PechaKucha

Chayse Johnson

ENGL 1102

Professor O'Dell

November 17, 2025

Reclaiming Agency: Sex Work, Labor Rights, and the Fight for Decriminalization

Sex work has been considered as one of the most stigmatized and underrated jobs in the

contemporary society. Although sex work has a long history of operation, and an undeniable role

in the local and global economies, it is still operating in a precarious legal and moral gray zone.

Sex workers in the United States are under a continuous threat of being arrested, being assaulted,

or becoming economically marginalized since prostitution is criminalized in almost every state.

The contrasting aspect of the paradox is overwhelming: in the times of glorifying the word gig

and flexible labor, sex industry, which is arguably the oldest kind of freelance work, is

criminalized and shunned. This essay is an argument that sex work needs to be decriminalized

and treated as a legitimate work and not as a moral imperfection or health epidemic.

Decriminalization would legitimize the rights of workers, would lessen violence and

exploitation, would enable the society to openly approach sex work with the prism of labor,

health, and human rights instead of criminal justice systems.

The social work problem creates a paradox of work and ethics. Modern economies, on

the one hand, tolerate flexibility, entrepreneurship, and bodily autonomy; on the other, they are

unwilling to grant such freedoms to individuals who sell sexual services. To explain this

contradiction, it is necessary to trace the historic stigmatization of sex work, examine the

economic aspects of it, and examine the empirical research underpinning various legal strategies.

The Historical Roots of Sex Work Stigma

The moralistic gendered stigmatization of sex work in America has a strong connection

with the heritage of Protestant reform movements. The “rescue” campaigns of the nineties of the

twentieth century depicted prostitutes as “fallen women,” victims of urban vice who needed to be

saved instead of be paid well (Doezema 34). These initial moral crusades conflated sex work

with moral corruption and gave rise to punitive policies like the Page Act of 1875 and the Mann

Act of 1910, which conflated consenting sex work with sex trafficking. This built a system of

social control around policing women's bodies and managing sexuality.

As feminist sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein recounts, these narratives have come to form

what she calls "carceral feminism", a paradigm that seeks to empower women by punishing

them, often replicating the same inequality it seeks to challenge. For Bernstein, "anti-trafficking

campaigns have become a site where feminist, evangelical, and neoliberal agendas converge,

producing a politics of protection through criminalization" (Bernstein 133). This overlap

between state power and moral reform is catastrophic: instead of reducing poverty or oppression,

it justifies policing and imprisonment as tools of "rescue."

The contemporary anti-trafficking discourse often collapses the differences between

commercial sex work and coerced trafficking. Laws such as America's 2018 FOSTA-SESTA

Act, which criminalized sites that hosted advertisements for sex work, were sold as

anti-trafficking bills but have actually placed sex workers at risk by taking away safe spaces

online where they can screen clients (Mac 61). Thus, the classical desire to "protect" women

remains a rhetoric that justifies state regulation of their bodies and labor.

Sex Work as Labor

Defining sex work as labor redirects the discussion from moral panic towards economic

justice. Sex work "encompasses a wide occupational range, from street prostitution to

law-established escort services and internet content provision," and thus "cannot be pathologized

as an undifferentiated whole" (Weitzer 214). The fundamental character of sex work which is

providing close, emotional, and physical services for money, intersects with other service and

care labor. Emotional labor, as famously framed by Arlie Hochschild, enlists workers to manage

their emotions and bodily appearances as a requirement of work (Hochschild 7). Sex workers, for

example, nurses, therapists, or flight attendants, engage in affective labor, labor that sells

emotion, attention, and care.

By looking at sex work as work, we are confronted with its material conditions rather

than its moral ones. Criminalization takes away workers' rights to negotiate fair pay, reject

dangerous clients, or access health services. It also supports economic insecurity by excluding

sex workers from banking, housing, and social security. As one scholar, Teela Sanders, puts it,

"sex workers are among the few service workers systematically excluded from occupational

health and safety protections" (Sanders 76). This legally required exclusion from labor

protections ensures the work will remain dangerous and exploitative, not because of the work

itself, but because of the legal context under which the work is performed.

The paradox is clear: society relies on prostitution as a persistent feature of the economy

but denies sex workers the basic rights of other workers. Decriminalization would not end the

issues of exploitation, but it would create the legal and institutional policies to address them just

as labor laws protect workers in agriculture, domestic work, or entertainment.

