Raven Bowen
The Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living and fuel crises, the war in Ukraine, in addition to geo-political decisions such as the choice to leave the European Union, have all had an impact on the income and lives of everyday people across the UK. In the context of our precarious labour market, some can gig and thrive as digital nomads or in lucrative careers, and others struggle through low-waged employment, unwaged work, or government disability and unemployment benefits. For many workers, during the pandemic, the Government’s scheme supported them to ‘stay home and stay safe’. Others were able to move their work online or embark upon a journey of self-discovery – forest-bathing, baking, or joining the ‘Great Resignation’ or the ‘Big Quit’ in search of more meaningful pursuits.
Sex workers, and those working in legal adult industries, an economically active population, were left out of Government’s income support schemes. Just like other workers, those in adult industries face rent increases, debt, and elevated costs for food and fuel. This means that many are cold, hungry, and experiencing stress, anxiety and depression while trying to find ways to make it to the end of the day or month. The impacts of economic insecurities are felt most among those who suffer as a result of feminised poverty and the racialised operation of capitalism.
Economic issues and structural inequities force involvement in sex industries for many who also work in undesirable low paid mainstream jobs. Moreover, people in the sex industry who use drugs who contacted National Ugly Mugs (NUM) case workers suffered with limited access and supply of the drugs they needed to stay well during the Covid-19 pandemic. They were also competing with the off-street and online workers who were driven to the streets in search of customers when Adult Services Websites (ASWs) complied with the government and eliminated their booking features during lockdown. I am not arguing that this should not have been done, but that there was no regard to how this would impact people who rely on income from adult industries, who became destitute overnight. The state mobilised businesses to shut down the legal sex industry but did little to ensure that sex workers too could ‘stay home and stay safe’. Equally, sex workers expected more support from these businesses – to put emergency resources in place for those who rely on their platforms at a time of tremendous crisis and uncertainty. Brouwers and Herrmann (2020) examined this issue and write: ‘sex worker-led organisations make clear that in their view sex workers are not simply ASW service users and describe a range of responsibilities or commitments that they want or expect ASWs to take towards supporting the sex workers they directly profit off’ (Brouwers and Herrmann, 2020). Unfortunately, many major ASWs may not comply. Hardy and Barbagallo (2021) discussed what they call a ‘platformisation’ of online sex work, the monopoly that one ‘by clients and for clients’ site in particular holds in the UK – notably their internal credit and fee structures – and the declining safety standards and worker control that has come as a result.
In response to destitution in their communities during the pandemic, sex workers created their own mutual aid fund to assist the most marginalised with one-off payments. National Ugly Mugs (NUM), the victim support charity that I run, administered some funds and supported this initiative and then in 2021, secured funding from The National Lottery Community Fund to get emergency food vouchers out to sex workers around the country to reduce their involvement in survival sex and buy us time to find alternative resources. NUM members experienced dire hardship during the pandemic. Early findings of our ‘Leaving the Game’ research, on barriers to navigating the dual worlds of sex work and mainstream work (underway), indicate that due to economic conditions, people have increased their reliance on sex work, that those who had left the industry have returned during the past couple of years, and that those who were planning on leaving sex work have delayed these plans due to a stark economic outlook and limited prospects. Many workers in this context experience forced labour, also known as ‘survival sex’, a working condition that prevents sex workers from refusing customers, compelling them to see clients (who have also become scarce), and provide services they would not normally offer to get the money they need to live. In response to the cost-of-living crisis and past experiences of exclusion (with respect to state resourcing direct funding to adults in sex industries during crises), sex worker-led organisations launched the Hookers Against Hardship (HAH) campaign. They called for donations to the hardship fund alongside several demands such as an end to benefits sanctions, evictions, and to police practices of fining and arresting impoverished sex workers.
