Consultation on the Criminalisation of Sex Work in Scotland Equally Safe

Consultation on the Criminalisation of Sex Work in Scotland Equally Safe Submission by Dr Anastacia Ryan Dear Scottish Government Justice Department, I would like to take this opportunity to express deep regret over the confined framework within which this consultation is taking place. The consultation extends from current Government policy as set out in ‘Safer Lives, Changed Lives’, and the subsequent ‘Equally Safe’ Strategy, which notably underpins the evidence presented in the consultation document and the arguably biased and leading questions proposed. The resultant framework and limited consultation narrative represent a missed opportunity for much needed discussion and debate on the Scottish Government’s approach to prostitution policy more broadly. The limited, exclusionary and ideologically-driven understanding of prostitution in Scottish Government policy more generally and in this consultation; fails to recognise the heterogeneous experiences of people in Scotland who sell and/or exchange sexual services; denies the agency of women, men, cis and trans persons; renders invisible actual acts of violence and exploitation occurring in the sex industry; continues an ineffective and dangerous reliance on criminal justice approaches that fosters unsafe working practices and deters victims of actual violence to seek redress, and perpetuates a misplaced moralistic agenda in supporting sex workers at the expense of a much need social justice and public health approach in policy and programmes, that centres the varied needs of people this consultation states intention to support. Moreover, the overt focus within policy and the Equally Safe strategy on ‘reducing demand’ fails to address the root causes and factors that exacerbate the vulnerabilities of women and girls to violence, which extend far beyond the narrow focus on eliminating prostitution as a means to achieve gender equality in Scotland. A platform of social justice – rights, redistribution, respect, inclusion and recognition – extending from decriminalisation as a first step, has the potential to avoid the trap of a welfarist approach as set out in current policy, which creates new forms of intervention in the lives of women who are traditionally marginalised, stigmatised and often criminalised. Being able to openly challenge structural oppression, particularly as it relates to women’s’ lives, is essential in discussions surrounding reform and to ensure the equally important process of de-stigmatisation and de- marginalisation of women who sell sex. Only in a decriminalised setting are these reforms possible and a holistic form of social justice for all women can be realised. The Scottish Government has an opportunity to lead the way internationally on an agenda for change that 1 meaningfully co-creates laws and policies with people with lived experience, and I remain hopeful that this consultation acts as a catalyst for such an opportunity to recognise and value the citizenship, voice and agency of sex workers, whilst creating effective policies to affect systems change for all women and girls; two important tasks that need not be treated as mutually exclusive. In response to the Consultation Questions; Question 1. Do you agree or disagree that the Scottish Government’s approach to tackling prostitution, as outlined in this section, is sufficient to prevent violence against women and girls? Disagree. The Scottish Government’s approach as defined in the current policy framework set out through ‘Safer Lives: Changed Lives’ (Scottish Government, 2009) and ‘Equally Safe’ (Scottish Government, 2014) is clearly positioned in an understanding of prostitution as inherently and unequivocally violence against women. This is fundamentally flawed, discriminatory and harmful as it extends to the sole funding of services and programmes willing, or, coerced by Government framing, to treat all people engaged in selling/exchanging sex from this ideological position. Within this ideology, sex workers are generalised and conflated as unstable, traumatised, passive and exploited (Farley, 2004; Jeffreys, 1997; Raymond, 1998), with these pathologisations seen as resulting in their sex selling (and undermining their agency exercised in a ‘decision’ to sell sex), and additionally resulting from their apparently traumatising experience of sex work (Levy, 2014). The harms experienced by sex workers are thus portrayed as synonymous with prostitution, with policy stating that the sex industry has ‘been shown to be harmful for the individual women involved’, and furthermore ‘has a negative impact on the position of all women through the objectification of women’s bodies’ and this ‘happens irrespective of whether individual women claim success or empowerment from the activity’ (Scottish Government, 2009: 7-8). Exclusionary Understanding This narrow and reducing definition of prostitution to commercial sexual exploitation of women, fails to include male, trans and non-binary sex workers, all of whom exist in the Scotland-based Sex Worker community, and thus experience a denial of their agency by the Government under current policy frameworks. Secondly, reducing people’s experiences in this way furthers the stigma already perpetuated towards people who are vilified for transgressing societal norms by providing sexual services as an economic activity, bearing heavily also on male, trans and non-binary workers. 2 This sweeping view of prostitution serves to render invisible actual experiences of violence, abuse and exploitation occurring in the sex industry, closing the doors to justice for sex workers who refute the understanding of their work as inherently violence and fear authorities and services will deny their distinction between consent and rape. Eradicating predominantly women’s choices and proposing that payment or another other circumstance for that matter, removes ability to consent, is fundamentally dangerous for the rights of all women and girls in Scotland. Potential for Retraumatisation of Women and Girls Defining all prostitution as commercial sexual exploitation renders dissenting voices and alternative experiences invisible through the state-perpetuated assumption that sex workers do not have the capacity to define their experiences or understand their own context, resilience or circumstances. Such an infantilising approach to working with women engaged in sex work has the potential not only to silence dissenting voices, but to erode actual experiences of trauma and violence by over writing women’s experiences with an ideologically driven narrative. This can have the potential for retraumatisation - a conscious or unconscious reminder of past trauma that results in a re-experiencing of the initial trauma event. Retraumatisation can be triggered by a situation, an attitude or expression, or by certain environments that replicate the dynamics (loss of power/control/safety) of the original trauma. As women and girls are substantially more impacted by violence throughout the course of their lives, enacted by perpetrators with the goal to create real or perceived powerlessness; service provision approaches that insist on false consciousness, lack of agency and victimhood, have the potential to create significant harm through retraumatisation1. Empirical documentation of the way that female sex workers experience this policy framework in their everyday lives in Scotland is expanding, yet ignored in this Consultation (Ryan, 2019; Scoular & Carline, 2014; Smith, 2015). Whilst interventions into the lives of women who engage in sex work are presented as policies and practices of welfare for women and girls, they are often experienced as intrusive, coercive and punitive (Ryan, 2019; Campbell, 2004). Mechanisms of control, enforcement and surveillance enforce gendered expectations and notions of good behaviour, rewarding with social inclusion of those women who exit the sex industry and continued exclusion of those that remain 1 Response submitted to Equally Safe Consultation by Care-Experienced, Survival Sex Worker Gaye Dalton. Available at: https://mymythbuster.wordpress.com/equally-safe-challenging-mens-demand-for-prostitution- consultation/ 3 involved. For women in the latter category, the paradoxical legal framework in Scotland leads to further criminalisation and marginalisation (Ryan, 2019; Scoular & O’Neill, 2007). Paradoxical Policy & Legal Framework The notable paradox in law and policy related to prostitution in Scotland lends a further reason for disagreement that the current approach is addressing violence against women and girls. On the contrary, the current laws surrounding prostitution heighten the risk of violence faced by all sex workers, perpetrated most often with impunity given barriers experienced by sex workers in reporting crimes against them due to fear of their own prosecution for working practices. Goodyear (2008) evidences the disproportionate levels of violence faced by sex workers in the UK by evidencing mortality rates as six times the rate of the general population. Further evidenced are the links between criminalization, higher levels of violence, and tied to this, the lack of reporting of violent acts to the police (English Collective of Prostitutes, 2012; Kinnell, 2006). In her research on violence against sex workers, Kinnell concluded that a legal framework which criminalises sex workers, such as that currently in operation in Scotland: “.. makes all forms of sex work more dangerous, while proposals for making sex work safer are rejected lest they

Load more