and I still consent to sex with other clients because being a rape victim does not make someone incapable of all future consent.
Uncharacteristically, I used self-restraint to avoid replying directly despite my irritation, and decided I’d use some of the studies I was sent to demonstrate a wider issue with the rhetoric around violence in sex work and the flaws in these studies.
First, I was sent this piece of research: Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries: An Update on Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
We see that researchers interviewed 854 people across these 9 countries, and that they’ve created statistics based on the responses they got during these interviews. It is implied that they think these statistics can reasonably be applied to people in prostitution in general, as an expected rate of violence… so let’s have a look at the methods section and see where these interview participants came from!
(Note: the vast majority of those interviewed were women and in only 3 countries were any men or any trans people interviewed.)
100 sex workers were interviewed in Canada from “in or near Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the most economic destitute regions in North America”. This introduces a massive skew, because poorer people are more vulnerable to all kinds of violence, and this is especially true for sex workers. This is nothing close to a representative sampling of Canadian sex workers.
123 sex workers were interviewed in Mexico, from the streets and brothels and strip clubs and massage parlours. We get no information on how these women were selected!
54 sex workers were interviewed in Hamburg in Germany, from “a drop-in shelter for drug addicted women” and “a program which offered vocational rehabilitation for those prostituted” and those “referred by peers” as well as an ad in the local newspaper. Though we don’t know how many came from the newspaper, certainly those in the shelter and vocational program and the peers of those women are much more likely than average to have faced violence. Violence is, in fact, what is likely to make women access these kinds of services in the first place.
130 sex workers were interviewed in San Francisco, all of whom were street sex workers who have a much higher rate of experiencing violence due to their high visibility and inability to screen clients before meeting them.
110 sex workers were interviewed in Thailand, who were mostly from “an agency in northern Thailand that offered nonjudgmental support and job training” and from the street and a beauty parlour. Though we don’t get specifics about the agency, it certainly sounds like it was an agency built to help sex workers into new professions, which obviously means that sex workers who want to stop selling sex are massively overrepresented here.
68 sex workers were interviewed in South Africa, from brothels and the street and a drop-in centre.
117 sex workers were interviewed in Zambia, through TASINTHA which is an organisation that supports people with a history of sex work by offering them food and vocational training. Yet again, this means the entire sample of sex workers are those who are making efforts to stop selling sex and are in significant enough poverty to struggle to afford food.
50 sex workers were interviewed in Turkey, exclusively from those “who were brought to a hospital in Istanbul by police for the purpose of STD control”. These women were either working illegally and were brought there for testing, which increases their risk of violence above the general population due to the effects of criminalization, or were brought to the hospital as a result of contracting STIs which may have been contracted via assault.
96 sex workers were interviewed in Colombia, from agencies. We get a lot of references here about prostitution in Colombia but no more information about the actual agencies these sex workers were in. Regardless, they are all workers with managers, no independent workers.
Here’s what I notice about all of these interviews – sex workers who sell sex independently are ignored and only included incidentally. Some of the sex workers interviewed in hospitals will have been independent, as will those who accessed drop-ins and vocational programs, but the interviewers made a point to seek out sex workers who were under the control of 3rd parties and often only interviewed through these services because they weren’t able to access them in places of control (like being refused access to brothels in Turkey). They also sought out street workers and poorer regions in some cases. These interviews are not representative of all sex workers.
The data we do get, on top of not accurately representing the entire population, does not give us an understanding of each individual person’s circumstances. For example, if we look at the table provided about types of violence these sex workers experience we don’t get details about how frequently assault was experienced or what their day-to-day lives are like with regards to violence. The closest we get is a question about whether rape was experienced more than 5 times by those who were raped at least once. We get more detail about child abuse, which may or may not have been prior to selling any kind of sex, than we do about current experiences.
While selling sex I have been threatened with a weapon, physically assaulted, and raped more than 5 times. I have been homeless and I was physically disciplined as a child. I experienced sexual abuse before the age of 18, from more than one perpetrator. On this table tracking violence, I would be in the category who has experienced it severely… and yet, my general experience of selling sex is that I consent to do so the vast majority of my clients are not violent. My likelihood of experiencing sexual assault has gone up and down whilst I have sold sex and I currently experience it far less than I did in the past and far less severely.
75% of these participants were in a state of homelessness because the interviewers went out of their way to interview homeless women who were often selling sex on the street.
