“The biggest issue that we came across was stigma and discrimination that sex workers face in the community, which is a barrier to them accessing services and retiring or moving out of sex work to do other sorts of work. It is important therefore that programmes address that and work with the community to reduce stigma and discrimination. One of the big things that we noted was the need for sex work to be recognised in equality legislation as a protected characteristic and occupation. That would give sex workers access to legal rights under discrimination and vilification laws.” Dr Larissa Sandy, October 29^th 2025, evidence given to the Criminal Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament.

I was online giving evidence to the same committee and heard these words from Dr Sandy. I wish I could say I was floored, shocked, appalled. Sadly I was not because the argument that ‘the real problem’ of prostitution is the stigma that women in prostitution endure and that sex worker is an identity worthy of equality law protection has been circulating for nearly 10 years. The argument reveals a profound misunderstanding of both equality law as well as the nature of prostitution itself. More than that, it contains one of the most anti-feminist propositions I have encountered in decades of research.

The Legal Illiteracy

The Equality Act 2010 protects nine characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. What unites these characteristics is clear: they describe aspects of who someone is, not what someone does.

“Sex worker” is not a personal attribute. It is a descriptor of someone involved in a particular type of economic activity – the commercial exchange of sex (or sexual services) for money. We do not have “teachers,” “doctors,” or “construction workers” as protected characteristics, because what someone does for money is not a protected characteristic. The legal architecture of equality law simply cannot accommodate economic activity.

To say that someone has a protected characteristic is to say that they possess an objective attribute which does not change. We all have a sex, a race, an age and we cannot change these. It is the fact that we cannot change them that provides the basis of our protection by the Equality Act 2010.

The Anti-Feminist Horror at the Heart of This Proposal

But there is something far more insidious lurking within this suggestion. For “sex worker” to function as a protected characteristic within the Equality Act framework, it would have to operate like the other protected characteristics. It would have to be treated as an inherent, fundamental aspect of a person—something someone is rather than something someone does.

This means the proposal implicitly concedes that some women are inherently sex workers. That prostitution is a personal attribute, a fixed characteristic, an essential part of who they are.

This is a resurrection of the oldest, most pernicious anti-feminist ideology about prostitution: that there exists a class of women who are essentially, by nature, prostitutes. That some women simply are “public women,” “fallen women,” “that kind of woman.”

Feminists spent decades fighting this ideology. We argued that prostitution is not a destiny, not an identity, not an essential characteristic of certain women. We insisted that it is shaped by material conditions—poverty, male violence, lack of alternatives, sex and gender based inequality. We demonstrated that women enter and exit prostitution based on circumstances, not nature. We rejected the Victorian notion of the prostitute as a permanent, fixed category of woman.

The protected characteristic proposal asks us to abandon all of this and accept that for some women, being a “sex worker” is as fundamental and immutable as their sex or race. It is one of the most anti-feminist lines of reasoning I have ever encountered.

The Neoliberal Ideology Problem

This essentialism serves a particular political purpose. As I critiqued in Ronald Weitser’s proposals for destigmatising prostitution, treating “sex worker” as a neutral identity category represents “a defence of neo-liberal economic policy on prostitution”—an approach “in which ‘market forces’ become the ultimate regulator of sex work.”

Such approaches treat stigma as if it exists independently of the sexed and gendered, classed, and raced material inequalities that produce and sustain prostitution. They privilege occupational identity over material inequality. Even within its own logic, consider this absurdity: are we to believe that a white university-educated woman selling sex via the internet to business elites and a 16-year-old runaway homeless Black girl selling sex on the streets share some fundamental characteristic that defines who they are?

These women are fundamentally differently socially located. Their capacity to control their working environment, their experiences of safety and violence, are shaped by economic, cultural, and sex and gender-based inequalities—not by some shared essential identity. As I wrote elsewhere, “it is too simplistic to claim that shared occupational status” is “politically and analytically more significant than their differences.”

Who Benefits?

We must ask: who actually benefits from treating prostitution as an essential identity deserving of legal protection? As I have argued, “it is not the women who sell sex, or even necessarily the men who purchase it that will benefit. It will be those individuals and corporations who own and control the industry—like any other capitalist industry.”

If “sex worker” is a protected characteristic—an essential identity rather than an activity shaped by material conditions—then we cannot simultaneously recognise prostitution as exploitation, as violence, or as a harm we should aim to reduce. We lock ourselves into accepting the sex trade as a legitimate industry built around a permanent class of women who are essentially “sex workers.”

