They are a vulnerable population who often rely on sex work to support themselves and their families, but they face significant and frightening dangers of violence that are made worse by criminalization.
The study, carried out at the University of Bristol and released on October 30, found that sex workers defy stereotypes, and that sex work is a “complex and diverse” field. But a substantial proportion of people—mainly women and trans women—are selling sex "to get by financially,” according to a University of Bristol summary of the study.
The study found that sex workers in Britain are “individuals from a variety of walks of life taking part in a range of services, from street work to webcamming, for a wide number of reasons.”
But according to an Independent newspaper report on the study, the fiscal austerity measures imposed by the U.K. government under the Conservative party over at least the last decade have been a driving factor for women and trans women to enter sex work simply to earn a living wage.
“This report shows sex workers are largely women struggling to get by in very difficult circumstances and goes against the stereotype of the poor victim and the happy worker,” Niki Adams of the English Collective of Prostitutes, a sex worker advocacy group, told the paper. “A big proportion of women are single mothers. It is also a lot of women in their twenties.”
She said that cutbacks in government anti-poverty programs have left many women without access to money, though many also work in public sector jobs such as teaching or nursing.
The acts of selling and purchasing sexual services are legal in the U.K., but many sex work-related activities, such as “soliciting in a public place” remain outlawed.
The six-month study, which drew 1,180 responses, found that “female sex workers directly linked experiences of physical and sexual violence to laws which criminalize the practice in the U.K.,” according to The Independent.
The sex workers in the survey, in common with their counterparts in other countries, said that they rarely reported crimes against them to the police, due to fear that they themselves would be arrested.
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