P.G. Macioti

In this article we will discuss the first Coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown and its immediate aftermath on the lives of migrant sex workers living and working in France, drawing on original interviews gathered between May and July 2020. Since 2016 in France, sex workers have worked under the so-called Swedish model legal framework criminalising the demand of sexual services. This has meant that sex workers, both migrant and non-migrant, have had to find various strategies to continue working within a criminalised environment      infringing upon their rights and safety. Research in the French context has largely shown that the introduction of the Swedish model increased the financial precarity and impacted in significant, detrimental ways the physical and mental health of sex workers (Le Bail & Giametta 2018). In the context of the existing hardship to which migrant sex workers were exposed under this repressive regime in France, this article investigates if and how the law enforcement and emergency measures around the Covid-19 crisis aggravated their already precarious living conditions. Our analysis here demonstrates that both institutional racism (e.g., government policies and law enforcement targeting racialized migrants) and interpersonal stigmatisation (e.g., poor treatment and stereotyping by clients and civil society) must be combated to reduce the discrimination against migrant sex workers that is amplified in times of crisis.

This article draws on the findings of the research project Sexual Humanitarianism: Migration, Sex Work, and Trafficking (SEXHUM), a study investigating migration, sex work, and human trafficking in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the US. In this article, we focus on how racialized categories are mobilized in antitrafficking practices in France. Since April 2016, the French government has enforced a prohibitionist and neo-abolitionist law criminalizing the demand for sexual services. This coincided with the targeting of Chinese and Nigerian cis-women and with the neglect of Latina trans women working in the sex industry according to racialized and sex-gendered understandings of victimhood. Whereas Chinese women tend to be presented by humanitarian rhetoric as silent victims of Chinese maledominated mafias, Nigerian women have come to embody the ultimate figure of the victim of trafficking by an overpowering Black male criminality. Meanwhile, (sexual) humanitarian actors have neglected Latina trans women's ongoing experiences of extreme violence and marginalization.

"Sex Work and Mental Health. Access to Mental Health Services for People Who Sell Sex in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and UK" is the final report of a OSF funded participatory research project based at Hydra e.V.. SWMH conducted 118 in depth interviews with sex workers with mental health needs from diverse sex work sectors, of diverse gender, sexuality, residence status and ethnicities in the four countries. The research found that stigma and judgemental attitudes by practitioners were experienced as greatly influencing both sex workers’ mental health and their access to support. Sweden was the site where stigma was most felt as the primary cause of distress and where it bore the highest weight in preventing sex workers from accessing mental health support. Ultimately, SWMH identified stigma as the greatest, most specific barrier for sex workers to enjoy good mental health and access good quality mental health support.
SWMH data in Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK found that, in order to start addressing sex work stigma in society, full sex work decriminalisation is a necessary first step. Whilst criminalisation exacerbates prejudice and stigma against sex workers and defines them according to strict and misleading victimisation categories, decriminalisation sends the clear message that sex work is work. It also acknowledges that sex workers comprise an extremely diverse population with diverse needs including the fundamental right to access unbiased, non-judgemental health support and be free from discrimination on the basis of their work.

Globally, sex workers have highlighted the harms that accompany anti-prostitution efforts advanced via anti-trafficking policy, and there is a growing body of social science research that has emerged documenting how anti-trafficking efforts contribute to carceral and sexual humanitarian interventions. Yet mounting evidence on the harms of anti-trafficking policies has done little to quell the passage of more laws, including policies aimed at stopping sexual exploitation facilitated by technology. The 2018 passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the corresponding Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), is a case study in how efforts to curb sexual exploitation online actually heighten vulnerabilities for the people they purport to protect. Drawing on 34 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 58) and key informants (n = 20) in New York and Los Angeles, we analyze FOSTA/SESTA and its harmful effects as a launchpad to more broadly explore how technology, criminalization, shifting governance arrangements, and conservative moralities cohere to exacerbate sex workers’ vulnerability.

