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The types of services for sex workers that programs like SWEAT and Sisonke deliver - condoms and personal lubricant to facilitate safe-sex practices, STI and HIV testing, tuberculosis screening, referrals to health clinics, information about rights, legal aid services, sex worker–led organizing, and harm reduction for people who use drugs - have long been celebrated by global health bodies like WHO and UNAIDS as essential to protecting sex workers’ health and human rights. Sex worker peer educators like Dudu and Eunice treat every single sex worker who uses their services with kindness, professionalism, respect, and, most important, no judgment, focusing instead on providing sex workers with the tools they need to work safely. Their work mirrors the outreach efforts of many sex worker organisations throughout the world, like the well-known Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), comprising thousands of organized sex workers in Sonagachi, the famous red-light district in Kolkata, India.
Anti-prostitution activists would argue that sex workers, or “prostituted women” as they prefer to call them, don’t need condoms or “know your rights” workshops - they need rescue from prostitution. Some anti-prostitution activists openly criticise the lifesaving assistance sex workers’ rights organisations routinely provide to sex workers. But Indian sex workers in Sonagachi and South African sex workers in Cape Town clearly need this assistance. The reason anti-prostitution activists dismiss outreach programs aimed at sex worker empowerment is that these programs go against the idea that all sex workers are victims of what activists argue is prostitution’s inherent violence. Western anti-prostitution activists have long argued that sex work is a form of patriarchal violence against women. Some African reformers have also embraced these anti-prostitution arguments. For instance, Fatoumata Sire Diakite, a Malian activist affiliated with the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW), an influential global anti-prostitution organization, argues, “Prostitution is violence against women and a violation of human rights.”
Anti-prostitution activists’ insistence on this monolithic narrative exemplifies what the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to as “the danger of a single story.” Adichie has argued that when we have a single story about particular people and places it erases the voices and experiences of those who don’t fit that universalized narrative. In describing her American college roommate’s stereotypes of Africa and Africans, Adichie noted: “Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans’ being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of connection as human equals.” In the single story of her roommate’s imagination, Africa was a continent of people “unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.” The danger of a single story, then, is that it makes “one story become the only story.” When I first listened to Adichie’s talk, I immediately reflected on how many anti-prostitution activists’ arguments exhibit the “danger of a single story” by presenting sex workers as simple objects of pity and potential rescue incapable of speaking for themselves. Because these ideas have penetrated the mainstream, it is difficult for many people to imagine sex workers as capable of consent and agency. This is perhaps why, when I tell people that much of my human rights work is in solidarity with sex workers fighting for their rights, they often interpret that as my saying, “I work on sex trafficking.” This is partly because although human trafficking (the movement of individuals through force, threat of force, coercion, or deception into a situation of forced labor) and sex work (the exchange of sexual services as labor between consenting adults) are not the same, anti-prostitution activists have co-opted anti-trafficking language to purposefully conflate the two. They argue that consent in the context of prostitution is impossible and that therefore all sex workers have been forced into sex work - either literally or by circumstance - and our primary focus must be the facilitation of their rescue, not the realization of their rights. They have created a global campaign that, at its core, is not about human trafficking or forced labor but about advancing an anti-prostitution agenda. (There are indeed people within the sex industry - as there are within the agricultural, construction, domestic care, garment trade, and factory industries - who are the victims of trafficking into forced labor. But the conflation of sex work and trafficking does nothing to help survivors of trafficking gain access to the resources and social services they need.) The narrative that people cannot consent to engage in sex work fits squarely into anti-prostitution activists’ “single story.”
Why is this single story dangerous? Because when we insist that sex workers are “victims” incapable of speaking for themselves, we silence them. When we ignore the multiplicity of sex workers’ experiences, we deny them agency. And when we contend that the primary concern for sex workers is the sex involved in sex work and not the criminalized and stigmatized nature of their work, not the material conditions of their labor, we fail to acknowledge and address the actual abuses many sex worker communities face.
The vast majority of Anti-Sex Work rhetoric can be traced back to six main political groups. These groups, despite generally occupying different political spheres, often have overlapping ideology, goals, rhetoric and messaging, and regularly collaborate on Anti-Sex Work, Anti-Trans, and Anti-Migrant legislative efforts.
Anti Sex Work Media Narratives
In recent years a sixth group has emerged, egged on by social media monetisation tools:
Below are some key political and religious figures, influencers, and organisations from across these sectors that are responsible for spreading myths and misinformation about the sex industry, and an overview of the ways in which they are connected.