Elite academics in Australia love to profess their support for ”sex workers”. University of New South Wales academic Catharine Lumby in ”Sex is not dirty work” on these pages pleaded for the media to treat sex workers with more respect, given that prostitution is a legal form of employment in Australia.
Lumby recalls telling her sons over the dinner table to not make jokes about women their friends call ”prosties”, and to remember that feminists and Christians could be condemned for failing to properly recognise prostitution as work.
This idea of prostitution conveyed to the two Lumby juniors is unmistakably a liberal one. In this framing, prostitution is embarked upon by individual women as something akin to a small-business enterprise (women in brothels in Australia are legally recognised as sub-contractors, not employees). While ”sex workers” might be at the bottom rung of the social ladder in terms of education, prior victimisation, social networks, and personal asset bases, liberals see them as admirable for attempting to improve their circumstance, and possibly give their kids a better chance in life.
In conveying this idea of prostitution, Lumby teaches her sons to be nice to ”sex workers”, which is indubitably a charitable thing for an elite academic to do.
However, in framing prostitution as a benign form of ”work”, Lumby also disenables her sons taking social and political measures against the sex industry and its customers as perpetrators of serious and widespread harm against women in Australia.
There now exists a mountain of empirical research, not only from feminist social scientists, but also from psychologists, clinicians, nurses, anthropologists and economists, of the harms of prostitution for women. These harms include post-traumatic stress disorder, genital and other physical injuries, pregnancy, depression and anxiety, and social isolation.
It has been known since the late 1970s that a major precursor of women’s entry into prostitution is childhood sexual abuse. There is also empirical evidence of the damage to women’s social status, and the negative impact on women’s connection to local community, of the sex industry.
Overwhelmingly, the social science and health literature condemns prostitution as a source of harm to women, as well as children.
For liberals to successfully frame prostitution as ”work”, rather than commercially mediated sexual abuse, they must close their eyes to this evidence.
Dr Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the school of Global Studies, Social Science & Planning at RMIT University.
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