Law, Public Policy, and Sex Work in North America and China

Abstract

Globally, sex work remains a controversial legal and public policy issue because its regulation raises questions about the state’s role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. National, state or provincial, and municipal forces govern the regulation of sex industry sectors worldwide by choosing one of three general legal approaches: legalization, decriminalization, and criminalization. This chapter unites global case study research findings to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of harms for sex workers by forcing them to work in isolated and potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Research presented here demonstrates that criminalization enacts a form of systematic collusion between institutional and social forces that function to socioeconomically marginalize sex workers. The result is an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Findings presented here draw upon the coauthors’ years of ethnographic research with hostess bar workers in China (Zheng) and women engaged in street-based sex trading in Canada (Orchard) and the USA (Dewey).