Just dirty and disorderly? Sex work has a more complex role in the community than is commonly portrayed.
Gold miners appear after being trapped underground at a mine in Carltonville, west of Johannesburg. Managing their safety has been a major issue as South Africa has among the deepest and most dangerous mines.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
When sociologists, driven by their value commitments, go beyond the relative comfort of the classroom and engage with organisations outside the university, they dirty their hands.
International Sex Workers’ Rights Day in San Francisco, 2008.
REUTERS/Kimberly White
Empirical evidence and a recommendation from Amnesty International are making it increasingly difficult for naysayers to ignore the ways that sex workers are harmed by criminalization.
Your every fantasy can be brought to life.
Shutterstock
Children who hawk goods on their heads on Nigeria’s streets face an array of health hazards and physical dangers. The government must take steps to reduce this practice.
Rentboy.com is busted in New York City.
Brendan McDermid/REUTERS
While being supported by many sex industry groups, feminists have labelled Amnesty International’s decriminalisation of prostitution a betrayal of women’s rights.
The criminalisation of any aspect of consensual sex work has been shown to increase sex work stigma.
shutterstock
There is a wider social, economic and cultural context in which sex work occurs. The criminalisation of consensual adult sex work does not prevent violence – it exacerbates it.
Due to the lack of reliable statistics surrounding human trafficking, there is no real scope of how large the problem really is, making it more difficult to police.
Shutterstock
Human trafficking is a major source of misery around the world. The absence of reliable statistics to determine its enormity has led to inflated guesstimates that harm efforts to combat the scourge.
The need for human contact is a less discussed side of the sex trade.
Shutterstock supporting hand
The EU has demanded rapid payment of £1.7 billion from the UK because the economy has done better than predicted. Some of this is because the prostitution market is now considered as part of our national…
The legal doctrine of coverture effectively suspended women’s legal existence.
D. Sarle
This week’s episode of ABC’s typically male-dominated show Q&A involved a panel of women who were speakers at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI). While the show presented far more conservative…
Guo Meimei, a Chinese internet celebrity, was recently arrested for involvement in illegal gambling and the sex trade. In China she was a star, well known for her flashy lifestyle. She later appeared on…
To paraphrase The Wire’s Stringer Bell: “Product, my dear colleagues. Product”. When the putative “CEO” of the Barksdale drug gang was referring to “product”, he possibly wasn’t thinking of the “gross…
Interim Director, UWA Public Policy Institute; Associate Professor & Programme Co-ordinator (Masters of Public Policy), The University of Western Australia