The sex workers’ rights movement, com­prised of diverse international and local grassroots campaigns, was launched in the early 1970s and has grown to include hun­dreds of thousands of sex workers and other activists, joined by allies such as health and social services providers, academics, femi­nists, attorneys, and human rights’ advo­cates around the world.

The principles of this movement are root­ed in a respect for self-definition and recog­nition of sex work as work. The sex workers’ rights movement also acknowledges diversi­ty of experiences, beliefs and circumstances of those who sell, trade, and survive through transactional sex. While some are “prosti­tuted people” or victims of trafficking, many others identify as sex workers, porn actors/models, hustlers, healers, body workers, erotic service providers, or simply individu­als who have engaged in sex for some pur­pose or exchange.

A fundamental principle of the movement is the recognition of sex workers’ human, civil and labor rights. The International Committee for the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe invokes “the right to freedom from slavery, forced labor and servitude” as well as a range of protections of prostitutes’ in­dependence, health and safety based on in­ternational law.

Laws that criminalize sex workers’ busi­nesses, clients (and even grown children and domestic partners) drive sex workers under­ground, exacerbate the danger and stigma, and limit protection against violence and discrimination. As a symbol of sexual op­pression, the sex worker is an easy scapegoat, on the receiving end of a backlash express­ing social anxiety about new sexual mores.

Most prostitution laws around the world have been based on abolitionist strategies that criminalize most aspects of prostitu­tion. Even when sex work is legal, advertis­ing, soliciting and maintaining a location to conduct business are usually illegal. Con­temporary prostitution abolitionists now call for the additional criminalization of clients. These campaigns purport to support decriminalization of prostitutes as well, but have been applied only where prostitution is legal for both parties. The result is an in­crease in the criminalization of commercial sex, and not the decriminalization of sex workers. As numerous reports have indicat­ed, these laws make sex work more danger­ous and isolating for sex workers.

Some anti-trafficking policies conflate trafficking with prostitution, increasing the arrest of sex workers and limiting women’s rights to travel. Sex workers around the world organize to protest laws influenced by these ideologies because rather than assist­ing sex workers, they only make them more vulnerable.

Despite current repressive trends, the sex workers’ rights movement has grown expo­nentially over the last decade with 65,000 sex workers organizing in West Bengal, doz­ens of organizations around the world and in the U.S. including SWOP-USA with chap­ters in many states. While engaged in an uphill struggle in a hostile political climate, the movement has been on the forefront of harm reduction and other human rights work. Sex worker activists have consulted on United Nations policy projects and advised local and national governments. During the recent United Nation’s Universal Periodic Review process, the U.S. acknowledged the prolific adverse effects of discrimination against sex workers.

Emerging from centuries when sexual health and pleasure were forbidden subjects, the discourse about prostitution is unso­phisticated and based on a puritanical un­derstanding of sex that is out of sync with changes in sexual mores. Anti-prostitution groups portray and define prostitution as “inherently oppressive.” This defini­tion of prostitution is extremely reductive and omits the realities of our diverse and complex experiences. Anti-prostitution discourse reproduces and relies on many misconceptions about the sex worker rights movement, maintaining that “pro-prostitu­tion” advocates claim prostitution is just like any job, or that it is always empowering.

Is sex work “empowering?” The empow­erment discourse itself invokes class-based assumptions. An individual can earn money for survival, rent, food, etc. One may or may not value the experience of sex work in other ways, but it’s a mixed bag when the cost of choosing to labor in a sexual economy is to lose one’s legal status and one’s safety and often live a double life. Despite these odds, I have known many courageous sex work­ers who are proud to have survived or even thrived.

Is prostitution a dangerous and predatory institution? As an institution within our current patriarchy, conditions in prostitu­tion reflect gender inequities in our societies. As an institution within our current racist and predatory capitalist system, those who survive through sex trade are subjected to the forces of those systems as in other work. This is compounded by criminalization and stigmatization.

Is decriminalization the solution to all the obstacles faced by sex workers? Clearly decriminalization of prostitution is not the complete solution to centuries of stigma, to current criminalization, nor to the econom­ic values that lead to poverty - discrimina­tion and exploitation. Decriminalization of commercial sex and anti-discrimination strategies lays the groundwork to support conditions that would allow us to organize and address these challenges. The solution to the problems and inequities of prostitu­tion is the same as the solution to problems of society in general, that is, promotion of social and economic justice, democracy, hu­man rights and peace on earth. As our allies at Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee in West Bengal remind us “Only Rights Can Stop the Wrongs.”