Let’s have a little talk about sex work in Australia.
Like most controversial things, it’s governed by different laws from state to state – from a regulated legal industry in NSW and Victoria to the criminal-but-regulated system in Queensland to the strange situation in SA where sex work is technically legal but “living off the earnings of prostitution” is not.
And things have just gotten a lot less safe for Australian workers, and it’s not even because of Australian laws. It’s because of the US.
And look, there’s a reason that sex work is snickeringly called The Oldest Profession. It’s existed forever and everywhere.
Thus any discussion of it should acknowledge that there’s no choice between a society with sex workers therein and one where sex work does not exist. The choice we have is between a society in which sex work is safe, and one in which it is not.
So, with that in mind: a pair of laws called FOSTA/SESTA passed in the US last year (they’re acronyms for laws called the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) which purported to be all about fighting sex trafficking by limiting content online.
Like this.
The outcome, however, was to make any site which carried content considered to be in any way connected with the sex industry criminally liable as aiding sex trafficking, regardless of whether they put the content up themselves or even knew it was there.
Suddenly sites were legally responsible for all user-generated content – and that’s a terrifying precedent to set for the internet.
The effect was immediate. Craigslist killed its adult listings. Fetish communities on Tumblr suddenly found years of art and photos deleted. And it’s also why Facebook Business pages suddenly gave you a bunch of new conditions about what boob’n’bum content you could and could not put up.
Et tu, Facebook?
And it’s even gone offline, with reports that some US hotels (notably the Marriot chain) started preventing unaccompanied women from drinking in their bars lest they be… sex traffickers, or something? That’s just nuts.
But thanks to the international-yet-US-centric nature of the interwebs, the issue has spread to Australia too. Local workers – even in states where sex work is entirely legal – have reportedly found their Gmail accounts shut down and their professional webpages deleted, if using a US hosting service.
And the internet is where workers meet and vet their clients, as well as sharing information with one another about clients which might be dangerous. There used to be a website specifically dedicated to this – Backpage – which was one of the first sites to shut down.
While we can’t really do anything about US law, it’s worth noting that legislation to decriminalise sex work in Queensland is currently before the parliament, and SA has been sitting on decriminalisation legislation for a year now with little sign of progress.
And again, you don’t have to support sex work per se to think that the people working in it should be able to do so safely, any more than you need to think coal mining or telemarketing is a terrific idea to want workers in those industries to be protected from injury and death in the course of their day to day work.
As Gala Vanting of peak industry body Scarlet Alliance’s told 10 Daily, “Attempting to make an entire industry invisible is a terrible way to prevent exploitation within it, and an excellent way to increase it.”