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

* Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]

1 Introduction

Sex workers in England are placed at the edges of the law. Selling sex is not illegal in England, yet street-based sex workers’ activities are criminalised by laws targeting persistent¹ soliciting and loitering² and indoor sex workers can only work fully legally if they work indoors and alone from premises they own.³ This study finds that every other way of working in the sex industry is criminalised or restricted. Furthermore, the laws are often not enforced, misused or enforced arbitrarily, leading to inconsistencies and gaps between the statutory law and the ‘law in action’ (Pound, 1910; Nelken, 1984). Many street-based sex workers are charged not only with soliciting, but with other offences, including anti-social behaviour (Sagar, 2009). Indoor sex workers are afraid of being charged with brothel-keeping laws intended against exploitative third parties. In the eyes of the law and the police, sex workers are not legitimate workers in England. This semi-legal state has a profound impact on sex workers’ working practices and, as a result, their safety (Klambauer, 2017; Pitcher and Wijers, 2014; Sanders and Campbell, 2014). The complex legal framework in England, in which sex work is neither fully legal nor illegal, provides insights into how those at the margins of the law relate to legality.

Sex workers in England move in and out of legal, illegal and legally ambiguous spaces. Hence, in order to understand how the law impacts on sex workers in England, it is necessary to go beyond the legal–illegal dichotomy (Scoular, 2010). The notion of semi-legality (He, 2005; Kubal, 2013; 2014) accurately describes the legal limbo of English sex workers. Semi-legality covers a wide spectrum of ‘interactions with law, demonstrating that the divide between legal and “illegal” is not a strict dichotomy, but rather a tiered and multifaceted relationship with degrees of membership’ (Kubal, 2013, p. 567). The law determines ‘who stands inside or outside the law (or in between)’ and whether subjects qualify as ‘full participants in society’ with ‘access to resources’ (Menjívar, 2006, p. 1002). Confinement within this spectrum of semi-legality marginalises and excludes sex workers from society and legal protections.

This paper presents the first study of the legal consciousness of sex workers who do not...