Decriminalisation debates remain central to discussions about how to best address human trafficking. At the heart of these considerations are questions around whether trafficking can best be reduced by increasing the policing and criminalisation of prostitution, by criminalising the purchase of sex but not its sale, or by decriminalising sex work entirely. However, with few exceptions such discussions exclude the people they impact most. Sex workers and sex workers’ rights organisations – particularly those from the Global South, trans, and sex workers of colour – are rarely granted seats at the table. They are not allowed into the dialogues set up to weigh the different policy prescriptions, even though those prescriptions will have life or death consequences for them once they take effect.
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery released the online version of this collection on 11 January 2020 to coincide with Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the United States. We chose to situate this discussion in relation to the anti-trafficking movement because of the way that anti-trafficking interventions paradoxically enhance policing and surveillance of sex workers as a means of rescuing them.
Spanning multiple continents and disparate legal and policy environments, the authors of this volume offer a radically different view of what they believe is best for sex workers. They give insights into the best strategies for ensuring that people who sell sex are protected; evaluate the increasingly widespread ‘Nordic’ model, which allows for the sale but not purchase of sex, alongside full decriminalisation; and explain some of the ways that they defend sex workers’ interests in hostile and patronising state and civil society environments. In doing so, they remind us again and again that sex workers are fighting for their lives and that decriminalisation is absolutely mandatory to increase safety. They also remind us that organising and advocacy does not start, or end, with decriminalisation.
