The Decriminalisation of Sex Workers
Catherine Stephens, an activist with the International Union of Sex Workers is also a member of the GMB trades union’s branch for people who work in the sex industry. She loves her job and came to tell Royal Holloway students why the stigma around what she does should be diminished, as part of the SU’s SHAG week. However, I question if Stephens has really grasped the enormities of what she does and advocates.
One in twenty students go into sex work in the UK to pay for fees, and being close to London we are in proximity of the diversity and mass policing that such an industry involves. Since 1999 it has been estimated that there are 80,000 people in the UK working in the sex industry. Stephens argues that the government’s definition of what constitutes sex work is too broad and contends...