by Hannah Shead FiLiA Women First team

When I initially started talking about women involved in the sex trade in my local area, one of the early conversations that I found myself having was around what language we should be using. The dominant phrase one often hears is ‘sex work’, but this felt really challenging. After all, what we were witnessing on our streets in no way resembled what anyone would ever describe as either sex or as work. Yet some people were equally challenged by the term prostitution, with its somewhat archaic connotations. It was considered to be a loaded term that people felt uncomfortable using. In the end, we made a collective decision to temporarily park the issue of language and instead focus our energy on understanding the actual experiences of local women. We engaged with them, found ways to listen to their needs and to hear their experience.

Eventually, the term that we found ourselves using was ‘prostituted women’. It somehow captured the element of coercion and exploitation, without sanitising the lived experience of women, which sadly was that of violence and abuse.  

Indeed, one thing that I know, regardless of where a woman is selling sex ‒ in the city, in the suburbs, online or on the streets, in a brothel or a massage parlour ‒ the reality is pretty brutal. The risk of violence is high. Women in prostitution are 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general female population;[i] three quarters of women involved in prostitution have experienced violence from men who buy sex; over half report having been raped or sexually assaulted.[ii]

When the statistics are so striking, it is perhaps somewhat baffling that for so long, we have found ourselves stuck in conversations about language and choice. After all, anyone who has worked alongside women in the sex trade will most likely agree that almost all of them, without fail, end up doing so not as an active choice, but due to a lack of choice. Nearly 75% of women enter prostitution before they are 18[iii] and half of women say that they were coerced into prostitution by someone else.

Here at FiLiA in the Women First team, we firmly challenge the notion of prostitution as being in any way empowering. We consider it another form of male violence. As part of the Women First project, we have interviewed sex trade survivors who collectively have over 100 years’ experience of being in the sex trade. This has included street, escort, sugar daddy and brothel work. Their experiences were all different but many of the themes were similar, namely that trauma and abuse served as a gateway into the sex trade and that it takes time and specialist support to exit and recover from the sex trade.

The women that we spoke with echoed the staggering levels of violence and brutality that women experience: ‘I wanted to exit since first day of working… it was so horrendous… it was man after man after man, it was like being raped continuously.’

‘If I carried on in that industry… I knew I would die.’

They told us about the importance of visible recovery and of being able to exit the sex trade: ‘There is this light at the end of the tunnel and people do exit… we never hear about that.’

‘There’s only gaslighting possible when it’s pro sex work. You can’t see the perpetrators.’

They also talked to us about how sometimes it was only years later; after finally exiting, they began to understand the harm it had caused: ‘I’ve become more feminist in my thinking, and I really realise the damage it does.’

Over the last 12 months, I have found myself in a number of conversations in which people are sharing some very real concerns about the direct harm that prostitution causes to women. I am encouraged to see an increased recognition of the sex trade as harmful to women. However, it is not simply enough to recognise harm… we must then move to a place where we can reduce and eventually prevent it.

At Women First, we do not simply want to shine a light on the harm that prostitution causes to women, we also want to help local authorities in the UK improve their response to women involved in the sex trade. We would love to understand what is happening in your area and to help you improve your offer to women. We will be talking more about this at the Nordic Model Now event on 9th November, and you can get in touch directly via Sally@filia.org.uk. 

[i] Salfati, C. G. (2009). Prostitute Homicide: An Overview of the Literature and Comparison to Sexual and Non-Sexual Female Victim Homicide

[ii] Marianne Hester and Nicole Westmarland; Tackling Street Prostitution: Towards an holistic approach, (2004)

[iii] Benson, C. and Matthews, R. (1995), Street prostitution: Ten facts in search of a policy in International Journal of Sociology of the Law