Still image from Travel (2016, 63min) a participative ethnographic documentary by Nicola Mai. Used with permission from Nicola Mai.
Between March 2014 and March 2015, two of the authors (Mai and Giametta) conducted a survey with 500 migrant and non-migrant sex workers in France in order to understand their views on the proposed law aiming to criminalise their clients. The law was discussed by the French Parliament recurrently in 2014 and 2015, before its final approval in April 2016 (law n° 2016-444). This survey was part of the project Emborders: Problematising Sexual Humanitarianism through Experimental Filmmaking, based at the Laboratory of Mediterranean Sociology at Aix-Marseille University between January 2014 and December 2015. The project adopted a participative ethical approach, by including people working in the sex industry and organisations representing and supporting sex workers in various stages, including the formulation of the research questions, as well as the gathering and analysis of the interview material. We compared the effects of humanitarian interventions targeting migrant sex workers and sexual minority asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and France.
The main aim of Emborders was to understand the effects in France and the United Kingdom of ‘sexual humanitarianism’, a concept developed by Nicola Mai to analyse how migrant sex workers are impacted by policymaking and social interventions based on their presumed vulnerability to trafficking and exploitation. Crucially, the concept of sexual humanitarianism refers to the global hegemony of a neo-abolitionist discourse, which systematically conflates prostitution with trafficking, framing prostitution as “paradigmatic of a system of male power” and seeking its abolition by removing the demand for sexual services. This trend is best exemplified by the global resonance of the “Swedish model” – a policymaking framework aiming to reduce the demand for prostitution by decriminalising sex work and criminalising the purchase of sex – as an ideal instrument to fight trafficking.
