Two representatives from the International Union of Sex Workers participated in a panel discussion at the Anarchist Bookfair. The other panelists speeches can be found here.

Note: There is no spokesperson for the International Union of Sex Workers. As a feminist, non-hierarchical organisation, the IUSW wishes to present a diversity of sex worker voices, so a number of IUSW activists speak to the press and to the public on issues relating to the sex industry and adult entertainment. They speak from their own experience and their knowledge of the industry. Unless otherwise stated, articles by IUSW activists represent their view as individuals, not those of the organisation.

Each individual decides for themselves the work they undertake and their degree of self-disclosure: most IUSW activists have experienced direct or indirect slander, libel, misrepresentation and threats as a result of their activism. As a result, we advise activists to record interviews, speaking engagements etc. to prevent misrepresentation, whether purposeful or accidental.

Catherine Stephens (IUSW)
I’m really glad to be here today, and I’m grateful for being invited – although the sex industry is much discussed, and many organisations have a vested interest in those discussions, there is frequent opposition to having actual, working sex workers present. Regrettably, some organisations, several of which describe themselves as feminist, actively pursue a campaign of exclusion of people who work in the sex industry. In addition, those same organisations try to undermine and prevent sex workers self organising by making personal attacks on activists, trying – sometimes successfully – to get venues to cancel bookings for events, produce documents distorting what people say, threatening legal action to make free speech very risky and so on. I and other people have personal experience of all of those things.

So actually just letting a couple of whores into the room is a very progressive and open minded thing to do. Listening to what we actually say is even more so.

And what does the IUSW say that people find so objectionable, that people want to prevent being heard? Well, we call for full human, civil and labour rights for everyone who works in the sex industry, whether through, choice, circumstance or coercion, regardless of role, migration or taxation status. Everyone counts.

We call for freedom to choose, respect for those choices, and an absolute right to say no. We call for fair and safe workplaces, whether run by independent sex workers, groups of us together, or third parties who facilitate our work.

We call for everyone in the sex industry to have the full protection of the law, like you in the audience, like the non-sex workers on this platform.

We call for policy based on evidence, on reality – not ideology, dramatic individual cases and stereotypes. We call for the inclusion of sex workers in the process of making decisions which will affect us.

And while our right to participate is undermined and eroded, we are forced to spend our time defending the existence of our work and our very presence, instead of working to improve our lives.

That is what we stand for, and that is some people choose to campaign against, often stating that “all prostitution is violence against women”.

Prostitution is having sex for money, and neither having sex nor getting paid is inherently degrading, abusive, exploitative or harmful. There are people in prostitution who are coerced or drug dependent or have otherwise limited choices – but the problem is coercion, drug dependency, social exclusion, limited options, lack of rights, not having sex for money itself. But by confusing prostitution with a whole host of other problems, we allow those problems to flourish.

It is vulnerability which creates victims, not sex work itself, and society’s treatment of sex workers increases our vulnerability,
perpetuates stigma and exclusion, outlaws us from working together,
treats exploitation identically with honesty, and sees outdoor workers – some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our society – as a nuisance to be eradicated.

For example, the only way to work in the sex industry free of the risk of prosecution is to work for yourself in complete isolation.

If two people work from the same building, the owner or tenant is criminalised as a “brothel keeper” – sex workers do not have the right of free association, a basic right in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

“Controlling for gain” – legislation on “pimping” – explicitly includes people who are working of their own free will.

Our legal definition of trafficking is so broad that anyone knowingly giving a sex worker a lift to work, even if they are not being paid to do so, is potentially at risk of prosecution.

So the law builds in isolation and it builds in vulnerability. There is an inherent contradiction between the police roles of protection and enforcement, and sex workers bear the consequences of this in terms of violence and other abuses.

Much of the violence experienced by indoor sex workers is through robbery. Gangs make a rational choice, in the expectation of a small number of people on the premises, cash available and reluctance to report. This reluctance to report is due to mistrust of the police response, and realistic anxiety of arrest if the premises can be considered a brothel or the site of controlling for gain.

One of the cases the IUSW is currently supporting is that of a brothel which reported a violent attack to the police, and are now being prosecuted. There have been many prosecutions in which it has been recognised in court that no-one was being coerced or exploited – just people imprisoned for working together.

