OpenDemocracy: Outdated laws and benefit cuts – Why women can’t leave sex work
Poverty and cautions trap women in sex work – good policies could resolve this. But politicians don’t want to know
There are a few dates in the calendar that sex workers mark. The day to end violence on 17 December is often a sombre affair, when we honour the sex workers who were murdered over the last year. But International Whores Day, on 2 June, is when we come together to celebrate survival and resistance.
This year, we, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), took our celebrations – and our protests – to Downing Street to demand the abolition of “prostitute’s cautions”. Eighty organisations, including Amnesty International UK and Liberty, signed an open letter to the home secretary supporting this action.
Prostitute’s cautions stem from the Street Offences Act 1959. Police are supposed to issue one when they have “reasonable cause” to believe that someone is loitering or soliciting. In practice, these can be given without warning and on the faintest of pretexts. I attended one court proceeding where the only evidence presented was that the woman was “standing on a street corner looking in the direction of several men.” Once, the ECP successfully had a caution removed from a woman’s record because the police did not even bother to record what evidence they had based it on.
Prostitute’s cautions must end because they are wrecking people’s lives. Thousands of women in the UK have received them since they were introduced. In the London Borough of Redbridge, 639 were issued between 2013 and 2015 alone. There is no right of appeal, and a caution remains on a person’s record until they are 100 years old.
Getting a caution can result in sex workers losing custody of their children, prevent them from securing jobs in other industries, cause them to be denied compensation or insurance, and even lead to deportation or travel bans. A number of women interviewed for our report Proceed Without Caution said they had hesitated to report rape and other violence because they had cautions on their records. They assumed these would lead to disbelief and hostility. Others described how employers had used their record of cautions to trap them into low waged work, as both sides knew they couldn’t easily leave and find another job.
The bottom line is that prostitute’s cautions directly undermine what many people in government say they want: namely fewer women in sex work. They, and other government policies like them, instead trap women into the sex industry by making it much harder for them to do anything else.
Poverty is the root
“At the age of 25, seven years into the industry, I tried to leave,” said one woman who spoke to us anonymously. “I had three kids to feed and looked for a job in an office, but they did a DBS check and the cautions and convictions came up. So I didn’t get the job. I had to carry on with prostitution.”
Such stories are easy to find, and the effects of criminalisation are compounded for sex workers who are migrants, trans, women of colour, street workers and working class. If politicians are serious about wanting to reduce prostitution, addressing the negative effects of cautions would be a good place to start.
Hundreds of women have told us they had little choice – they couldn’t survive doing other jobs, and the benefits system was failing them
Most sex workers are mothers working to support their families. Jenny Pearl, a member of the ECP who worked on the street for decades, told the Public Bill Committee of the Policing and Crime Bill in February 2009 that she and many other women she’d met did sex work “purely to keep their families together”, and to keep their children out of care. She said in her testimony that, “They go out for an hour and make enough money to pay a bill.”
Austerity cuts and benefits-slashing policies have disproportionately harmed women, especially single mothers. Research shows that policies like the two-child benefit cap are increasing child poverty, but children don’t exist in a vacuum. Children are poor because their mothers are poor.
In 2018, the UN Rapporteur on poverty called austerity a “political choice” that specifically targets women. In 2019, a Work and Pensions Committee inquiry also acknowledged that benefits sanctions and delays to Universal Credit were pushing women into “survival sex”.
Since then, hundreds of women have reached out to ECP for support whilst starting or returning to sex work. They said they had little choice – they couldn’t survive doing other jobs, and the benefits system was failing them.
If they are unlucky enough to get a caution in the course of trying to make it to another day, they will find it much harder to exit the business later on.
No good alternatives
Claims that sex work is ‘degrading’ is often used when justifying crackdowns on prostitution. But sex work is not the only industry which degrades women. As Nickie Roberts, an author and former sex worker, put it:
Working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most degrading and exploitative work I ever did… Why should I have to put up with a middle-class feminist asking me why I didn’t ‘scrub toilets’ instead of becoming a stripper? What’s so liberating about cleaning up other people’s shit?
Is it because the industry is based on sex that critics feel free to indulge their repressive tendencies? Does it attract particular condemnation because sex workers are effectively illegal workers, and less able to publicly defend their right to survive?
Many people stay in sex work not because they lack the will to exit, but because they don’t have any realistic alternatives. In 2019, when we conducted research for our report ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a job like this’, we found that the jobs available to women are often low paid with exploitative and even dangerous working conditions.
Mothers face particular discrimination, including a lack of consideration for their caregiving responsibilities. One woman told us she tried taking a bar job because she wanted to stop sex work. But the late hours, low pay and lack of flexibility for childcare responsibilities, on top of transphobia and sexual harassment, all pushed her back into it.