Legal Frameworks: Criminalization, Nordic Model, and Decriminalization

Throughout the globe, there are three primary models of sex work regulation used by

governments: full criminalization, partial criminalization (the "Nordic model"), and full

decriminalization. In the United States, the fully criminalized model is applied whereby selling

and purchasing sexual services is prohibited except in a few exceptions in a few counties of

Nevada. The sex workers are there arrested, charged, and incarcerated, whereas the clients

receive relatively less punishment. This policy has not eliminated the sex trade; it has merely

made it more dangerous. In a study in The Lancet in 2014, criminalization was linked to more

violence and sexually transmitted infections among sex workers (Deering et al. 44).

The Nordic model, implemented initially in Sweden in 1999, criminalizes demand rather

than supply, with the intent of dismantling demand. Although advocates claim this protects sex

workers, evidence refutes it. Jay Levy and Pye Jakobsson's study shows that Sweden's approach

"has pushed sex work further underground, increased stigma, and made workers more vulnerable

to violence and police harassment" (Levy and Jakobsson 941). Criminalizing clients upsets the

filtering procedure, forcing workers to screen clients earlier and in more isolated areas to avoid

getting caught. Rather than increasing safety, the Nordic model replaces one form of

criminalization with another.

Conversely, the New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act (2003) is a logical and

rights-based resolution. It decriminalized commercial sex work among consenting adults and

established labor protections, work place health and safety rules, and anti-discrimination

legislation. A comprehensive government review found that 90 percent of prostitutes said they

felt they had greater rights and protection after the reform, and none felt they had more coercion

or trafficking (Abel et al. 200). The facts demonstrate that when sex work is acknowledged as

work, exploitation decreases and protection increases. New Zealand's model demonstrates that

public policy has the ability to safeguard workers and still appreciate individual freedom without

resorting to punishment.

Economic Pressures and Structural Inequality

Sex work is often criticized as not being a free choice because it is a product of poverty,

coercion, or addiction. While economic marginalization certainly pushes many into the industry,

it neglects an essential truth: economic need typifies all labor under capitalism. As sociologist

Laura María Agustín notes, "Few workers, in any industry, work purely by choice; they work to

survive" (Agustín 85). Withholding agency to sex workers in the guise of protection patronizes

them and takes away their capacity to make logical choices.

Additionally, most sex workers indicate they prefer sex work to low-income service

work, with flexibility and greater pay as top advantages. Platt et al. determined that

decriminalization "improves economic security and reduces workplace violence," whereas

criminalization "aggravates poverty and exposure to coercion" (Platt et al. 452). For them, sex

work provides not only economic survival but autonomy, an ability to manage schedules and

income within a labor market that frequently marginalizes women's and queer individuals' labor.

Economic exclusion also cuts across race, gender, and migration. Black, Latina,

Indigenous, and trans women are overrepresented among prostitution-related arrests in the

United States. Transgender women of color constitute almost 50% of all prostitution-related

arrests in some of the biggest cities, as indicated by the Urban Justice Center. Criminalization is

therefore a means of racialized control, sustaining classic hierarchies of who has the ability to

express or commodify sexuality. Legal scholar Juno Mac argues that "sex work laws are not

neutral as they selectively criminalize the poor, migrants, and gender nonconforming people

under the guise of public order" (Mac 54).

Decriminalization, then, is not solely an economic shift; it is a racial and gender justice

initiative. It interrupts the way the state regulates and excludes marginalized bodies from the

economy. As Black feminist theorist Audre Lorde formerly said, "There is no such thing as a

single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." Decriminalizing sex work

should, therefore, be seen as part of a broad movement toward intersectional labor justice.

Health, Safety, and Human Rights

From a public health perspective, criminalization is both ineffective and dangerous. The

World Health Organization and UNAIDS have repeatedly concluded that decriminalizing sex

work would significantly reduce the global HIV epidemic. Modeling studies estimate that full

decriminalization could prevent up to 46 percent of new infections among sex workers and their

clients within a decade (Shannon et al. 55). If workers are permitted to go to clinics and use

condoms without the fear of arrest, they are more secure in covering themselves and their clients.

Conversely, "condom confiscation policing" (i.e., the use of condoms as evidence of

prostitution by law enforcement) discourages safe sex and sabotages prevention efforts against

HIV (Platt et al. e449). Criminal sanction fears drive workers underground, away from health

care and peer support. Thus, the same laws that try to protect public morals end up endangering

public health.

The violence inflicted on sex workers is in direct proportion to criminalization. As per a

meta-analysis in the American Journal of Public Health, 45 to 75 percent of sex workers in

criminalized settings are exposed to physical or sexual violence while 7 to 14 percent in

decriminalized settings are exposed to it (Deering et al. 42). The violence is not only from clients

but also from police officers and landlords who exploit workers' illegal status. When workers

fear police as much as predators, justice becomes impossible.