A substantial amount of violence to street sex workers comes from members of the ‘general public’, such as gangs of youths, aggrieved local residents and vigilantes. Attacks include shouted abuse, projectiles (e.g. cups of urine) thrown from cars, and assaults requiring hospital treatment – I’ve met one woman who was working on street in Ipswich during the Steve Wright murders, and months later was beaten up by people who had seen her being interviewed on the local TV news.

Some anti sex workers’ rights campaigners blame such violence on our clients, but the majority of robbery, abuse, harassment and physical or sexual violence experienced by sex workers in the course of their work comes from those who do not pay for sex. Many of these assailants make no pretence of being clients, but express hatred of sex workers and appear to feel their actions are justified by the social attitudes of abhorrence for commercial sex. Others may approach as if they were clients, but then refuse to pay, commit assaults and robberies, or violently force return of payment after having had sex.
If we look at how sex workers actually feel about their clients, we see a very different picture. For example, Suzanne Jenkins’ research interviewed nearly 500 sex workers (a very high number for a quantitative study) and explicitly explored sex workers’ experience of power relations between themselves and their clients. 54.5% of women said their relationships with their clients were equal, while 26.2% saw their clients as more vulnerable; 78.7% felt always or usually in control – only 0.7% saw the client as being in control; 86.5% never or rarely felt exploited by clients.

Jenkins’ research also examined the role of stigma and shows fear of stigma blights sex workers lives. 30% of the 300 female participants reported having felt threatened, and in almost all cases, the threat was of being publicly exposed as a sex-worker. Stigmatisation and marginalization of sex workers is no more an inherent part of sex work than homophobia is an inherent part of being lesbian or gay. We do not confuse homophobia and attacks on LGBT with being gay, we don’t say racist assault is an inevitable result of being black – it’s time to separate stigma and social exclusion from sex work itself, and hold them to account.

And it can be done – all it takes is the political will . In Liverpool, the police view crimes against sex workers – like crimes against LGBT, like racist assaults – as hate crime. With a specialist support worker, Liverpool police are achieving a 40% detection rate for rapes committed against street sex workers reported to the police. 90% of cases for violence against sex workers that went to court during 2005 to end March 2009 resulted in convictions. Rape cases for the past six months have achieved a 100% conviction rate. 100%.
National average for all women is 6%.

But this achievement – putting rapists behind bars – requires actually listening to sex workers when we talk about violence, not describing everything that happens to us as assault. Particularly, it means not arresting sex workers when we contact the police to report crimes against us.

We can solve the problems associated with the sex industry – but policies that solve problems are based in reality and on evidence – not ideology, dramatic individual cases and stereotypes.

The abuses we suffer are used to argue for the eradication of our work, by those who dismiss the voices of sex workers that contradict their ideological positions.

What I want to see, what the IUSW wants to see, is a society that enables, not excludes, sex workers
when we speak out, in all our diversity.

Thank you for listening.

Thierry Schaffauser (IUSW)

My name is Thierry Schaffauser and I have been a sex worker for 7 years. I have started to work on the streets in Paris and I work now in this country advertising on line and I also work in the gay porn industry.

In my life I have always had problems with authority and it has always been difficult for me to accept it. I think one of the reasons why I am a sex worker is for the freedom it provides me and because I couldn’t work any longer for someone else. I couldn’t hear any more sexists and homophobic jokes from my co-workers and feel exploited and humiliated, like a consenting slave. I did many jobs before doing sex work and so far sex work has been the least exploitative work I have done. In the sex industry you can have employers but it is also easy to work independently and keep control on your work. You can choose when you want to work, not to wake up early at mornings, and have better incomes than in doing other jobs generally available for working class people and minorities.

And I think it is precisely because sex work is an economic strategy for working class women and minorities that it is criminalised. Husbands needing their wives to stay to do the housework and all kind of services. Bosses needing an exploitable labour force. But sex workers tell them all to fuck off!
Sex work is repressed and stigmatised because it is a strategy for women and minorities to be economically independent from a father or from a husband, to flee their country and always find clients and money wherever they migrate. Without sex work I wouldn’t certainly have been able to live my own life, to study, to travel and move to London when Sarkozy became the “Furher” of France, to learn a new language, to militate, to write a book, to have time to sleep in mornings, to enjoy myself, to be me.
But even with the best working conditions is sex work still inherently the result of an economic power from one person to another?

