Single parenthood is a major driving force in causing people to consider getting into sex work, from selling sex to stripping to making online content. In addition to those who begin sex work because of having children, plenty of sex workers have children once already engaging in it for the same reasons as everyone else; we want to start a family with a partner, we get pregnant accidentally, or we feel called to help raise the next generation with good values and ethics.
Current and former sex workers alike face criticism for any proximity we have to kids. We are viewed as deviants who may be a threat for a multitude of reasons, either because finding out that we’ve done sex work may traumatize them or because we’re assumed to want to groom the youth into joining our profession. Every article about a teacher who gets fired when their OnlyFans account is discovered is an example of this kind of bigotry in action. Other common occurrences include relatives refusing to allow sex workers access to children within the family, denials when attempting to adopt, and taking away custody of sex workers’ children.
Upon hearing that a sex worker has had a baby of their own or has custody of a young child, many people’s initial reaction is to assume there is a danger posed to the little one. Sex worker parents are viewed with suspicion by default, due to stereotypes the average person has absorbed from a lifetime of consuming whorephobic media. They imagine clients being brought into the same home where the child lives, perhaps with them sleeping in another room during the transaction, and fear the possibility that those clients might seek to harm the child if they become displeased with the services from their parent. Add in the assumptions people make about sex workers doing drugs and behaving irresponsibly and you have a recipe for unneeded reports to children’s social services.
I was recently subject to a baseless report to children’s social services myself, which I can only assume was made as a result of disclosing a history of selling sex to the safeguarding support worker who assessed me a couple of days after giving birth. My recommendation is always that sex workers should avoid disclosure to anyone likely to target them, but knowing it was already included in my medical records meant that I had to share the information or risk a worse reaction for having tried to hide it. Presumptions were made that I would require support I was actively insisting I didn’t need. Other safeguarding team members insisted that post-partum depression was a serious concern because of my mental health history (including sex work related PTSD), framed me living with friends I’ve known for a decade and lived with for 5 years already as unstable housing, and so I was referred to children’s social services even though no specific risk to my daughter was identified. This all happened to me despite years of experience offering peer support to other sex workers in circumstances like these and being highly educated on my options – sometimes there’s nothing you can do, or you’re caught in a vulnerable moment.
My story of being reported ended quickly, with the referral being dismissed by a social worker over the phone who saw the report for the bigotry that it was once she’d asked me a few questions. I was incredibly lucky. Still, the visceral terror of not knowing to what extent whorephobia might force me to accept constant invasions of our privacy by children’s social services is something that lingers. What if the social worker who’d called me that day had been one who was a little less understanding about sex work? I’ve heard too many real-life horror stories not to imagine it, involving children being removed from loving homes as a result of this stigma.
Contrasting the way we are viewed by biased medical professionals and all kinds of paternalistic support workers, sex workers actually tend to be highly protective of our children and to prioritize them in a way that many other parents do not. We sell sex or make porn to provide for our children even when we hate it, we’re more aware than average of how pervasive abuse is and take extra precautions before we leave them with anyone, and we create lifestyles which allow us to spend the maximum amount of time possible at home parenting. If we do see clients in our family homes, it’s usually out of necessity and what we need is financial support to stop and help moving to somewhere new. Taking away our kids leaves everyone worse off and functions as a punishment for poverty.
Some of us might need additional support beyond money, especially since the factors that make people more likely to do sex work can also make parenting more difficult, however we still need to be regarded as individuals rather than statistics… not least because the data on us is so flawed. Anyone can have mental health issues or physical disability, and we should all be provided with the accessibility tools we need to perform effective childcare rather than be treated differently if those disabilities led us to sex work. Nothing about selling sex or making porn in themselves inherently makes someone unfit to parent, if we reject the stereotypes and don’t blame sex work for issues which are actually the result of poverty and other forms of marginalization.
In terms of harm that could potentially result from having a parent who does sex work, the damage tends not to come from the sex working parent and instead results from ways the parent is victimized which extend to the kid. A child might be bullied by their peers if they find out about the parent’s job, for example, which also applies to the children of queer parents; in both cases we should blame the bullies (and the parents who instilled those values in them) rather than suggest certain people shouldn’t have kids due to the existence of bigotry. That same child is unlikely to have a strong negative reaction to knowing about their parent’s work if their peers don’t know or harass them over it, since they’ve probably been raised in an environment that doesn’t subscribe to anti sex work values. Ex partners of sex workers also have the potential to use knowledge of their work vindictively to poison the children against them or gain custody even when the kid has a clear marked preference for the sex working parent as a primary caregiver.
Before I even started trying to conceive, I thought long and hard about how I would mitigate these problems. I considered how I would balance sex work and fatherhood to keep my daughter safe. I put extra screening procedures into place for pregnancy and after birth that I hadn’t been following before. My new list of rules includes never letting a client drive me home, not mentioning my daughter’s existence to them even if they ask whether I have children, and strictly limiting kissing and therefore potential exposure to illnesses like Covid-19 or the flu which I might pass on to my baby.
To my surprise, all the dangers I actually faced during pregnancy and after birth weren’t from clients at all. Instead I dealt with my landlord’s partner forcing entry into my home and threatening to hit me and my housemate. A workplace occupation culminated in my boss drilling through the locks to the bookshop we were employed in while I slept downstairs, entering with over a dozen people and scaring the hell out of me. Failures by medical professionals left me torn open from an instrumental delivery that I believe could have been avoided. Those issues have all cleared up now that my daughter is here, but the reality of what the true dangers were made me re-evaluate and recognize that I was being disproportionately cautious about sex work compared to everything else in my life.
As my daughter gets older and transitions out of the newborn phase, I will face new challenges like any parent does. I’ll also be here for more time with her because doing sex work allows me to have a flexible schedule and work for less hours in total. Others may have to rely on nurseries and babysitters to continue their jobs. I get to raise her within a progressive social circle full of sex workers who truly understand the meaning of mutual aid and community care, while parents outside of these groups struggle to form connections with the parents around them if their own friends aren’t having children. No parent is perfect, yet I feel confident that I can be a good father to my baby and remain a sex worker and activist for our rights. If anything I feel better equipped than the majority of civilian parents I see, after feeling so compelled to defy the stereotypes.
Sex workers can be great parents. Society just has to let us.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 