The article presents the findings of the SEXHUM project studying the impact of the different policies targeting migrant sex workers in Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United States. It draws on the concept of sexual humanitarianism, referring to how neoliberal constructions of vulnerability associated with sexual behaviour are implicated in humanitarian forms of support and control of migrant populations. Based on over three years of fieldwork we examine the differential ways in which Asian cis women and Latina trans women are constructed and targeted as vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse, or not, in relation to racialized and cis-centric sexual humanitarian canons of victimhood. Through our comparative analysis we expose how the implication of sexual humanitarian rhetoric in increasingly extreme bordering policies and interventions on migrant sex workers impacts on their lives and rights, arguing for the urgent need for social reform informed by the experiences of these groups.

This is the final SEXHUM POLICY REPORT providing policy recommendation drawing on our research findings in Australia, France, New Zealand and the United States.

For more information on the SEXHUM project: www.sexhum.org

Our research findings strongly suggest that:

Decriminalization and labour rights
● The repeal of all repressive laws that criminalize both the sale and purchase of sexual services is the most appropriate and least harmful policymaking framework for sex work.
● The decriminalization of sex work should be accompanied by anti-discrimination measures and socio-economic resources supporting the access of sex workers, including migrants, to healthcare, housing, employment, education, financial and insurance services, parenthood rights and other key dimensions of social life.
● A work permit with sex work authorization should be available to migrants working in the sex industry. This should not mention sex work or ‘adult entertainment’ in order to avoid further stigmatization and victimization of migrants.

Anti-trafficking Policies and Interventions
● Anti-trafficking interventions should separate themselves from anti migration and anti sex work law enforcement if they want to reduce the vulnerability to exploitation of the people they aim to support.
● Access to protection and support for victims of trafficking should not be conditional to collaboration with law enforcement or to the possible prosecution of their traffickers.
● Any policy and social intervention on sex work and trafficking can only have a chance of succeeding if it also includes prospective and actual migrants’ legal right to access the international and national labour markets.
 
Social Interventions
● Sexual humanitarian, anti-migration, and anti-sex work initiatives and interventions are harmful to the lives and rights of migrant sex workers. As such they should be defunded and the resulting resources diverted to sex worker rights associations and other organizations supporting them.
● Sex worker rights organizations and communities should be consulted before any new policies and interventions targeting sex workers are designed and implemented. Their feedback and reactions should be taken into consideration, including not proceeding with such policies and interventions.
● Peer-to-peer (migrant) sex worker community support networks, organisations and outreach projects should be specifically funded and promoted to continue providing a range of free in-language services and community spaces.

Stigma, Discrimination and Abuse
● Sex workers should be able to benefit from mainstream and targeted assistance and protection measures in the context of domestic violence.
● Police who commit violence, harassment or other crimes against sex workers must be held accountable for their abusive acts.
● Since sex workers are part of different minority groups, policies addressing sex work must effectively address all structural discriminations framing it such as sexism, racism, and transphobia.
● The voices of groups representing marginalized sex workers, such as transgender sex workers, sex workers of colour, or immigrant sex workers, should be elevated.

More details about project findings and their policymaking implications are available in the specific country sections of the report.

Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South
Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and individual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context
by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking; interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit; and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offender, as well as definitions of slavery, are racialised, gendered, and sexualised and rely on the victims’ subjective accounts of bounded exploitation. By documenting these and other limitations involved in a criminal justice approach, the authors reveal its shortfalls. For instance,
while harsh sentences are meant as a deterrence to others, the complex and structural roots of migrant labour exploitation remain unaffected. This research finds that improved legal migration pathways, the decriminalisation of the sex industry, and improved access to information and support for migrant sex workers are key to reducing heavier forms of labour exploitation, including human trafficking in the Australian sex industry.

Transgender (hereafter: trans) people are rarely included in human trafficking research. This empirical study presents narratives of trans individuals who report experiences consistent with the Palermo Protocol’s definition of traffick- ing, access to anti-trafficking services for trans individuals, and attitudes of anti- trafficking advocates and law enforcement toward trans people. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted for 30 months between March 2017 and August 2019 in Los Angeles and New York City included in-depth interviews with sex workers and trafficked persons (n = 50), of whom 26 were trans, and key informants (n = 17) from law enforcement and social services. Most trans participants who reported exploitation did not self-identify as victims of trafficking nor were they identified by police or anti-trafficking organizations as victims. Law enfor- cement gatekeeping was identified by anti-trafficking advocates as a barrier to meeting the needs of trans clients because they were viewed as “less exploi- table” than cisgender women. Discriminatory law enforcement practices resulted in the exclusion and hyper-criminalization of trans migrants and people of color who were profiled not only by gender, but also race/ethnicity and immigration status.

