Liberal Premier Colin Barnett has proposed reforms to license and register some forms of sex work. And again people are referring to the bill as “legalisation” and “partial decriminalisation” when it is not.
It’s deeply concerning when big party politicians and mainstream journalists do not understand the proposed sex-work laws, and describe them as the opposite of what they are.
Most Western Australians seem unaware that Barnett’s proposed bill is unnecessary, perpetuates stigma towards sex workers and will result in worse working conditions.
The only legislation that is appropriate for sex workers is full decriminalisation — not the terrible licensing and registration bill being proposed.
Fails health test
The Liberals propose making it a criminal offence in WA not to use condoms for sex work. This is unnecessary, and WA health minister Kim Hames knows it.
Research shows that sex workers under any laws have better sexual health than the general population. Their bodies are their business. It’s not for the police to regulate. This law hasn’t worked in Queensland, except to give police the power to pretend to be clients and pressure sex workers for unprotected services.
Licensing laws also involve mandatory sexual health testing — another policy that is a proven failure.
Mandatory testing ignores the fact that sex workers are aware of how to take care of their sexual health, and also perpetuates the myth that sex workers are vectors of disease. It is proven in New South Wales that under decriminalisation, sex workers have access to the best health and support services.
Mandatory testing is expensive, doesn’t work, and puts undue pressure on the state’s health system.
Police should not regulate sex work
Licensing and registration gives power to police and creates more danger in WA, where police violence against sex workers is already a big problem.
One survey found that half of sexual assaults against sex workers were perpetrated by police.
Since WA Labor introduced the Prostitution Act in 2000, which criminalises the clients of street-based sex workers and allows police to pose as clients to entrap sex workers, street-based sex workers have been particularly vulnerable to police violence and harassment.
Corruption flourishes when the police force regulates sex work. This has been seen in Western Australia since the early days of prohibition when the police of the time took it upon themselves to implement the “containment policy”.
They decided who could operate and where. Individual workers had to be photographed and registered with the vice squad, right up until 2006, and a curfew in Kalgoorlie required sex workers to stay on sex industry business premises from 6pm to 6am.
The WA police made their own unwritten laws. The vice squad has officially been dissolved, but there is evidence that police still maintain a register of sex workers. Sex workers don’t know if they are still on the list or how to have their records removed. WA police won’t confirm if it exists or where it is held.
Sex workers don’t need rescuing
This is bad enough, but Liberal MP Nick Goiran and other more hard-line Liberal politicians have said they do not think Barnett’s plan goes far enough.
They want nothing less than a full-scale crackdown on sex workers’ human rights. Some have proposed implementing the “Swedish model” — the criminalisation of all sex worker clients in Western Australia and an extension of the criminalisation of street-based sex workers’ clients in 2000.
Criminalising clients does not eradicate sex work. It drives it underground, undermining sex workers’ health and safety. Thirteen years of criminalising street-based sex workers clients in WA has already proven that.
Those who seek to criminalise clients along “Swedish model” lines insult sex workers by saying that they are helpless victims that need to be rescued. This is a simplistic view that implies that all sex workers are women and all clients are men.
This view attached a more dimension to sex. But if sex is viewed as a physical activity, then sex workers are being paid for manual and often mental labour.
If you view wage labour as exploitative, that’s fine, but don’t single out the sex industry. Sex work clients are of all genders, from all class backgrounds, and they have all kinds of different reasons for choosing to see a sex worker.
Some people say sex workers have “no choice” or “limited choices”. It is the case that some people have to make choices that are difficult or limited, particularly based on class privilege. The sex worker community acknowledges this.
If a person is marginalised and has limited options, it doesn’t help to take away their options — particularly if sex work is their income and source of survival.
Sex workers are campaigning for the enhancement and transformation of working conditions, not the eradication of sex work.
Goiran instead wants to build “re-training” centres for sex workers, modelled on “Linda’s House of Hope”, a WA Catholic Church endeavour that wants to rehabilitate sex workers because they believe they are all drug-addicted or money-addicted naughty girls that need to be saved.
