Globalisation and Sex Work:

Deepening Risks and Increasing Social Action

Abstract

The law regulating and often criminalising commercial sex aims simultaneously to provide “healthy adult entertainment” and to protect social morals and “women and children” who are supposed to reside within these morals. Such laws are based on the infamous double-standard which not only divides men and women but divides women into “bad” and “good” along the line of whether they are involved in commercial sex or not. Sex workers, as “bad” women, are thus not situated as workers by the law, but subjected to either social exclusion or rehabilitation. This paper critically examines these issues and, through focusing on the widening social divisions and insecurity caused by globalisation, further demonstrates that class and ethnic biases have also been encapsulated within the law's sexual double-standard. It also points out that the same double-standard is at work in recent anti-trafficking measures, nationally and internationally, and inevitably relates migrant sex workers to trafficking and views them as either victims or criminals, then disempower and ostracise them. Based on outreach work conducted with a sex worker support group, this paper emphasises that more stringent policing on the sex industry in keeping with anti-trafficking measures is making sex workers as a whole more vulnerable. It further suggests that it is necessary to employ sex workers' experiences and agency as a foundation for understanding the sex industry, instead of this double-standard, in order to change the law and its influence on society to truly ease the harm to vulnerable sex workers. This also means learning from the sex workers' rights movement which is being spread by globalisation as well.