Survival Sex Work

Survival sex work is a term that appears self-explanatory as meaning sex for survival, but I have had to rethink its utility over the decades. In 1995, I began working as an outreach and advocacy worker with sex workers in Vancouver, British Columbia, at a charity called PACE Society. The organization’s mandate was to “eliminate the conditions that led to prostitution.” Around 2000, not only did the mandate shift to recognition of sex work as work, but we also tried to improve how we articulated the circumstances of diverse populations of sex workers. We had to communicate the plight of sex workers to politicians, policy actors, and funders to get support and investment while challenging stereotypes of sex workers as deviants, hapless victims, or worse, as responsible for their own victimization. Active and former sex workers within practitioner groups began using the term survival sex work as part of antipoverty activism and rights organizing. PACE Society worked with a variety of street-based sex workers on various strolls, segregated by pricing—high-track, mid-track (also known as “kiddy stroll”), and low-track—throughout the Greater Vancouver Regional District, along with off-street agency workers and independent sex workers. These populations shared numerous reasons why they did sex work, and most of their explanations fell into three categories: sex workers would say things like “I do this to survive” or that “it’s the only way to get money” for drugs, food, or rent. Others did not do sex work for survival but rather to pay for “the little extras” for their kids or themselves or to finance a car or education, and some did sex work to explore their sexuality.Our priority was to change conditions for those experiencing extreme poverty, housing insecurity, health issues, and drug dependency as well as racism, criminalization, and stigma. We chose to distinguish between sex work and survival sex work, defining sex work as “the exchange of services for remuneration, where parties consent and negotiate the details of the transaction,” to reflect the power and agency in the self-description of individuals who had access to more resources and who were able to exercise more control over their work, including the ability to turn away undesirable clients without causing too much financial hardship. We then defined survival sex work as “a state in which a sex worker consistently lacks the opportunity to refuse work” to better describe the persistence of constrained choices and the experience of being economically compelled to accommodate every client. We were aware of another definition from Sex Workers United Against Violence (SWAUV), a group of First Nations sex workers in Vancouver, which stated that “survival sex is something we do when we are trying to survive the conditions of criminalization, stigma, and discrimination.” For them, survival sex was a condition perpetuated by state policies and prejudice.During that time, rhetoric around sex work as violence escalated along with the conflation of sex work and trafficking. The term survival sex, instead of the full term survival sex work, gained popularity among other political actors, particularly NGOs whose views on prostitution policy differed significantly from our own. This was also the point when many of us started dropping the “work” from survival sex, for purposes of brevity. Our counterparts in sex worker organizations in Eastern Canada contacted us and expressed concern about our use of the term. They told us then that we should use the term forced labor instead of survival sex to refer to situations in which people do sex work to avoid destitution and hardship, so as not to divorce sex work done for survival from any other forms of forced labor.Now, as the CEO of National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a UK-wide charity that provides victim/survivor support services to adults in sex industries, I have continued to confront survival sex (work) as a troubling term. In 2018, I submitted oral and written evidence to the UK House of Commons’s “Public Inquiry into Universal Credit and ‘Survival Sex.’” The inquiry took place after sex-work-support and antipoverty groups publicly complained about harmful policies introduced under the program of “Universal Credit.” Among other things, the new government income-support structure delayed payments for up to five weeks, leading some applicants to enter sex work or return to it. The Home Office adopted the terminology of one antipoverty group, Changing Lives (aka The Cyrenians), who defined survival sex as when “women regularly exchange sex to meet survival needs, monetary or otherwise. Alternative currencies include somewhere to sleep, alcohol, drugs, food and tobacco.” The English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) rejected this definition: “We were objecting to [survival sex] becoming an institutionalized term by politicians that would somehow distinguish between the happy hookers and the poor victims, and therefore be a misrepresentation.”1 According to the ECP, survival sex is just sex work for basic needs, the same reason most other work is done. I agree. We do not affix the term survival to work in retail or any other industry, so why do it for sex work? Nonetheless, the Home Office adopted the Changing Lives definition during the inquiry, despite my own attempt to explain that survival sex was something experienced by sex industry workers prior to breaking even and paying for essential needs. It is a useful descriptor, but when co-opted it comes to define a population, rendering their “work” and the labor context invisible, as previously warned.In December 2023 Dame Diana Johnson, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee (HASC) on Trafficking, issued a report calling for the Home Office and law enforcement to refrain from using the term sex work, in addition to recommending the criminalization of adult services websites and the purchasing of sexual services, as part of the Home Office’s continued conflation of sex work, migration and trafficking.2 NUM issued a statement in response, highlighting the origin of the term sex work, coined by the late Carol Leigh (also known as Scarlot Harlot) in the 1970s, to reposition sex workers as part of the working classes.3 We vehemently rejected Dame Johnson’s recommendation to eliminate this term, its history, and its meaning, because we saw it as a way to control the discourse of how sex workers and others are allowed to speak about and describe their economic activity.I often reflect on definitions of survival sex work, the challenge mounted against it from Eastern Canadian sex workers some seventeen years ago, the more recent critique from the ECP, the co-optation of the term (particularly the dropping of “work” as part of it), and the political moves to disassociate survival sex from labor. They were right. In my own anti-violence work, I am repoliticized around the importance of language and discourse, history, legacy and activism. Ultimately, I am accountable to sex workers and choose to listen, learn with them, and build a world that respects their self-definitions, economic activity, and rights. The shortened term survival sex will not be a part of this future. Moreover, we will grandmother-out survival sex work altogether and use the term forced labor, as it was and still is the most appropriate descriptor.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.