Ana Lopes, PhD, President of Britain’s General Union (GMB) Sex Workers Branch. “Stigmatising Sex Workers”. Mar. 2006 – “Sex work is legitimate work and problems within the industry are not inherent in the work itself. It is vulnerability, not sex work, which creates victims. Sex workers should enjoy the same labour rights as other workers and the same human rights as other people. Sex workers can only gain the same rights as other workers when the debate is moved from a moral framework and placed in the framework of labour rights.”[1]
Teela Sanders, DPhil, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Crime and Deviance at the University of Leeds. “Blinded by Morality? Prostitution Policy in the UK”. Capital and Class. Summer 2005 – “There appears to be a legitimate place for commercial sex in conservative and religious parts of Europe–in Turkey, Portugal, Italy, for instance…
With the underlying assumption that women do not choose to work in prostitution but only use it as a ‘survival strategy,’ only the extreme ends of coercive prostitution are described…
This one dimensional approach reflects a wider political hypocrisy that accepts and promotes the idea that some parts of a woman’s sexuality can be legitimately used as employment, while other aspects are labelled as an immoral or inappropriate use of the body…
[I]t is accepted and encouraged that femininity should be expressed in a certain way…Sex work is not considered a service industry, because the idea of sexual services is viewed through a different lens due to the inherent Christian, middle-class morals attached to the act of sex, as something that is only rightly expressed in heterosexual, monogamous, reproductive relationships.”
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