Nearly 20% of UK working women earn below the Living Wage, and women are 50% more likely to be low paid than men. Women are also more likely to be on exploitative, zero hours contracts than men. One migrant woman in the ECP shared that she tried jobs in bars, shops, and care homes, only to be harassed, underpaid, or sacked unfairly. Eventually she turned to sex work because she judged it to be her least exploitative option.
Degradation can also come directly from the state. Asylum seekers forced to survive on £49.16 a week, and immigrant women made destitute by ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’, often have little choice but to engage in sex work in order to survive.
Politicians offering more pain, not solutions
The Crime and Policing Bill 2025, currently in the House of Lords, could have been an opportunity to address the harm caused by the criminalisation of sex work. And, tantalisingly, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi put forward an amendment to repeal the offence of “loitering and soliciting for the purpose of prostitution”. This would have effectively ended the use of prostitute’s cautions by police.
Unfortunately, she coupled the repeal with measures to criminalise people who associate with sex workers, including clients, and to close down the platforms that sex workers depend on to advertise. These would have isolated sex workers further and made exiting the industry harder. Luckily, the amendments didn’t pass.
This isn’t an isolated incident. For decades there have been repeated attempts to increase the criminalisation of sex work via the criminalisation of clients. This is known as the Nordic model or the end-demand model. It is sold as a method of reducing sex work that does not punish women, but it is despised by sex workers because of the many ways it makes us more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Criminalising clients increases the danger and stigma of sex work
Let me try to summarise what sex workers have been put through in the last decade and a half. In 2009, Labour MPs including ministers, such as Hariet Harman, Jacqui Smith, Caroline Flint, Vera Baird and Fiona Mactaggart, helped instigate a moral panic around “sex trafficking”, which was then used as justification criminalising sex workers’ clients. They peddled misinformation to back up their arguments. Statements like“80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker” were quickly shown to be baseless, yet these officials continued to spout these false claims.
One year later, the government introduced a strict liability offence for paying for sex with someone “controlled for another’s gain.” This meant that buyers could be prosecuted even if they didn’t know the person was controlled. The English Collective of Prostitutes spearheaded a campaign against this and managed to narrow the clause, resulting in a final text that penalises only people paying for sex with someone “subjected to force, deception or threats”, rather than people “controlled for gain”. The offence has rarely been used since. But the fallacy that the majority of sex workers are trafficked has endured.
Mactaggart tried again in 2014 to criminalise clients as part of the Modern Slavery Bill. We again fought back, and found that we had many allies on our side. As we wrote in 2016: “Hundreds of individuals and organisations responded to our plea and lobbied MPs to oppose the amendment. Hampshire Women’s Institute, Women Against Rape and the Royal College of Nursing were three notable groups that lent their name to the campaign.”
Sex workers made it clear that criminalising clients increases the danger and stigma of sex work. They explained how existing kerb-crawling legislation robbed them of the time to check out clients, negotiate what services they would provide, forced them to work in more isolated areas, and caused them to work harder and take more risks to make the same money. As one put it:
To avoid the police, clients drive by and signal to follow them into a side street. As soon as I get to the car, I have to jump in. You get no chance to see who it is that is driving, I can’t really see his face, or check if he is drunk. I have to just hurry up and get in before the police come.
Within a few weeks the amendment had dropped without a vote.
The issue fizzled under the surface for a number of years, occasionally coming back up for debate. In 2016, the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce argued for a sex buyer law. Labour MP Sarah Champion did the same in 2018. In 2020, there was another call to crackdown on the platforms where sex workers advertise, led by Labour MP Diana Johnson.
In 2024, a new take on the issued emerged. Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham at the time, tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which proposed to redefine “prostitution for gain” as “sexual exploitation of an adult”. This sparked immediate outrage from sex workers, who reject being categorised as victims of exploitation regardless of how we name our own experience. We warned that this would criminalise as an exploiter anyone who associates with a sex worker. Prosecutions would undoubtably have increased.
The amendment fell, but the term “commercial sexual exploitation” has entered common parlance among organisations funded for VAWG (violence against women and girls) work. It is within the realm of possibility that this is because Jess Phillips, now minister for safeguarding and violence against women, holds the purse strings for some of the £157 million VAWG budget.
Now we have the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, where Antoniazzi’s (failed) amendments again attacked sex workers by characterising us as victims of exploitation in order to justify greater police powers and more repression.
Prostitution rates would fall off a cliff if every woman in this country had financial independence
All these attempts to criminalise clients have had the same end goal: to end prostitution through the back door. Why are MPs, many of whom are self-described feminists, so hell bent on shutting down one of the last remaining options that many women have for making a living? And why, if the objective is to reduce prostitution, don’t they focus on strengthening women’s hands and giving us more choices?
