Empowering Thai Sex Workers: The Positive Effects of Decriminalizing Prostitution

Socially, many societies are not ready to accept sex in exchange for payment. While proponents of criminal penalties to deter prostitution cite concerns with human trafficking and exploitation, decriminalization may offer better protections and working conditions for sex workers.

Prostitution is one of the oldest, most controversial, and yet most long-lasting vocations in history. In Thailand, prostitution continues to exist for developmental, cultural, and financial reasons. The government’s flawed agriculture and development strategy has left many rural families unable to afford a bare livelihood, driving many rural women to go to the cities for money and thus enter the sex industry. While the culturally patriarchal Thai society denies women choice over their life path, it expects them to support their nuclear family. Furthermore, urgent financial need, easy access to the sex industry, and relatively high potential earnings of prostitution drives an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 married women, single mothers, and underage teenagers to participate in the sex industry.

Women in the Thai sex industry have strikingly similar backgrounds: most of them come from the underdeveloped northern or northeastern part of Thailand and have taken part in rural-urban or cross-border migration. They are usually poorly educated, with an average of four to six years of compulsory education, and are encouraged to enter the sex industry between the ages 13 to 20 by friends or relatives who have previously worked in the industry.

While this profitable vocation is attractive to many Thai women, the vocation is both controversial and illegal in Thailand, which results in less than adequate protection for sex workers. However, activists have advocated for several approaches to improve the lives of these workers and prevent more women from entering the industry. Four mainstream approaches target prostitution: criminalization, semi-criminalization, public health and education, and decriminalization.

By mapping each of these approaches, the merits of decriminalization become obvious. Decriminalization: 1) tackles labor exploitation by ensuring labor rights recognition and regulation, facilitating income security, and reducing violence and abuse; 2) endows sex workers with equal human rights, respect and dignity; 3) recognizes sex workers as active social actors with equal citizens’ rights, including access to public services and involvement in political and social structures, and as legitimate workers who have the ability to claim consent, personal autonomy, and agency.

I define sex work as the exchange of sexual services for material gain. By evaluating currently proposed solutions, I’ve developed three primary objectives: to 1) improve the lives and working conditions of sex workers; 2) empower sex workers to fight marginalization and discrimination; and 3) cultivate awareness of sex workers’ self-protection and identification as legal workers who enjoy human and labor rights under the law.

 

Three Flawed Approaches

In over 100 countries around the world, prostitution is a criminal activity governments claim is unethical and immoral. Many nongovernmental organizations also prefer this approach because they believe the sex industry perpetuates sex trafficking, requiring disincentives for both the consumers and sellers.

This approach confuses nonconsensual sex trafficking with noncoercive, arms-length sex work by treating consenting sex workers as trafficked victims and slaves. Their efforts result in sex workers’ fear of being criminalized, and thus give up on seeking the help and resources such as condoms and HIV/STI testing. In addition, the criminalization approach intensifies public discrimination against sex workers. Reporters and researchers note that police are found to arrest women for prostitution-related offenses far more frequently than they arrest consumers and pimps. Police harassment and incarceration subject these women to further injustice, violence, and abuse due to their “criminal” records, and sex workers may be less willing to report abuses to the police for fear of arrest. These factors limiting sex workers’ human and labor rights protections, as well as sociocultural barriers, undermine opportunities for sex workers to survive inside their business.

To avoid the drawbacks of the criminalization approach, many activists have begun to advocate the semi-criminalization approach, also known as the “Swedish model” or “Nordic model.” The semi-criminalization approach recognizes sex workers as victims and redirects them to alternative employment in other sectors such as sewing, manufacturing, etc. NightLight, a local NGO, provides workshops to equip previous sex workers with skills to make handcrafted products for a living. Human Rights Watch describes this approach as the world’s first human rights-based policy approach to ending human trafficking. Many international organizations have adopted it by aiding victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation, promoting male youth awareness and education, and advocating for the revision of prostitution law to criminalize consumers.

However, the semi-criminalization approach does not necessarily improve sex workers’ livelihoods. While it primarily focuses on finances as the major incentive for sex workers, it still does not compensate workers for the financial disadvantages of leaving the sex trade, or help them find alternative sources of income. In addition, semi-criminalization’s focus on ending demand misguides the public to overlook its potential dangers. While it may reduce demand for sex services, it largely pushes the sex industry further underground. A switch of locations from brothels to clients’ or sex workers’ residences exposes sex workers to potential violence, abuse, and eviction. The harm can extend to single mothers losing custody of their children because of unhealthy environments. In summary, semi-criminalization provides financial alternatives, but it overlooks labor protections and results in other discrimination.

Public health and education is a peripheral approach to prevent the transmission of sexual diseases, such as providing condoms and regular HIV testing and establishing counseling programs for sex workers. Many local community-based NGOs, such as the Empower Foundation, operate free safe sex programs and aim to provide better education infrastructure for teenage girls in rural areas to prevent the generational cycle of entering the sex industry. Community initiatives include economic empowerment and social services that offer alternative training and vocation possibilities. Public health and education have limited contributions on their own, but add to the effectiveness of other options, especially decriminalization.

 

Decriminalization and Its Merits

Many activists, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), Amnesty International, and Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), advocate decriminalization as a long-term solution to improve the human and labor rights of sex workers.

From a labor recognition perspective, the ILO advocates for prostitution legalization and focuses on recognizing the economic and labor value of sex work, which accounts for an estimated 10% of tourism expenditures in Thailand. The concept of decent work involves fair income, workplace security, and the ability to organize. Its protocol is an initiative to a labor regulation approach under the Unacceptable Work Form (UWF) framework that tackles labor exploitation more effectively, according to Amnesty International.

From a law and justice perspective, Amnesty International argues that legal recognition affirms sex workers’ ability to claim consent and speak up against increasing danger and oppression, associate freely, and bargain collectively. Measures to combat violence and respect the decision to engage in the sex industry could help law enforcement identify nonconsensual sex-trafficking, and provide adequate protection for victims.

From a feminist and women’s rights perspective, AWID criticizes existing laws that delegitimize sex work, restrict the activities of women’s rights defenders, heavily stigmatize sex work, and further obstruct the progress of gender equality. By promoting social acceptance of sex work, decriminalization helps to ameliorate discrimination, improve formal worker protections, and mitigate development program scarcity.

By broadening access to justice, a stronger nondiscrimination framework should be subsequently introduced into the system. At the moment, the incomplete framework is largely supported by local NGOs who built infrastructures such as public health clinics or regional and international compliant mechanism of violations. The sex workers’ movement is a promising component coming into this framework to help the public better understand discrimination and exploitation inside of the industry.

Photo by juno mac on Flickr

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1 thought on “Empowering Thai Sex Workers: The Positive Effects of Decriminalizing Prostitution

  1. According to Wikipedia, “Georgetown is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher education in the United States.” As a Roman Catholic, I am disgusted and embarrassed this type of material is not only published, but has any association to a Catholic institution. This topic has nothing to do with justice; it is pure abasement and depravity. Have mercy on us, Lord.

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