Decriminalization addresses this by allowing workers to report abuse, access social

services, and work indoors in safer conditions. Legal rights in New Zealand consist of refusing

clients, advertising, and working together in brothels, reducing isolation and risk. This model

also constructs communities by changing sex work from a criminalized act to a regulated,

tax-paying profession that supports the economy.

Feminist Divisions and Moral Panic

Few feminist arguments are as controversial as that about sex work. Abolitionist

feminists on the one hand imagine prostitution as inherently exploitative, arguing it as

perpetuating patriarchal power and objectification. Sex-positive feminists and labor activists on

the other hand defend the right to practice the selling of sexual services as a proof of agency and

body autonomy. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, leading abolitionist theorists,

contend that prostitution "institutionalizes the sexual subordination of women" (MacKinnon 30).

Such arguments rely on a universalized victim model that elides the heterogeneity of sex

workers' experiences.

Organizers like Carol Leigh, the first sex worker to employ the term sex work in the

1980s, maintain that "naming it work is the first step toward legitimizing and protecting it"

(Leigh 27). This shift in terminology revolutionized the debate into one of economics instead of

morality, placing the movement on par with others across the globe for labor rights. Feminist

anthropologist Tiantian Zheng also argues that "the feminist responsibility is not to save but to

hear—to honor the intricate negotiations of power, survival, and agency that mark sexual labor"

(Zheng 11).

Sex-positive and intersectional feminists highlight how criminalization sustains gender

inequality by punishing women and gender-diverse people for exerting control over their

sexuality. In addition, as Zheng illustrates, sex work panic is likely to deflect attention from

structural issues such as pay gaps, housing unaffordability, and erosion of social safety nets.

Decriminalization is not synonymous with glorifying prostitution but with recognizing that all

workers, whether doctors, lawyers, or sex workers are entitled to safety, autonomy, and respect.

Policy Implications and Reform Options

If the United States were to adopt New Zealand's model of decriminalization, several

policy areas would have to be changed. Labor law would have to recognize sex work as a legal

form of self-employment under occupation health and safety regulations. This would also

include the ability to unionize, report abuse, and access unemployment benefits. The creation of

cooperatives for sex workers, similar to New Zealand's or Belgium's, would give workers

collective bargaining rights and promote transparency.

Also, there would be the need for immigration policy to end the tradition of conflating

migrant sex work and trafficking. Migrants join the sex industry voluntarily as transnational

labor, but policy makes them doubly vulnerable, both illegally working and sex workers. The

U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) aimed at reducing coercion instead leads to

raids that deport migrants rather than protecting them. A decriminalized framework would

differentiate voluntary work from coercion and provide that actual victims of trafficking are

protected while others keep their means of livelihood.

Thirdly, campaigns on destigmatization and public education would be needed as they

would ensure people are more informed. Discrimination is motivated by social stigma in

housing, healthcare and custody. The partnership between the sex worker-led organizations and

the public health agencies should allow the creation of outreach and educational material that

focuses on consent, safety, and bodily autonomy. This community-based strategy is consistent

with the principles of harm reduction and has been effective in the prevention of HIV in many

communities across the world.

Also, the economic gains of decriminalization are high. The Urban Institute stated that as

of 2010, the underground sex economy in eight cities in the U.S. alone was producing between

39.9 and 290 million a year (Dank et al. 22). As a way of introducing this market to the formal

economy, cities would have the opportunity to earn taxes, lower the expenses incurred in law

enforcement, and refocus the funds in health and housing. Decriminalization would therefore

protect workers as well as provide quantifiable social good.

Conclusion

Sex work is there simply because there is a demand and will never go away regardless of

the legal or moral reprimand. Instead of whether or not sex work should exist, the question is

how it should work. Moral panic and criminalization have not helped to protect women; on the

contrary, they have increased stigma and violence. The identification of sex work as labor is one

way through which justice can be achieved because it guarantees rights of workers, better

community health, and eliminates the racial and gender inequalities that perpetuate oppression.

Decriminalization does not mean acceptance of exploitation, it is just an acknowledgment that

workers should be safe, dignified, and have a choice regarding their work. The experience of

New Zealand and many other studies around the world proves that legalizing sex work is less

harmful and more empowering to communities. Since the society is reexamining the definition of

labor in a more precarious economy, it is a move that has to be taken to realize the sex workers

are labor and all workers should be treated as such in order to achieve universal worker justice.

Sex workers are in need of what any worker needs; safety, respect and entitlement to manage

their own labor.

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