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Taking the Crime Out of Sex Work: New Zealand Sex Workers' Fight for Decriminalisation. Gillian Abel, Lisa Fitzgerald, and Catherine Healy, with Aline Taylor (Eds.) (2010) Bristol: Policy Press.
Taking the Crime out of Sex Work brings together the latest research on New Zealand's 2003 Prostitution Reform Act and provides a celebratory historical account of the law reform struggle. Pleasingly coherent for an edited collection, the book nevertheless allows individual authors their own voice, although it does not include any perspectives from the Act's opponents. The book comprises two parts, the first provides historical context to the campaign for decriminalization along with detailed information on that campaign and the different players involved. The second part reports on the impact and implementation of the Act, according to the findings of ?The Prostitution Law Review Committee established under part four of the Act, which in turn drew mostly upon research carried out by the Otago University's Christchurch School of Medicine and Victoria University's Crime and Justice Research Centre. This collection provides a comprehensive account of New Zealand's innovative approach to prostitution policy from the politicians, activists and experts involved in designing and monitoring the reform. It will interest those concerned with sex industry and sexuality politics as well as those who study social reform processes.
The New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act aimed to decriminalise prostitution by "the complete removal of the laws governing sex work and sex work-related offences" (p. 8). Decriminalization differs from legalization and regulation, which involve a specific set of laws designed to contain the sex industry within particular areas and monitor prostitutes. Gillian Abel and Lisa Fitzgerald, in their introduction to the book, argue that existing legalisation models typically disadvantage sex workers because the restrictive conditions under which they can legally work drives them into the illegal sector and unsafe situations. By contrast, the New Zealand Act concerned itself with the "human rights of sex workers and minimising the amount of harm incurred by their occupation" (p. 197). Decriminalisation means that brothels become subject to the same kind of regulation as other businesses.
Sex worker activists, academics and a politician provide a multidimensional picture of the reform campaign in the six chapters that constitute part one. Jan Jordan's chapter "Of Whalers, Diggers and...