Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:35:24.638Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On the edges of the law: sex workers’ legal consciousness in England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2019

Eva Klambauer
Eva Klambauer*
Affiliation:
The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, London, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In England, sex workers are placed at the edges of the law. How the social and legal status of sex workers impacts on their perception of and interaction with the law in a semi-legal setting has not yet been explored. Drawing on fifty-two qualitative interviews with indoor and outdoor sex workers in England, this study investigates their disposition to the law, legality and the state. The commonalities and discrepancies between the experiences of indoor and outdoor sex workers reveal the influence of the combination of legal framework and social status on sex workers’ legal consciousness. This study finds that, even in a setting of semi-legality, sex workers attempt to avoid contact with state authorities. However, this aversion to the current law does not prevent them from making claims for legal change. Surprisingly, indoor and outdoor sex workers hold opposing views on the appropriate level of regulation and state involvement in the sex industry. Remarkably, although outdoor sex workers have more negative experiences with arbitrators of the law, they desire the law's protection. In contrast, indoor sex workers’ main grievance is for sex work to be a legitimate industry that can operate with only minimal state control. These differences in outdoor and indoor workers’ legal claims are explicable by sharp cleavages in social status, vulnerability and degree of criminalisation. These findings demonstrate that intra-group differences in the legal consciousness of marginalised groups are key to understanding the role of social and legal status in shaping legal claims.

