What Sex Workers Think About Victimhood, Violence, and Exploitation. Insights From a Collaborative Study Prioritizing Sex Workers' Voices
Abstract
After two years of parliamentary debates, France adopted a new law on prostitution in 2016. A number of sex workers’ rights groups, community-based health organizations, and health NGOs, opposed to the criminalization of clients, organized their advocacy, and decided to document the impact of the law from the perspective of the sex workers themselves. As social researchers, we were involved in the collaborative evaluation project. The main objective of the study was to assess the impact on sex workers’ living and working conditions, but the interviewees also often expressed their opinions on the law and on prostitution. Based on ethnographic data, this chapter highlights how sex workers reacted to the ways the 2016 Act defines violence and assigned them the status of victims, and how this Act can be seen as a source of violence toward sex workers.