Personally I don’t feel like my clients have any power on me. I feel quite the opposite but I suppose it depends also on how workers feel and on the way they work. When I have to advise friends who start sex work I always try to give them tips so they can keep control on what they do and avoid bad clients. In all circumstances we must always have the right to say no. I have always been able to refuse a client or to refuse to do something I didn’t want because I know there will always be other new clients who want to meet me. That’s the reason why I don’t think we can compare a client with an employer.
I don’t think that the one who pays is necessary the one who dominates. When a patient gives money to his or her doctor for the medical services he or she provides, we don’t tell them they are exploiting the doctor. My views are more that a client who pays shows that he is accepting my conditions and that he’s ready to respect the contract. A bad client however will often be the one who doesn’t like the idea to pay and really wants it for his money. Most men think that it is humiliating to pay and that we should provide them sex for free. Being a client is stigmatised as someone who cant pick up without having to pay and many men are boasting that they don’t need to pay to have sex.

The comparison we hear sometimes between sex work and rape and the call to criminalise clients is really shocking for me because if they want to arrest our clients, those who respect the contract, no-one seems to give a shit about the men who rape us, who refuse to pay, and the fact that our reports for rape are not registered by the police. So if it was about protecting us, what do they wait for to arrest men who REALLY rape sex workers ? Criminalisation is not about protecting us as it has never protected a sex worker to be sent to jail as well as our clients. Criminalisation is about preventing us to work and to punish us for disobeying and because some people have an ideological problem with the fact that working class people dare using their sex to earn a better living when it should remain sacralised.
If we refuse to be rescued and refuse their rehabilitation, then they accuse us of complicity with patriarchy, sexual exploitation of children, slavery, trafficking and rape. Yes, all that just because we want our work recognised as a work.

For instance, our union is criticised for allowing in its membership policy everyone who’s ready to support sex workers rights.

On this membership issue I may have the same opinion and would prefer a workers only group, however, the fact that they use that to conclude that the union is run by pimps and punters is not only false but it is a way to disqualify our voice.

What I have to say comes from my own mind and no-one else. They can pretend that we are manipulated by pimps to delegitimate our say but they should also know as feminists that this technic is the same old technic used to silence minorities. Women had themselves to suffer from it when they were told that they couldn’t obtain the right to vote because they were manipulated by the church and would vote like their husbands.

Each time a sex worker stood up and spoke for herself or himself there has always been thrown suspicion. We don’t accuse the “ex sex workers” to be manipulated by the abolitionist business and the rescue industry because we respect their voice even if we believe they are the minority.
We know that the abolitionist system comes from the nineteenth century Victorian ideology. At this time, sex out of marriage was not acceptable for women. Nowadays they don’t speak anymore about fallen women, they call sex workers “prostituted women” but does it change much? These Victorian feminists were defending Christian values. Nowadays they still ally themselves with fundamentalist Christians and use their same techniques. As a result, there are ex-sex workers who campaign against sex workers’ rights like there are ex-gays who campaign against LGBT rights. But we know that a LGBT person who commits suicide is rather due to the stigma than the sexuality he or she has.
Also I want to ask you: Do you really think that the absence of money makes sex free of exploitation and domination ? What about sex in our relationships when we feel we have to?

What about having sex with our partner to get rid of him, to end an argument, because it’s valentine day and he offered the restaurant, because we don’t have anywhere else to go and we depend on his incomes, when we are new in this country and don’t know other people who can accommodate us, when he says he hasn’t come yet and that you have to wait for him to finish.

Does the fact to blame sex work is not an excuse not to look at our own sexualities?

Or is that because we cant accept that sex workers are not these inferior beings and that they can teach us a lot about how to fight against domination in our sexualities.

To conclude, I don’t know if in a perfect anarchist society without any kind of power, sex work will still exist. For sure it won’t exist in the same way it does in a capitalist and patriarchal system. I like to think that the future sex workers will provide sex and affection to their comrades whatever their gender, sexual orientation, etc. It will not be anymore about male clients who have the economic power to pay but about making the people, everyone, happy.

IUSW