Integrating several revenue streams and jobs or gigs is a strategy that many modern workers employ to make ends meet. Work, Money and Duality: Trading Sex as a Side Hustle documents the experiences of working-class people who concurrently hold jobs in mainstream markets and in sex industries – I conceptualise this practice as ‘duality’. They do this as a financial strategy to supplement low and stagnant wages, combat austerity and deal with bills and crushing debt. Although both mainstream and sex industry marketplaces are precarious, competitive, and exploitative, the contributors to the book view duality as an innovative response to economic conditions. They have organised their lives to earn income from both marketplaces – income that can be used to address emergencies, or to fund projects such as tuition or repaying debt. For some, duality is a pathway to achieving social mobility – to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. They experience alienation and status frustration as they are skilled and employed but unable to achieve a quality standard of living from a sole revenue stream.
The people represented in the book are those we all know. They work in universities, the NHS, service and hospitality industries, and charity and private sectors. They are our co-workers, who are stripped of their cultural citizenship and personhood the moment we find out about their sex work. Their perspectives about work, money, and duality, while managing identity, information and audiences betwixt these two disparate life-worlds illustrates the extent to which some have to go in order to make a living and a life in economic contexts of our collective co-construction, but not necessarily of our individual choosing.
There are tremendous risks associated with sex work involvement due to ‘whore stigma’ (Pheterson, 1993) and the lack of protections we offer sex workers. Their expulsion from the working classes (Bernstein, 2007) has not been helpful. Largely, we do not recognise sex work as work, and thereby deny sex workers access to labour rights – essentially deeming them ‘undeserving’ of social and legal protections. We deny them victimhood as we blame them for the harms they experience and associate them with vice, public nuisance, and criminality, (see Graham, 2017). Those who victimise and exploit sex workers very effectively use their marginalisation to dissuade them from accessing services and the criminal legal system for support and protection. Sex workers are maliciously conflated with trafficking victims, a ploy to expend resources to associate them with organised exploitation and to criminalise them under the 20-year-old Sexual Offences Act (2003) for merely sharing a flat to work together as a safety strategy. The association made between sex work, trafficking, and organised exploitation serves to deny sex workers cultural, financial, and digital citizenship. State resources are used to identify, research, and monitor sex workers, but not to truly socially, politically, and economically include and resource them, and enshrine their rights, protections, and entitlements within law and policy.
Sex industry work is a solution to complex economic and social issues for those facing poverty, not the cause. Like all choices, it is constrained. it is the best or only choice for some, and for those who have more resources and control over their working conditions, diverse adult industries present lucrative opportunities to earn money. If we were oriented towards ending (feminised and racial) poverty, eliminating forced labour, sex for rent and survival sex, we would provide a guaranteed liveable income, along with drugs and drug management programs, safe and affordable housing, and other resources we need to survive and thrive. Unfortunately, the ways that we chose to practice capitalism, based in scarcity and competition, means that our marketplaces do not provide equitable opportunities for everyone’s economic survival. Those facing the worst economic outcomes can hardly avoid forced labour, both in sex industries and beyond them. In these ways, poverty is violent.
People may disagree with the selling or exchanging of sex as a practice in our society and I encourage those individuals to read ‘Work, Money and Duality’ and hear from this hidden population of sex workers and engage with sex worker-led organisations to gain a greater understanding of sex work and contemporary contexts. An analysis of sex work in relation to mainstream work will lift our gaze from viewing sex workers as population in need of correction, to our system in need of restructure and transformation. Join the movement to repeal the laws, policies and practices that criminalise, stigmatise, victimize, and displace sex workers, and are at times criminogenic.
We must together advocate for true systems change, for mainstream work and benefits to pay more than survival sex, and to end the blocking of sex workers’ access to resources, political power, human and labour rights, and other forms of capital. Or, if we cannot support sex workers in their fight for rights and recognition, we can at least stay out of their way.
About the author
Dr Raven Bowen has been involved in community development, research, and advocacy among sex workers in Canada and the UK for almost 30 years. She is the CEO of National Ugly Mugs, a UK-wide victim support charity for adults in sex industries. Don’t miss this BSC Book Prize (2022) winners’ Keynote address at this year’s Conference in June 2023.
Contact
Dr. Raven Bowen
raven@nationaluglymugs.org
Twitter: @corbeau_1863
www.nationaluglymugs.org
This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the British Society of Criminology or the institution they work for.
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