A critical review of the criminalisation of sex work in South Africa : a comparative legal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this research is to critically examine the causes and consequences of the criminalisation of sex work between consenting adults in South Africa by means of a comparative approach. In order to achieve this objective, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, foreign- and international law were consulted. Sex work is criminalised in South Africa in terms of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 and the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act 32 of 2007. It is argued in this study that the criminalisation of sex work and sex workers unfairly discriminates against the sex work profession as other transactional sexual acts are deemed acceptable. It seems that the law is applied selectively and discretionary to the detriment of sex workers. The criminalisation of sex work infringes on the sex worker’s right to equality; dignity; freedom and security of a person; privacy; freedom to receive and pass information or ideas; freedom of trade, occupation, and trade; and fair labour practises. The issue of prostitution should not be dealt with on a moral basis, but on a human-rights basis. In order to test the impact of the criminalisation of sex work in South Africa, it was necessary to investigate comparable countries’ legislative approaches to the purchasing of sex, and their various models of prostitution. The laws and policies pertaining to prostitution in three common-law countries of similar legal background to South Africa, i.e. Canada, India and Great Britain (UK), were compared to the approach followed in South Africa. International instruments that impact on sex work were also examined, and a conceptual and historical analysis of sex work and the law undertaken. After researching the adequacy and implications of the criminalisation of sex work in South Africa and comparing sex work legislation and policies in comparable foreign jurisdictions, the research recommends that sex work be decriminalised, amongst other substantive suggestions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".