The Children We Forget

The protected characteristic proposal forces an impossible question: at what point does someone become essentially a sex worker? Many women currently in prostitution entered as girls—groomed, exploited, criminalised.

If “sex worker” is a protected characteristic—an essential aspect of identity—does a 15-year-old girl being prostituted possess this characteristic? Is this who she inherently is? Of course not. We recognise she is a victim of exploitation.

But if we reject this for children while accepting it for adults, we create an arbitrary line that obscures the continuum of exploitation and circumstance. We suggest that at 18, what was exploitation becomes identity. What was done to a girl becomes what a woman essentially is.

This reveals the fundamental problem: treating prostitution as a protected characteristic requires us to accept an essentialist view that feminists have fought against for generations.

What’s Actually Needed

Protected characteristic status would not help those in prostitution access what they need: housing, exit services, drug treatment, protection from violence. These require investment in social infrastructure, not legal categories that enshrine prostitution as essential identity.

What protected characteristic status would achieve is normalisation of the sex trade as an industry built around a class of women who are inherently “sex workers.” Legal categories shape social understandings. If we accept in law that some women essentially are sex workers, we abandon the feminist insight that prostitution is something that happens to women because of material circumstances, not something they inherently are.

Conclusion

After thirty years researching prostitution, I know this: women in prostitution need protection from violence, pathways out of poverty, and a legal framework that recognises their exploitation rather than entrenching it. They do not need legal categories that treat prostitution as an essential aspect of who they are.

Women are not inherently sex workers. Prostitution is not a personal attribute. And any proposal that requires us to accept otherwise is not just legally illiterate—it is one of the most anti-feminist lines of reasoning I have encountered in my career.

The fact that this argument was made to the Scottish Parliament tells us something important about how far academic discourse has drifted from feminist analysis. It represents the kind of approach that mistakes neoliberal identity politics for liberation and essentialism for progressivism.

On 29 October 2025, I gave oral evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s Criminal Justice Committee in support of Ash Regan’s Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill. For nearly two decades, I opposed criminalising the purchase of sex (the “Nordic model”)—not from a fixed political slogan like “sex work is work” or “prostitution is all male violence”. In my research, I have always held both truths in view because women describe prostitution as a way to make money while also recognising it as sex-based violence and victimisation. I avoid abstract debates about consent; they skim past poverty, tend towards a facile interpretation of constraint and choice, and are not capable of holding in view the relentless realities of male violence and how this shapes women’s and girl’s ‘choices’.

I opposed criminalising buyers because more urgent problems demanded action. But I have changed my mind. Despite major legal and policing reforms over the last 15 years, some of the most intractable harms of prostitution and male violence remain unaddressed. Having studied the Bill and the evidence base, I now think its implementation could make things a little better for women caught up in prostitution.

Solving ‘the problems’ of prostitution

All law reform claims to solve a problem. With prostitution, we must ask: what problem, exactly, and how does it fit the realities on the ground? Until the early 2000s, England, Wales and Scotland treated prostitution as a problem of public nuisance. This was established in the Wolfenden Report (the same report that decriminalised homosexual sex between men). At its time this was a landmark report. It said that where prostitution and homosexual sex between men were concerned, the law ought not meddle in matters of private morality. It ought only set limits when private morality creates problems of public nuisance. Wolfenden and his colleagues thus thought that prostitution was ‘just’ a moral question, except where it caused public nuisance.

What this meant in practice was that the police sought only to police the visibility of prostitution – or rather the visibility of women in prostitution.

Policing public nuisance

I started doing research into prostitution in the mid 1990s. Back then it was largely a local “cottage industry”. Women worked from the streets, in saunas and in brothels. Local gangsters and drug dealers controlled many of the street working women and brothel or sauna owners set the economic terms which controlled how much money a woman working within those locations could make. Indoor work was arranged through contact magazines or public phone booth small card ads. Most cities had a red-light district and a vice squad; brothels, massage parlours and saunas formed the indoor scene; escorting was limited. Voluntary support was thin. So in 1993, in Birmingham a local convent offered women support, a sexual health outreach agency used a van to hand out condoms to street working women and occasionally advice (and they made the odd referral), and a probation-run day centre ran a diversion scheme for women criminalised for soliciting or loitering. That was it.

