Event: Launch of community research on sex work – Tues 5 Feb
Launch of new research:
“What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Job like This – a comparison between sex work and other jobs commonly done by women.”
by the English Collective of Prostitutes.
Hosted by Dawn Butler MP
Tuesday 5 February 2019, 6-8pm
Committee Room 5, Houses of Parliament
All welcome.
Speakers:
Niki Adams (ECP) & Sophia Hill (community worker) – on the method and findings of the research.
Jenny Pearl (ECP) & Sarah Brown (midwife) – on the comparison between sex work and other work commonly done by women.
Selma James (first ECP spokeswoman, author of Hookers in the House of the Lord in Sex, Race and Class: the Perspective of Winning) — on why sex work is ‘women’s work’.
“What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Job like This – a comparison between sex work and other jobs commonly done by women.”
Sex work is portrayed as uniquely exploitative, yet no comparison has been made between the wages, hours and working conditions in the sex industry and other jobs primarily done by women. Interviews with women workers from a wide range of occupations challenge commonly held assumptions about jobs and the women who do them.
The Home Affairs Select Committee in 2016/7 recommended the decriminalisation of sex workers on the street and in premises. It also recommended that “the Home Office commissions an in-depth research study to help develop a better understanding of the current extent and nature of prostitution in England and Wales, and to draw together and put in context any recent relevant research.”
This research is pertinent to both the crisis of criminalisation under the present legislation which has seen thousands of women arrested, raided and prosecuted, and the crisis of poverty, low wages, homelessness and destitution which drives women, particularly mothers, into prostitution to survive. We present it now so it can be incorporated into the body of evidence that will inform future prostitution law and policy.
English Collective of Prostitutes
Crossroads Women’s Centre
25 Wolsey Mews
London
NW5 2DX
Tel: 020 7482 2496
Fax: 020 7267 7297
prostitutescollective.net