System-involvement resulting from anti-trafficking interventions and the criminalization of sex work and migration results in negative health impacts on sex workers, migrants, and people with trafficking experiences. Due to their stigmatized status, sex workers and people with trafficking experiences often struggle to access affordable, unbiased, and supportive health care. This paper will use thematic analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with 50 migrant sex workers and trafficked persons, as well as 20 key informants from legal and social services, in New York and Los Angeles. It will highlight the work of trans-specific and sex worker-led initiatives that are internally addressing gaps in health care and the negative health consequences that result from sexual humanitarian anti-trafficking interventions that include policing, arrest, court-involvement, court-mandated social services, incarceration, and immigration detention. Our analysis focuses on the impact of the criminalization on sex workers and their experiences with sexual humanitarian efforts intended to protect and control them. We argue that these grassroots community-based efforts are a survival-oriented reaction to the harms of criminalization and a response to vulnerabilities left unattended by mainstream sexual humanitarian approaches to protection and service provision that frame sex work itself as the problem. Peer-to-peer interventions such as these create solidarity and resiliency within marginalized communities, which act as protective buffers against institutionalized systemic violence and the resulting negative health outcomes. Our results suggest that broader public health support and funding for community-led health initiatives are needed to reduce barriers to health care resulting from stigma, criminalization, and ineffective anti-trafficking and humanitarian efforts. We conclude that the decriminalization of sex work and the reform of institutional practices in the US are urgently needed to reduce the overall negative health outcomes of system-involvement.

This briefing paper is based on a scoping literature review of existing research on mental health and sex work. It is part of a wider Wellcome Trust Seed Award project, which aims to understand how occupational health and safety differs between sex workers and other professions which are established as 'risky' because of the elevated prevalence of violence in the workplace and poor mental health. This document is directed to practitioners and service providers who work with sex workers and to researchers in the fields of sex work and mental health. Whilst this synthesis is by no mean exhaustive, it intends to: • introduce the main discourses and frameworks of analysis on sex work and mental health • identify the main factors that influence sex workers' mental well being • recommend best practice and policies to improve sex workers' mental health • suggest new directions for practice-oriented research on sex work and mental health Methods We conducted a literature search in six academic databases (Ovid Medline, Psych Info, Web of Science, Embase, CINAHL Plus, Global Health) and Google Scholar for quantitative and qualitative studies related to mental health and sex work. We also searched grey literature, documents written by sex workers, NGO and government reports. Aiming to critically address dominant discourses, we scoped all relevant literature, regardless of its methodological or ethical flaws. We also included research on mental health and trafficking into the sex industry, to contextualise the sex work literature and because the definition of trafficking is often unclear and/or not clearly differentiated from sex work in research. We anticipated that labour exploitation and coercion along with the overlap between trafficking and sex work would be highly influential on mental health. Overall, we retrieved 160 documents. We conducted similar literature searches to identify research on nursing and police as comparator 'risky' professions. Research approaches We identified three main approaches to mental health and sex work in the research literature:

Drawing on participant methodologies this article examines two cases of workers' self-organised projects oriented to improving the quality of sex work and to 'professionalisation'. The first case is a group of sexual assistants for people with disabilities, who have organised meetings and training for sexual assistants in a medium-sized city in Switzerland. The second is a group of peer sex worker educators offering workshops to people who sell sex in various industry sectors in a large German city. We argue that these activist interventions may represent a resource for identifying crucial aspects of work-quality and professionalisation in sex work and for making sense of some apparent contradictions of sex workers' organising. Indeed, through ongoing conversations and recommendations about working practices and ethics, our participants develop situated views of what is better sex work and they originally engage with key conceptual areas, such as consent, autonomy, standardisation, income and professional identity. They do so by comparing a variety of experiences in sex industries, as well as discussing similarities with other jobs such as body work, care work, and psychotherapy.