Silencing the Sex Worker (formerly Demonizing Our Sisters)

Abstract

“Were you silent or were you silenced?” These famous words from Oprah’s 2021 interview with (ex) Prince Harry and Meghan Markle highlight a deeply important concept: there is harm in wrongfully silencing someone’s contributions.
This Article argues that sex workers are silenced when they attempt to contribute to law making processes. As a result, they are unable to contribute their knowledge in a meaningful way. The consequence is that laws reflect only one perspective of life in the sex trades: the prostitution abolitionist position that all sex work is inherently a form of violence against women. Without the ability to help shape this narrative, sex workers will continue to be silenced by the allegation that they are a danger to the feminist movement, courts will make harmful rulings, and legislatures will continue to enact laws that put sex workers in danger.
This Article makes several contributions. Firstly, it makes a contribution to feminist philosophical literature by coining the “Cycle of Epistemic Oppression” as a tool to excavate silencing within the law. It then examines how this cycle operates in the context of prostitution policy making. Finally, this examination demonstrates the wide applicability of the Cycle of Epistemic Oppression to diverse areas of law.

Keywords: sex work, prostitution, trafficking, legal theory, critical theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, epistemology, epistemic oppression, jurisprudence, epistemic injustice, courts, legislatures, policy, constitution, cooptation, transformative, interpersonal violence, movement to end violence,