Both evangelical organisations and some self-proclaimed feminist groups regard every form of sex work as exploitation, and therefore as the main cause of human trafficking. They seek an end to the entire sex industry, and their method of choice at the moment is the so-called Nordic model, or the criminalisation of buying sex. The association Terre des Femmes has split over this dispute.
Individual situations are frequently more complicated. Many women decide to work as sex workers, but are later on deceived regarding the actual working conditions and find themselves in situations that meet the legal criteria of trafficking. Legally speaking this initial consent does not erase the responsibility of the perpetrators, but it does make the question of desired remedies less clear than abolitionist organisations would like.[...]
The problem with conflating sex work and trafficking in human beings is that women are made to be victims even when they have consciously decided to work as sex workers. The ‘rescue industry’, as the scholar Laura María Agustín calls it, attributes victim status to persons, mostly women, who have rationally and consciously decided to engage in sex work and who, at least in the moment of making their decision, do not see themselves as victims.[...]
According to Luca Stevenson, the coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, this position reflects a very white middle class approach. "Very few people are free to choose their jobs and many factors contribute to someone working in informal, precarious or even dangerous industries such as sex work. The criminalisation of sex work does not create economic options, but makes sex workers more vulnerable, more precarious."
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