In the summer of 1994, I spent time shadowing the sexual health outreach team in Birmingham and sat in probation run drop-in centre. I met many women and girls. Even those who called prostitution “work” or an alternative to theft, robbery or burglary also described male violence—from families, boyfriends or pimps, punters, and sometimes the police. ‘Consent’ talk felt beside the point then, as now. Choices were made under the force of necessity. Some of the stories of male violence were extreme—kidnapping and days-long assaults, beatings, gang rape, and total financial control. I cannot recall one woman that I met that summer who did not have a history of physical, sexual or emotional violence by men. For some women, escaping a violent man was often a push into prostitution (remember, back then there were very few refuges and no real statutory or third sector violence against women services). For others, male violence was just part and parcel of what happened in prostitution – an occupational hazard. For others still, violence marked their personal relationships. I remain unconvinced that much as changed.

Under-protected and over-policed

The policing asymmetry was stark. Women were arrested for prostitution offences; the men who raped, abused, controlled and profited from them were rarely pursued. In the mid-90s there were nearly 10,000 convictions for soliciting/loitering but only a few hundred for “living off immoral earnings.” The problem was obvious: women and girls were over-policed and under-protected. We already had laws against kidnap, rape, violence and pimping, but they were not enforced for these victims, who seldom reported for fear of being treated as offenders.

Hence, when the Nordic model was first introduced in Sweden in 1999, I did not have much time for it. What good would it be to just expand police’s attention from the women to those purchasing sex? How would that address the poverty, the complex social and welfare problems the women had or the male violence they experienced? We needed police and court enforcement against male violence. We needed real protection for the women and girls. We needed services for the trauma women and girls endure and for the addictions that are so common amongst women in prostitution. We needed government action on poverty and the homelessness that funnel women into prostitution. Most of all, we needed to stop criminalising the women and to consistently police and deal with the men who make women’s lives in prostitution a misery. Criminalising clients didn’t seem to touch those deeper problems.

Shifting definitions of ‘the problems’ of prostitution

Everything changed in the early 2000s. In less than a decade 15 changes of law or policy took place – all of them to address violence and exploitation experienced by women and girls in prostitution and set limits to the circumstances in which a person could consent to their involvement in prostitution. Prior to 2000, girls could be arrested for soliciting and loitering for prostitution even though they were under the age of sexual consent. But that year the Department of Health and Home Office issued guidance that said that any girl under the age of 18 years old should not be treated (in the first instance) as an offender. Instead they should be treated as a victim of sexual abuse. Other laws followed which focused on making unlawful other forms of commercial sexual exploitation and other forms of prostitution that were intimately intertwined with exploitation (such as human trafficking). Support for women who experienced violence from clients was put on a formal and official setting when, in 2012, the Home Office and police funded the National Ugly Mugs Scheme which when it was first set up allowed women to report violent punters and become aware of violent punters in their locality. Within a few years after that, new Crown Prosecution Service guidelines were established to deal with commercial exploitation of both women and girls and finally the law changed such that no girl under the age of 18 years could be prosecuted for a prostitution related offence.

This policy revolution had two effects. First, arrests and convictions of women for soliciting/loitering fell sharply in England and Wales. The old revolving door—arrest, fine, unpaid fine, custody, back to the street—that characterised the life of so many women in prostitution in earlier decades was effectively closed. In truth the criminalisation of street working women had already begun to decline by the mid 90s. Elsewhere I argued that this was a result of the mushrooming of sexual health outreach projects that followed in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Table 1: Numbers of records of soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution (adapted from Ministry of Justice figures)

NB: 1985 – 2003 figures refer to convictions for soliciting or loitering for the purposes of prostitution. 2004 onwards are police recorded figures.

Second, “support” often meant little more than referrals to mainstream services. With no statutory duty on local authorities to support women in prostitution, most women still couldn’t access the money, housing, or protection they needed. Sexual health harm-minimisation projects helped many women, but such projects cannot tackle women’s poverty, endemic male violence, or homelessness—nor could they keep up with the rapidly changing forms of prostitution that started to emerge in the 2010s.

By the early 2010s prostitution transformed. A local “cottage industry” became a globalised market. Street work dwindled; indoor work expanded. Contact mags and phone-box cards gave way to internet platforms. The street pimp was replaced by quasi-legitimate, profit-driven third parties, often linked to organised crime. ‘The prostitution market’ globalised, organised and ‘professionalised’ into the multiple billion dollar a year global industry that it is nowadays. We can see this shift in other police recorded offences. There was a dramatic decline in police recorded crime for soliciting or loitering and a concomitant increase in the numbers of police recorded figures for modern slavery.

