Via Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex, a report out of New Zealand discusses one of the non-surprising benefits of their recent legalization of prostitution: increased leverage for prostitutes in relation to their customers.

After interviewing 772 sex workers, Otago University’s Gillian Abel found workers are more empowered to insist on safe sex and assert employment rights with both brothel operators and clients. Relationships with police have also improved.

‘When it was criminalised, the negotiations were much more covert to try and enforce condom use, whereas now they’ve got the law behind them. One sex worker in Christchurch has taken a client to court for removing a condom. ‘

Read the quote in context here.

One needn’t be enthusiastic about prostitution as a cultural institution to see this as a very, very positive outcome.

The power imbalance between typical workers on the one hand, and their customers, employers/agents, and law enforcement on the other is a huge, huge problem that’s further exacerbated by criminalization. In particular, independent of any social or philosophical problems one might have with sex work*, or legalization of it, and independent of any questions of whether sex work “empowers” those who do it, the blunt fact of legalization provides a tremendous lever that has traditionally been unavailable in negotiations with customers, employers such as pimps or escort agencies, and law-enforcement or other civil entities.

If you’re pro-sex-work it’s a positive development because it brings prostitution a lot closer to the level of enforceable civil and workplace law all other employed or self-employed worker have the right to receive — for instance the right to take legal action against a customer, employer, police officer, or passer by who attempts to rob, rape, rough them up… or even just refuse to leave on a condom. And if you’re anti-sex-trafficking it’s a positive development because it makes it far, far easier for coerced sex workers to come forward and, perhaps even more importantly, it gives sex workers themselves legal avenues for reporting when they become aware of other workers who are being coerced.**

In fact the only two kinds of people I think would be bothered by the direction of this change in the sex-worker status-quo would be people like pimps, cops, and johns who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to exploit them and… sex-work abolitionists who believe sex workers should have no autonomy and no rights because that gives them virtually unlimited power to “rescue” them. (Hmm… gee, see a pattern there?)

* And I do have problems with it. The biggest, by far, being the way sex work appears in terms of the no-sex class paradigm’s construction of heterosexual sex as perpetually scarce, inevitably transactional, and desire as necessarily disjoint (men want sex, women want something else) rather than matched. Consequently sex work for me is a symptom rather than a root cause, and therefore there’s zero benefit to society, and quite a bit of harm for workers and even customers, in opposing it in isolation.

** I’m actually curious whether law-enforcement and social-service groups where prostitution isn’t illegal ever recruit legal sex workers to help identify sex workers who really are coerced. To the extent sex workers are altruistic they’re likely to be as concerned about coercion as any other law-abiding citizen. And to the extent they’re no more altruistic than any other law-abiding citizen there’s still the fact that illegal or coerced workers undercut both safety and prices.