Sex Worker Rights and Human Rights: A Double-Edged Sword : Rights, Resistance and Mobilisations

Since the 1970s sex workers across Europe have begun to organise and demand human rights and labour rights with the slogan ‘sex workers rights are human rights’. However, fed by the dominant anti-trafficking discourse, sex workers’ human rights are under attack by an increasingly influential coalition of abolitionist organisations, radical feminists, conservative Christians and left wing liberals. Both the anti-prostitution and the sex worker rights movement draw on human rights arguments. While abolitionists claim that sex work is a violation of human dignity, sex workers invoke the right to self-determination and personal and bodily autonomy. In this thesis I explore these tensions in the use of human rights, and show how human rights can be both a tool of empowerment and a tool of repression. Through in-depth interviews with sex worker rights activists and analysis of litigation and court cases, I explore how sex worker organisations mobilise human rights to address violence against sex workers, resist their dehumanisation as victims or deviants, build alliances, challenge repressive laws and policies, and advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work as a precondition for the protection of their human rights. Conversely, while the sex worker movement builds on an emancipatory and labour-based perspective on sex work, the abolitionist movement moves sex work back into the realm of (female) victimhood and crime, with a focus on repression and control rather than empowerment. Focusing on the cases of Germany, France and Spain, I also show how through the gateway of human dignity and female victimhood the anti-sex work movement uses human rights to create a hierarchy of ‘human-ness’ and to call for the further criminalisation of sex work while relieving states of their accountability for the protection of sex workers’ human rights. In this way, human rights are turned into a double-edged sword.