This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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There is no neutral position on whether sex work is work

By:   []

Date: 2021-08

This last interviewee went on to explain that, in practice, members of the organisation were pragmatic: they were focused on helping victims of trafficking rather than those voluntarily engaged in sex work, so their views did not matter for their work. They were ultimately staying out of the debate.

Not much has changed in the years which have passed. There continue to be many organisations who seem unsure of where they stand, or try to stand everywhere at once, or simply do their best to avoid the conversation. This tends to be justified in pragmatic terms: by occupying the middle ground they avoid both the puritanical zealotry that is sometimes associated with opposition to sex work and the controversy that would certainly come with endorsing decriminalisation. Moreover, it also comes with the advantage of insulating anti-trafficking organisations from potential changes in government policy. If the laws governing commercial sex change, it is less likely to damage your relationship with government if you don’t have a clear position.

These appeals to pragmatism are frequently tied to concerns over funding. Many governments favour faith-based organisations with long histories of charitable work, and therefore award contracts and funding to established organisations with politically ‘safe’ profiles. A good example of this larger dynamic is the position of the Salvation Army as the UK government’s preferred service provider for the National Referral Mechanism, which handles suspected trafficking cases. For charities and service providers, proximity to government and a reputation for neutrality can be a major competitive advantage in an environment where non-governmental organisations struggle to survive. As a case in point, the Salvation Army replaced another organisation, the Poppy Project, which folded shortly thereafter.

Apart from concerns over funding, I was also told that ‘staying out of it’ enables organisations to more effectively focus on victims’ needs without any ‘distractions’. According to this logic, abstaining from the debate over sex work means taking the moral high ground.

‘Staying out of it’ means becoming a bystander

There is much more going on beneath the surface. One of the main problems with these appeals to ‘neutrality’ is that they reduce the political and personal stakes associated with the status of sex work to an intellectual abstraction. ‘What to do with sex work’ becomes a hypothetical moral question that might feel personally important but which carries no real weight. The claim that staying neutral allows organisations to get on with the ‘real work’ of victim services reinforces this approach.

Yet that understanding of the problem is anything but neutral. It accepts the anti-sex-worker premise that abstract questions of morality and specific views on feminism are able to outweigh concrete safety issues. In doing so, it affirms that the sex work policy debate does not have to centre on sex workers’ livelihoods, safety and their rights as workers, but can also be about what ‘we’, as a society, believe is ‘right’.
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