Table 2: Police recorded figures for the key prostitution-related offence, adapted from Ministry of Justice figures.

What does this mean for Regan’s Prostitution (Offences and Support) (Scotland) Bill?

First, de facto, we’ve already decriminalised selling sex while criminalising modern slavery. Women are no longer routinely arrested—whether because the street scene shrank or because forces now divert women into services. Second, we’re only beginning to police child sexual exploitation actively. And despite the very high profile attention that grooming gangs has received recently, there is evidence that policing efforts are improving. Third, policing attention to exploitation of adult prostitution remain stubbornly low. Either such exploitation is rare (highly unlikely), the police are looking away (likely), or such exploitation is now normalised as “business practice” in the globalised prostitution market (most likely). In short, after nearly two decades, enforcement and protection of women in prostitution still lags despite a plethora of very good laws and policies.

Has England and Wales’ informal decriminalisation made women safer?

No. Women First found only 18% of local authorities commission any service for women in the sex trade. Where services exist, they resemble the late-1990s mix: charities, sexual health outreach, addiction services, and the occasional dedicated project. Women in prostitution remain at extreme risk of violence; centuries of research—and today’s homicide disparities—bear that out. The idea that simply stopping arrests delivers a safe, “sex-positive” sexual marketplace is delusional. When did the invisible hand of ‘the market’ ever curb male violence or address exploitative business practices? Those who argue for decriminalisation and those sex-positive proponents of ‘sex work’ also say that to treat ‘sex work’ as ordinary work requires also destigmatizing it as well as stopping the arrests. In fact, one of the acdemics giving evidence on 29th October made the case that decriminalisation works best when ‘sex worker’ is included as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act 2010 (less said about the legal illiteracy of this suggestion then better). What is clear is that if prostitution was to be brought truly into employment laws, the health and safety requirements typical of other hands-on kinds of employment would make it unattractive to many buyers. And if it is not to be brought within employment law, then it would become the wild west of employment practices where anything goes. For me, this is a dystopian vision of neo-liberal market forces regulating the sale and purchase of sex. It is not one I have ever supported or could support.

What’s wrong with a twin-track approach to policing prostitution?

The legacy of the drive to reform prostitution policy to make violence and exploitation in prostitution unlawful has created a ‘twin track’ approach to policing prostitution. Police attention and energy is spent on policing the exploitative and violent end of the market. This has created an intractable problem at the heart of how we deal with the problems of prostitution. In order to prove that the women in a brothel that the police have just raided are, in fact, victims of human trafficking or are, in fact, being exploited, the police have to collect evidence from the women. It means that policing attention is necessarily forced on to the women. It also means that all the same old problems with establishing whether each individual woman consented to what happened to her emerge. And what we know from 50+ years of feminist research on sexual exploitation and sexual violence is that we have yet to rid ourselves of the sexist stereotypes that shape how ‘consent’ is made sense of within the criminal justice system.

It is my belief that because we do have a half decent legal framework that addresses exploitation and violence in prostitution, if we then also criminalise the purchase of sex we may well address the problems of having a twin track approach to policing prostitution. Please note that Regan’s private member’s bill decriminalises soliciting and loitering.

Many researchers and activists who support fully decriminalising prostitution (i.e. removing all the current laws which make it illegal to own or run a brothel, to solicit or loiter in a public place for prostitution and so on) will tell you that criminalising the purchase of sex will have the following effects. Police will try to ‘get to’ the purchasers via the women and thus women will remain the target of police attention. It will drive prostitution underground as purchasers try to evade police attention. I’m not convinced. I remember these arguments being made in Sweden in the early 2000s. I also remember how unevidenced they were.

One final note on policing: as Table 1 above shows, we have a crisis in the policing of prostitution related crimes against women and girls. This is a crisis driven, in my opinion, by the reforms of 20 years ago that emphasized the distinctions between voluntary prostitution and forced prostitution, retained the criminal justice measures against women whilst also paying lip service to addressing the crimes committed against women. I know from my own research into child sexual exploitation that early attempts to treat girls in prostitution as victims of sexual exploitation fell flat because police officers and others focused on the conditions in which the girls were being prostituted rather than the activities of the men. The inability of the police to consistently deal with all girls as victims and all punters as criminals arguably was the precondition for the grooming gang scandals that we are dealing with at the moment. It is my opinion that criminalising the purchase of sex will give police absolute clarity when policing prostitution. All sellers of sex – regardless of their circumstances are not offenders. All purchasers are. It is a simple framework legal framework that may well help the police do their jobs.

------------

So yes, I support Ash Regan’s Bill. I support it because it puts support for women in prostitution on a statutory footing. I would like to see it located within a local authority’s violence-against-women strategy. Let’s criminalise the purchase of sex to shift policing attention away from the women to the men who create the market and the men who make women in prostitution’s lives a misery.

We tried just criminalising the really problematic end of prostitution. Look where it led: grooming-gang scandals, Jeffrey Epstein, and countless women living with the trauma that money-for-sex brings. We stopped arresting women in prostitution —but we didn’t guarantee support or send a national message that women are worth more than a few quid for a stranger’s gratification. Isn’t it about time we do something more?

While I am on the topic of things that have changed since 2019 (see today’s earlier post), I suspect this type of dossier (see below) would not find its way into an employment tribunal (mine) or, indeed, be referred to in a witness statement as a justification for harassing a gender critical feminist academic these days. Nearly 250 pages of snitch screen shots and the like. Seems someone spent a lot of time gathering together all this evidence of my (and the other members of the GCRN) crimes against trans people.

Perhaps I am wrong? Maybe some people in some universities do have the time to compile dossiers like this one.

For the Sherlock Holmes out there - you will have to read through the witness statements (uploaded on my substack) to see who mentioned a near 250 page document in their statement. Hint…. it’s a short statement and it is referenced in the final sentence.

The Dossier

18.4MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Today I am sitting in the Committee for Academic Freedom’s conference on academic freedom. We have come a long way since 2019. Firstly, there is a conference that is discussing threats to academic freedom. This would have been unheard of in 2019. Secondly, there is open discussion of the silencing and harassment experienced by gender critical feminist at the hands of trans rights activists. Back in 2019, we heard the shrill voices of trans rights activists shouting that academic freedom does not mean freedom from consequence and, at any right, because we are all funded by American far right organisations, we get our silenced voice heard in the (you guessed right) far right press. Thirdly, there is Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act and the new complaints scheme of the Office for Students and, as I type, I am listening to Prof Arif Ahmed talk about both the guidance and the scheme. Compare with 2019, bullies acted with impunity and were, in fact, celebrated.

This got me thinking about what happened to me at Essex University - the first of my cancellations and the one that was used as evidence to justify my other cancellations. It got me thinking about the events back in December 2019 - some of which I knew about in real time, others I found out about later. I know I gave many interviews at the time of the publication of the Reindorf Review. I thought however, just as a measure of how far the sector has moved (largely as a result of the struggles of gender critical feminists, I think) it would be timely to put up here my story in the Reindorf Review. This was refered to in my witness statement in my case against The Open University as well as at various points in the cross examination of witnesses like my former Head of School (now Professor) Deb Drake. So here it is. I have only extracted the sections that are my story. The rest of the Reindorf Review can be found here. Meanwhile here is the summary of my story back in December 2019 as retold through the eyes of Akua Reindorf KC. I invite you think about whether this could happen now.

Reindorf Review My Story

4.46MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

For those that attended my FiLia panel (State Punishment, State Sancetions and the Fight for Women’s Rights, below is the text for a letter to be sent to your MP. For those that were not at FiLia or did not attend, one of the panelists is asking people within the UK to write to their MP to raise awareness of the plight of female judges in Afghanistan.

There is also further information if you follow @marziababakarkh on X and #Afgfemalejudges. The point of the campaign is to raise awareness to the need to resettle Afghan Female Judges. Marzia herself was a family court judge in Afghanistan and survived the Taliban’s assassination attempts before seeking refuge in the UK. I will put more links to the campaign and to Marzia’s work once FiLia is finished. I will also link to the video of the panel)

“Since the Taliban returned to power women been systematically excluded from public life. Their policies have stripped women of fundamental rights - banning them from employment, education and restricting their movement.

Female judges, who upheld the law and defended the rights of others, are being especially persecuted by the Taliban. Some have been resettled overseas but many remain trapped and are living in hiding - in fear for their lives.

We call upon the UK government, the European Union, and the international community to take immediate action to establish safe pathways out of Afghanistan and resettlement programs for the Afghan women judges.”