Keywords

legal consciousnesssex workmarginalisationprostitution policy
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 15 , Special Issue 3: The Many Faces of ‘Style’ in Law and Legal Scholarship , September 2019 , pp. 327 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abel, G, Fitzgerald, L, Healy, C and Taylor, A (eds) (2010) Taking Crime Out of Sex Work: New Zealand Sex Workers’ Fight for Decriminalisation. Bristol: The Policy Press.Google Scholar
Abrego, LJ (2011) Legal consciousness of undocumented Latinos: fear and stigma as barriers to claims-making for first- and 1.5-generation immigrants: legal consciousness of undocumented Latinos. Law & Society Review 45, 337–370.Google Scholar
Boff, A (2012) Silence on Violence. GLA Conservatives. Available at http://glaconservatives.co.uk/silence-on-violence/ (accessed 15 March 2017).Google Scholar
Boittin, ML (2013) New perspectives from the oldest profession: abuse and the legal consciousness of sex workers in China. Law and Society Review 42, 245–278.Google Scholar
Campbell, R and Sanders, T (2014) Criminalisation, protection and rights: global tensions in the governance of commercial sex. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14, 535–548.Google Scholar
Cowan, D (2004) Legal consciousness: some observations. Modern Law Review 67, 928–958.Google Scholar
Crofts, P (2010) Brothels: outlaws or citizens? International Journal of Law in Context 6, 151–166.Google Scholar
Crowhurst, I, Outshoorn, J and Skilbrei, M-L (2012) Introduction: prostitution policies in Europe. Sexuality Research and Social Policy 12, 187–191.Google Scholar
Deering, KN et al. (2014) A systematic review of the correlates of violence against sex workers. American Journal of Public Health 104, e42–e54.Google Scholar
Ewick, P and Silbey, S (1992) Conformity, contestation, and resistance: an account of legal consciousness. New England Law Review 26, 731–749.Google Scholar
Ewick, P and Silbey, S (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories From Everyday Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Felstiner, WLF, Abel, RL and Sarat, A (1980) The emergence and transformation of disputes: naming, blaming, claiming …. Law & Society Review 15, 631–654.Google Scholar
Grubb, A and Turner, E (2012) Attribution of blame in rape cases: a review of the impact of rape myth acceptance, gender role conformity and substance use on victim blaming. Aggression and Violent Behavior 17, 443–452.Google Scholar
Harding, R (2011) Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives. Oxon: Routledge.Google Scholar
He, X (2005) Why do they not comply with the law? Illegality and semi-legality among rural-urban migrant entrepreneurs in Beijing. Law and Society Review 39, 527–562.Google Scholar
Hernández, D (2010) ‘I'm gonna call my lawyer’: shifting legal consciousness at the intersection of inequality. In Sarat, A (ed.), Special Issue Interdisciplinary Legal Studies: The Next Generation, Vol. 51. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Google Scholar
Hertogh, M (2004) A ‘European’ conception of legal consciousness: rediscovering Eugen Ehrlich. Journal of Law and Society 31, 457–481.Google Scholar
Hertogh, M (2014) ‘No justice, no peace!’: conceptualising legal alienation in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin case. In Nobles, R and Schiff, D (eds), Law, Society and Community: Socio-Legal Essays in Honour of Roger Cotterrell. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Hirsch, SF (2002) Feminist participatory research on legal consciousness. In Starr, J and Goodale, M (eds), Practicing Ethnography in Law. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.Google Scholar
Hubbard, P, Matthews, R and Scoular, J (2008) Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion. Gender, Place & Culture 15, 137–152.Google Scholar
Hull, KE (2016) Legal consciousness in marginalised groups: the case of LGBT people: legal consciousness in marginalised groups. Law & Social Inquiry 41, 551–572.Google Scholar
Kantola, J and Squires, J (2004) Discourses surrounding prostitution policies in the UK. The European Journal of Women's Studies 11, 77–101.Google Scholar
Kelly, P (2008) Lydia's Open Door: Inside Mexico's Most Modern Brothel. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kingston, S and Thomas, T (2015) The Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014: implications for sex workers and their clients. Policing and Society 5, 1–15.Google Scholar
Kinnell, H (2008) Violence and Sex Work in Britain. London: Willan Publishing.Google Scholar
Kirby, D (2016) Prostitutes should be free to work without fear of arrest in managed ‘red-light’ district, says campaigner, The Independent. Available at www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/prostitutes-should-be-free-to-work-without-fear-of-arrest-in-managed-red-light-districts-says-a6815011.html) (accessed 3 March 2017).Google Scholar
Klambauer, E (2017) Policing roulette: sex workers’ perception of encounters with police officers in the indoor and outdoor sector in England. Criminology & Criminal Justice 18, 255–272.Google Scholar
Kotiswaran, P (2014) Beyond the allures of criminalization: rethinking the regulation of sex work in India. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14, 565–579.Google Scholar
Kotiswaran, P (2007) Wives and whores: prospects for a feminist theory of redistribution. In Munro, V and Stychin, CF (eds), Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements. Oxon: Routledge-Cavendish.Google Scholar
Kubal, A (2013) Conceptualising semi-legality in migration research. Law & Society Review 47, 555–587.Google Scholar
Kubal, A (2014) Struggles against subjection: implications of criminalisation of migration for migrants’ everyday lives in Europe. Crime, Law and Social Change 62, 91–111.Google Scholar
Kubal, A (2015) Legal consciousness as a form of social remittance? Studying return migrants’ everyday practices of legality in Ukraine. Migration Studies 3, 68–88.Google Scholar
Lerman, AE and Weaver, V (2014) Staying out of sight? Concentrated policing and local political action. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651, 202–219.Google Scholar
Levine, K and Mellema, V (2001) Strategising the street: how law matters in the lives of women in the street-level drug economy. Law &Social Inquiry 26, 169–207.Google Scholar
Levy, J and Jakobsson, P (2014) Sweden's abolitionist discourse and law: effects on the dynamics of Swedish sex work and on the lives of Sweden's sex workers. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14, 593–607.Google Scholar
Lutnick, A and Cohan, D (2009) Criminalisation, legalisation or decriminalisation of sex work: what female sex workers say in San Francisco, USA. Reproductive Health Matters 17, 38–46.Google Scholar
Maher, L (2000) Sexed Work: Gender, Race and Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Majic, S (2014) Participation despite the odds: examining sex workers’ political engagement. New Political Science 36, 76–95.Google Scholar
Menjívar, C (2006) Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States. American Journal of Sociology 111, 999–1037.Google Scholar
Merry, SE (1990) Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans: Language and Legal Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Musheno, M (1995) Legal consciousness on the margins of society: struggles against stigmatisation in the AIDS crisis. Identities 2, 101–122.Google Scholar
Nelken, D (1984) Law in action or living law? Back to the beginning in sociology of law. Legal Studies 157, 157–174.Google Scholar
Nelken, D (2008) Eugen Ehrlich, living law, and plural legalities. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9, 443–471.Google Scholar
Outshoorn, J (2011) The politics of prostitution revisited: trends in policy analysis and research. In Jónasdóttir, AG, Bryson, V and Jones, KB (eds), Sexuality, Gender and Power. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pettiway, LE (1987) Participation in crime partnerships by female drug users: the effects of domestic arrangements, drug use, and criminal involvement. Criminology 25, 741–766.Google Scholar
Pitcher, J and Wijers, M (2014) The impact of different regulatory models on the labour conditions, safety and welfare of indoor-based sex workers. Criminology & Criminal Justice 14, 549–564.Google Scholar
Pound, R (1910) Law in books and law in action. American Law Review 44, 12–36.Google Scholar
Sagar, T (2007) Tackling on-street sex work: anti-social behaviour orders, sex workers and inclusive inter-agency initiatives. Criminology & Criminal Justice 7, 153–168.Google Scholar
Sagar, T (2009) Anti-social powers and the regulation of street sex work. Social Policy and Society 9, 101–109.Google Scholar
Sanders, T (2009) UK sex work policy: eyes wide shut to voluntary and indoor sex work. In Phoenix, J (ed.), Sex for Sale: Prostitution Policy Reform in the UK. Bristol: The Policy Press.Google Scholar
Sanders, T and Campbell, R (2007) Designing out vulnerability, building in respect: violence, safety and sex work policy. The British Journal of Sociology 58, 1–19.Google Scholar
Sanders, T and Campbell, R (2014) Criminalisation, protection and rights: global tensions in the governance of commercial sex. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14, 535–548.Google Scholar
Sarat, A (1990) ‘… The law is all over’: power, resistance and the legal consciousness of the welfare poor. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 2, 343–380.Google Scholar
Scoular, J (2010) What's law got to do with it? How and why law matters in the regulation of sex work. In Scoular, J and Sanders, T (eds), Regulating Sex/Work. Oxford: Wiley-Backwell.Google Scholar
Scoular, J and Carline, A (2014) A critical account of a ‘creeping neo-abolitionism’: regulating prostitution on England and Wales. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14, 608–626.Google Scholar
Seron, C and Munger, F (1996) Law and inequality: race, gender … and, of course, class. Annual Review of Sociology 22, 187–212.Google Scholar
Silbey, S (2005) After legal consciousness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 1, 323–368.Google Scholar
Van Doorninck, M and Campbell, R (2006) ‘Zoning’ street sex work: the way forward. In Campbell, R and O’Neill, M (eds), Sex Work Now. Cullompton: William Publishing.Google Scholar
Weitzer, RJ (2011) Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business. New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar