Guest post: “Sex work” and child labour
Originally a comment by Bernard Hurley on The myth that it is possible to commodify consent.
The great genius of the neo-liberalism is that it can commodify anything.
Once there is general acceptance of this philosophy, terms like “sex worker” tend to get a free pass. If you take it as axiomatic that a so-called “free” market enhances the agency of all involved then it might seem draconian to interfere with the “sex market” and take away the agency of all involved.
The arguments advanced for the full decriminalisation of the “sex market” bear a striking resemblance to those advanced in favour of child labour in nineteenth century Britain. We are told “sex work is work like any other work”; I don’t know if any of the defenders of child labour actually said “child labour is labour like any other labour,” but they said plenty of things that suggest they would concur with this idea. Just as it is argued that some women could not survive without prostitution and others became prostitutes out of choice, so it was argued that some children could not survive without factory work and others worked out of choice; just as you can find ex-prostitutes who will tell you how liberating their “sex work” had been, so you could find adults who looked back fondly at their time working a child in a factory; just as some prostitutes go on to become brothel keepers¹ so some child labourers went on to become factory owners.
It took a lot of struggle to ban child labour. The 1833 Factories Act is often seen as a landmark victory in this struggle but by modern standards it is woefully inadequate²; however it is worthy of note that it criminalised factory owners not child labourers, similarly we criminalise slave owners not slaves. There are clear precedents for legislation along the lines of the Nordic model not only working but working well.
But there are other worrying aspects of this. A card-carrying neo-liberal could respond to the claim that “sex work” cannot be carried out in line with normal health and safety regulations with “So much the worse for health and safety regulations.” Indeed I fail to see how it could become normal work without a substantial dilution of such regulations.
Beware what you inflict on the weakest in society for there are those who would inflict it on you.
Footnotes:
[1] I have heard this fact used as an argument for the legalisation of the “sex market;” after all, if prostitution were so terrible would someone who had experienced it inflict it on others?
[2] It made it illegal to employ children aged under 9 in factories and restricted the hours of those under 13.
“So much the worse for health and safety regulations” is not clear. I’m guessing it might mean “Too bad for health and safety regulations”, but others might read it quite differently…
The context makes it clear.
My mileage varied on that. I don’t think it’s clear at all!
Well it’s idiomatic. I recognize the idiom so in context I found it clear enough. I like Bernard’s way of writing so I don’t want to mess with it. And really it is pretty clear since we know neo-liberals (aka libertarians) do not love health and safety regulations.
In the health care and criminal justice systems there are regulations with regard to blood and body fluids. Prostituted women in hazmat suits or even wearing latex gloves are not likely to be popular with the punters so I am guessing that they would be exempt from the health and safety rules in place for other “professions”.
The comparison of child labour and prostitution is interesting, but we should be careful in how far we take the analogy, and also in what lessons we draw from it.
In 1833, after all, factories had only been around in their then-current form for around fifty years or so. Therefore it was not very long at all, in historical terms, between the introduction of industrial labour and the recognition that this sort of labour was inappropriate for a certain class of people, regardless of the consent these people ostensibly gave or the economic circumstances that supposedly necessitated their engagement in industrial labour. Yet this recognition, and the attendant social reorganisation that accompanied it, helped to disempower poor women during industrialisation…as these women were no longer able to bring their children to work with them, and they could not afford to have their young children looked after, many women had to stay home (because it was naturally supposed that women had to take care of their children). Thus men demanded more money, and the women who were able to work suffered greater inequalities of pay.
It would not surprise me, then, if the enacting of child labour laws led indirectly to an increase in prostitution as a means of survival, as it took many more decades for European and American society to develop the cultural institutions and attitudes that allowed women to win their own bread. Even if not, the instantiation of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology is bound up intimately with Europe’s changing attitudes toward children and women’s relationship to them. Thus any law, even the best and most necessary of laws, can wind up doing unintended harm if it is passed and enforced without the cultural attitudes and institutions to ensure that harm is mitigated.
What comes first? The law or the culture? It probably depends, and I don’t have any answers about whether and which laws should be passed or repealed with respect to prostitution. But I deeply suspect that our cultural institutions and attitudes are not equipped to bring about abolition, given the misery and destruction that is evident wherever it is practiced, even (or perhaps especially) in places where it is prohibited.
(And yes, that last sentence is ambiguous; the ‘it’ in the last two clauses is supposed to refer to prostitution, instead of abolition. Apologies for the poor writing, Ophelia.)
Law is a manifestation of culture. Neither comes first, they induce change in each other both directly and indirectly.
All too often, sex work is child labor.
Seth, your argument is “The situation was appalling. Not all of it was fixed. So harm reduction in context should have permitted child labor.”
It’s an good example of what’s wrong with (some? most?) harm reduction arguments.
Sorry, when the context is slavery, you don’t say, “Oh, well, at least they got a couple of square meals a day.”
You clean up the context. And, yes, you better do it right because shoving poor women into prostitution because you’re trying to stop child labor is beyond bad. The lesson to take from the child labor situation is not that some child labor was “better” than the available alternatives. It’s that you change the alternatives. It’s that you assist the former slaves / bonded laborers / debt peons. I.e. use the Nordic Model.
@ 10 quixote
You end on a non sequitur. The Nordic Model has nothing to do with assisting sex workers, it is the criminalization of the purchase of sex.
The Nordic Model assists sex workers like making it illegal to pay for a haircut assists hairdressers.
@Silentbob
No. The Nordic model provides exit strategies and assistance for prostitutes who want to leave the life.
Quixote,
You mischaracterise my post, which wasn’t an argument so much as a brief collection of musings upon the fact that massive cultural changes are complicated, take a long time, and are only partly accomplished by passing laws. In fact I took pains at the end to not advocate or discount any particular legal framework for ending (or at least reducing the harm of) prostitution.
I suppose my argument, such as it is, is that passing a law (or ensuring a law is not overturned) is *not enough* to end prostitution, for the simple fact that prostitution still exists, even in Scandinavia. A great deal of energy must be spent on building out social structures that give women a real alternative. Simply keeping prostitution illegal or derailing decriminalisation efforts doesn’t do a single thing to help women who are trafficked to and from areas where the practice is already illegal, nor does the Nordic model help women who are thrown out of their homes because landlords are legally unable to ‘live off of the avails’ of their tenants. In countries where the practice is decriminalised, it isn’t regulated very well, and the police can still hardly be trusted to prevent or prosecute abuses.
Prostitution has been around a lot longer than child labour, and abolishing it is going to take a lot more work. In the meantime, there are concrete steps we can and should take to make prostitution less dangerous.