It is an absolute affront to sex workers’ rights, and ignores the research that indicates drug-use among sex workers is about the same as the general population.
Barnett and Goiran are proposing laws that scapegoat sex workers and are unnecessary: coercion, theft, assault, rape, deprivation of liberty, sexual contact with a child — these laws already exist.
Sex workers aren’t selling ourselves, we are selling a service. Same as a masseuse or a hairdresser. We just use different parts of our body for the service.
Please support us in our calls for decriminalisation in both Western Australia and South Australia. Sex work is real work, and sex workers are here to stay, whether the Liberals like it or not.
[Rebecca Davies is a sex worker who has worked in the WA sex industry for seven years, and previously worked as a peer educator at the WA sex worker support service for two years. She is a member of the Scarlet Alliance National Sex Workers Association Executive Committee. Davies would like to acknowledge Socialist Alliance member Farida Iqbal’s contribution to this article.]
A terrible proposal designed to extend police and state power further into the lives of working people.
I read somewhere else that the new laws are designed to push brothels out of ‘suburbs’ and into ‘designated industrial areas’ - so gentrification obviously.
It seems to me these ruling class people do not care about exploitation but only their bourgeoisie morality and Christian ethics.
I think that is why sex work is constructed as exploitation where as sweatshops, unpaid reproductive labour, hell wage-labour full stop are seen as necessary.
(Source: marginalutilite)
Further to the last link I reblogged, this research and discussion is incredible.
I sent this email to a lot of people recently:
TL;DR: A new browser add-on automatically flags OkCupid users who have confessed to rape.
The Aaron Swartz JSTOR liberator is a tiny bit of civil disobedience, presented to you in clicktivism form. By running this bookmarklet (which you should not do if you are not comfortable potentially violating terms of service), you will visit JSTOR, a keeper of academic articles, be presented with a random paper, and will download a single paper from the site. You will have to click a terms of service agreement agreeing to not share the document you are reading, yet you will then download it and uploaded to another server. It will also ask for a message of memorial about Aaron. We will be gathering your messages of memorial and rememberance of Aaron to put up soon.Violate a Terms of Service contract in solidarity with Aaron Swartz’s memory.
Please also read:
(Source: queerblackandproud)
Collating the latest edition of Avenue! Four anarchist papers out of Perth in one year: this must be some kind of record.
As usual, hit me up if you would like copies or check out the website here, online versions should be available soon. http://unnamedavenue.org/
And lets stop pretending that the Labor party is ‘pandering to the rascist vote’ — they are getting hammered from absolutely every corner for their plan to excise the Australian mainland from the Migration Act. Make no mistake: the Labor party is pursuing their own racist neo-liberal ideology despite the polls.
Also on Hack tonight they interviewed Doug Cameron from Labor’s ‘left’ faction who stated in no uncertain terms that, while he opposes the position, he will not cross the floor. Then they interviewed Judy Moylan - from the Liberals ‘libertarian’ faction who said that she is likely to cross the floor. A scary indicator that Labor has moved right of the Liberals.
Look, Mr. Government, when we give our land for your benifit and that of the nation-state, you call us generous.
When we ask why we have not benefited, you ignore us.
When we started shouting, wanting to be heard, you called us trouble makers.
When we take up arms to ask for what rightfully belongs to us, you call us militants.
When we become angry because you trampled on us, you call us hot-headded youths.
Those are names you use to justify your disregard for us.
Soon, you may call us guerrillas or terrorists.
That, however, will not get rid of us.
Tell us this; ‘who legitimised your authority?’
We did not construct you, Mr. Government.
We can refuse your authority, despite how coercive you may be.
We can slowly eat you away like fleas of a dog.
That will be ‘the war of the flea’
Communiqué from the Isatabu Freedom Movement, Solomon Islands. ~1998
Showing that the issues that started the civil war there were more than mere ‘ethnic tension’ or ‘poor governance’, as the Australian government would have us believe. Unfortunately it was Malaitan workers that copped the brunt of the violence in the civil war that started in 1998.