89% of these participants wanted to leave prostitution because the interviewers went out of their way to interview women in vocational programs trying to leave it.
Frankly, the fact that they didn’t get figures saying 100% of them want to leave is shocking, given the selection bias!
Let’s take a look at another study and see if this is a fluke: Screening for Traumatic Brain Injury in Prostituted Women.
This study involved only 66 participants. “Participants were 66 women who were clients of four agencies that offered services to women escaping prostitution in San Francisco, Chicago, and Toronto, Canada.” Not off to a great start, because of course those who are seeking to stop selling sex are likely to be in a worse position where they experience violence than those who are not.
Unfortunately, the researchers undermine any possible statistical relevance of their data through the way they conduct their focus groups and which questions they ask. Of the 66 participants, 60 had a lifetime history of a head injury and 40 of them had experienced it whilst selling sex. No clarification is requested as to whether the head injury was caused by, or relevant to, selling sex. These women are vulnerable and poor, hence using these services, and we have no evidence at all here that there is an increase in their likelihood of sustaining a head injury specifically because they are selling sex.
Women who experience abuse have high rates of TBI in general, and in this study the sex workers chosen were from a pool of women who are using support services targeted at abused women who have sold sex… so the result was exactly what you’d expect.
Now we’ll try an analysis done by an Icelandic organisation called Stigamot: Does prostitution affect the well-being of its survivors?
Stigamot analysed the experiences of their service users, who sought them out because they were having issues related to their experiences selling sex. Obviously these statistics have a huge selection bias and cannot be applied to the general population of sex workers, because the group are already self-selected to be exclusively those who have experienced harm.
The statistics provided would be useful when requesting funding, to show the specific needs of their service users, but they don’t tell us anything about the average sex worker’s experience in Iceland.
How about a study of clients, instead, to illustrate attitudes and desires for violence? Men who buy sex, Who they buy and what they know.
(Side note: Julie Bindel, notorious SWERF, is credited here!)
This study covers interviews of 103 men. They were selected to be interviewed based on responding to a newspaper advert and all viable applicants were accepted. This study does a lot better with how it recruits than those of sex workers did! Unfortunately, there is still an element of bias at play which is not acknowledged by those conducting the study – the men who agreed to participate are likely to have done so because they are titillated by the idea of speaking about seeing sex workers. Those who view sex workers negatively, or get off to violence and dehumanisation, are more likely to desire to brag about this than men who buy sex and do not think these things are.
The attitudes shown (acceptance of rape myths, as highlighted) are associated with violence, but this study tells us nothing about the rate of violence against sex workers or whether these clients regularly act on desires they may have to harm us.
While it may be interesting to read the words of whorephobic and misogynistic men, we learn nothing about clients’ likelihood of perpetrating abuse by reading them.
Some thoughts:
Even if every single one of us was raped or beaten at some point whilst selling sex, that would not tell you what our average experience selling sex is like. We need access to workers’ rights and to be free from criminalization not in spite of violence against us, but often because of it. Exploiters and abusers are less able to harm us when we have money and resources and aren’t having to hide our activities from the police.
When it comes to assessing our risk of violence, we should be considered as full people rather than sorted into a victim vs empowered false dichotomy. Our likelihood of being raped matters, not just in terms of whether we may be raped but in terms of how often it is likely to happen. Too often, studies on sex workers treat a single instance of rape over a lifetime in sex work as equivalent to frequent rapes throughout, because all that matters to them is whether we can be labelled as victims and reduced to that. No-one should be subject to sexual violence, and it absolutely matters when sex workers are raped even if we’ve been raped before. A sex worker being raped by one client or by several does not tell you anything about how they are treated by their other clients.
I constantly have people telling me that my insistence that I consent to sell sex is undermined by the huge numbers of sex workers who do not, using studies like this. It’s nonsensical, because I am a person who has experienced this same violence and it has not taken away my ability to consent to sex work. My clients are not rapists as a general rule. There are clients who have raped me, and they have typically chosen to target me instead of someone else because I have been vulnerable (as a sex worker they assume no-one cares about, as a brothel worker who can’t report because my workplace is illegal, as a poor person selling sex to make ends meet, etc.)
No matter the level of violence sex workers face on average, which I do not seek to downplay, we are best protected by the full decriminalisation of our work and the destigmatisation of selling sex.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 