Ending women’s poverty, low benefits, disability discrimination, housing insecurity, lack of recognition for care responsibilities, and pay inequality – this is where the focus needs to be. We, the English Collective of Prostitutes, guarantee that prostitution rates would fall off a cliff if every woman in this country had financial independence and security. But making the work more dangerous while not even attempting to address these causal factors will only get more women hurt.
Antoniazzi made no mention of any of these issues when discussing her amendments. She also did not oppose the recent cuts to disability benefits in the heavily-criticised welfare bill, which is expected to push thousands more people into poverty.
It is horrifying to us that Labour women like Antoniazzi have cultivated a reputation as gender equality warriors, campaigning on established feminist issues like abortion and putting the “priority of the woman up front and centre”, yet go against the most basic feminist principle – that policies should be informed by the women most impacted by them.
Why not listen to sex workers about what decriminalisation would mean to us? Safety First Wales, a coalition demanding decriminalisation and resources to improve sex workers’ safety, has publicly criticised her position on sex work to no avail. Instead she and others label all prostitution as violence and support increasing police powers against women working in the sex industry, making our lives harder and more dangerous. That’s not feminism. That’s not a solution.
What real support to exit looks like
Effective campaigns to help women leave prostitution have, very occasionally, been put into action.
After a spate of brutal murders targeting women selling sex in Ipswich, a programme was set up to support sex workers. Around £7000 was spent on “a personalised management plan” for each woman over a year in an effort funded by the local council, charities and the NHS. Approximately 130 women were able to leave prostitution for a period of time. “We got weekly cash payments and some women got help with debts,” said one woman who participated in the initiative. “I was able to stop working for a while.”
Unfortunately, the success of this project was credited to a police crackdown on kerb-crawlers rather than to meeting sex workers’ needs. The strategy of focussing resources at sex workers has not been repeated to our knowledge.
Politicians wring their hands about the horrors of sex work, but their own policies push women into prostitution and trap them there
One exciting development that could serve as a model for other places is the Guaranteed Care Income Pilot in San Francisco, which supported ten single mothers (including undocumented mothers) over the course of 2023. The project was set up by our sister organisation US PROStitutes Collective, as part of its In Defense of Prostitute Women’s Safety Project.
The women, who were all “at risk of incarceration or having their children taken by child welfare”, received $2,000 (about £1500) a month for a year. This wasn’t enough to live on by itself, but it helped participants exit extreme poverty. By the end of the year, the women reported better health and an improved ability to care for their children. Crucially, they also reported that they’d had no need to do anything illegal, including sex work.
Considering how effective programmes like this have been in helping women to exit sex work, why can’t a similar scheme be rolled out here in the UK? Real support not only works, but it’s cheaper than punishment!
‘It’s money that’ll help us leave’
The discrimination faced by sex workers can make it harder to leave.
Take housing. Even with a reasonable income, safe and affordable housing can still remain out of reach for sex workers. Without proof of income or employment, many sex workers can’t rent legally. Some rental agreements also explicitly prohibit “immoral activity”, which can be used to evict tenants. Mothers are especially fearful of complaining to the authorities, in case social services take their children. With Support not Separation, which campaigns to stop children being taken from their mothers, we have fought to prevent this. In other cases we have campaigned against rogue landlords, trying to take advantage of sex workers’ situation by charging above market rates.
Speaking to the sex workers’ support organisation National Ugly Mugs in 2022, one woman said her high rent was the main barrier to leaving sex work. “What do I need to leave sex work? Housing, housing, housing. I can’t leave because my rent is so high. The landlord knows I’m not English and asks me for a bigger deposit and more rent,” she said. “He made me an offer – sex with him for a rent reduction, but I can’t do that as it will never end. He’ll want more and more.”
Accessing bank accounts is another hurdle. Even though exchanging sex for money is legal in the UK, sex workers are frequently ‘debanked’ – meaning their accounts are frozen or closed without explanation. More than 80% of members in the Sex Workers Union report experiencing financial discrimination, which includes practices such as having accounts frozen, denied, or closed because of their work. As sex work increasingly moves online and as society becomes more cashless, financial exclusion puts sex workers at greater risk of theft, violence, and exploitation.
It is no longer acceptable for politicians to wring their hands about the horrors of sex work when their own policies – from cautions to benefit cuts – are pushing women into prostitution and trapping them there. The evidence has been plain for a long time: ending women’s poverty must be the priority.
As one sex working mum put it: “It isn’t the person, it’s the society that’s the problem. I get a bill and if I can’t pay it, I get a bigger bill. It is money that will help us leave. That truth should be obvious to anyone who cares to listen.”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/outdated-laws-and-benefit-cuts-why-women-cant-leave-sex-work-decriminalisation/