The 2016 French law criminalising sex workers’ clients reveals larger political concerns about the national context in which it was drafted and implemented, including political anxieties around women’s rights and migration in the name of public order. What we discuss here is based on 25 in-depth interviews with migrant sex workers in France as well as 15 interviews with different actors involved in the drafting of the 2016 law to end sex work demand. These include MPs, gender equality officers, sex work prohibitionist activists, and lawyers.
France began to prohibit sex work in the 1960s when it signed the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. Trafficking back then, however, was not the headline political agenda item that it is today. It rose to prominence in the 1990s, when activists and politicians linked the concept of trafficking to the increasingly visible presence of racialised migrant women doing street-based sex work across French cities.
Nicolas Sarkozy, as minister of the interior, took steps to curb this presence when he introduced the 2003 domestic security law (Loi Sécurité Intérieure). This law upgraded the penalty for soliciting from a fine to an offence, and broadened its scope to include not just “active soliciting” but also “passive soliciting”. Both passive and active soliciting thus became offences when Article 225-10-1 was introduced into the penal code, a shift that was strongly influenced by political anxieties around trafficking issues and new urban policies at the time.
