Download This PaperThe Mainstreaming of Sex Workers' Rights as Human Rights
46 Pages Posted: 6 May 2020 Last revised: 7 May 2020
Date Written: April 16, 2020
Abstract
In the past twenty years, an international consensus has slowly emerged: sex workers’ rights are human rights. International human rights bodies, inter-governmental organizations, and influential nonprofit human rights organizations have institutionalized the concept of sex workers’ rights as human rights in direct response to global sex workers’ rights advocacy. The sex workers’ rights movement frames its cause as a human rights issue in order to connect its fight to a sophisticated international system and to transform sex workers — who are among the most marginalized and stigmatized communities in the world — into rights bearers in the global discourse. This Article will explore several primary fields of inquiry: how and why has the global sex workers’ rights movement applied a human rights frame to its political, social, and economic claims? How have influential international human rights bodies officially responded to this framing, and what are the strengths and limitations of these responses? And, finally, how have sex workers’ rights advocates attempted to use mainstream human rights recognition to secure political and legal gains for sex workers on the ground? The emerging consensus among human rights bodies that sex workers’ rights are human rights is, encouragingly, not in line with the longstanding and damaging anti-prostitution argument that sex work is itself a human rights violation. The human rights frame that sex worker advocates have championed for decades focuses the conversation where it belongs: not on theoretical arguments about the meaning of sex work but on the evidence-based realities of the streets, bars, brothels, clubs, massage parlors, and truck-stops where sex workers suffer human rights abuses because of the harmful and unrelenting hand of the carceral state.
Keywords: sex work, human rights
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