Sex Workers Rights Are Human Rights: Or not? The Art of Stealing Back Human Rights (original) (raw)

2022, Sex Work, Labour and Relations. New Directions and Relations. Teela Sanders, Kathryn McGarry & Paul Ryan (eds.), Springer Nature, 2022

Since the 1970s sex workers across the world have used the human rights framework to claim legitimacy and advocate for civil and labour rights with the slogan ‘sex workers rights are human rights’. However, fed by the dominant anti-trafficking discourse, sex workers’ human rights are under attack by an increasingly influential abolitionist coalition of radical feminists, Christian evangelicals and ‘left wing’ liberals. Using the case of Germany, France, and Spain I examine how the neo-abolitionist anti-sex work campaign hijacked human rights as a vehicle to exclude and silence sex workers and justify their repression. Through the gateway of human dignity and female victimhood human rights are used to create a hierarchy of ‘human-ness’ to contain deviant sexuality and re-establish the white middle-class monogamous model of ‘good’ sexuality, while at the same time dehumanising sex workers and relieving states of their accountability for the protection of sex workers’ human rights. After discussing the contested relationship between sex workers rights and human rights, leaning on the principles of dignity and self-determination, the chapter examines the resistance of sex workers and, in particular, the way courts dealt with the competing abolitionist and sex workers’ rights claims in the countries concerned.