Alison Gerard

Privileging Work Not Sex: Flexibility and Employment in the Sexual Services Industry:

We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well-paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding worker decisions about sex work. Debates and regulation focus on gendered inequalities related to heterosexuality much more than they recognize gendered inequalities related to labour market conditions. The focus on criminalization, harm, exploitation and stigma obscures the centrality of work flexibility and conditions to womens decision-making. A more direct focus on the broader employment context may produce better recognition of why women do sex work.

Strategic in/visibility: Does agency make sex workers invisible?

This article examines the links between in/visibility, agency and mobility through the narratives of 55 predominantly indoor sex workers interviewed in Melbourne, Australia, where state government regulations permit some forms of sex work under a licensing framework. This article explores the tensions around the requirement for visibility in the regulation of sex work, the utility of ‘strategic’ invisibility in the lived realities of sex work and the discursive ‘invisibilizing’ of sex workers’ agency in anti-prostitution discourses. For the workers we interviewed, ‘strategic invisibility’ was an agentic strategy that prevented stigma and protected social, economic and geographical mobility within and outside the sex industry. In Melbourne, workers’ careful management of their ‘invisibility’ as sex workers contrasted with the state’s harm minimization framework that insists on sex workers’ visibility within healthcare and licensing systems. This article draws on empirical data to suggest that regulation through licensing can both alleviate and contribute to vulnerabilizing contexts of sex work, providing useful lessons to those considering a similar system of regulation.

‘I’m not getting out of bed!’ The criminalisation of young people in residential care

Evidence from both Australian and international jurisdictions show that children in residential care are over-represented in the criminal justice system. In the current study, we interviewed 46 professionals who had contact with young people in residential care settings in New South Wales, Australia. Our sample included police officers, residential care service providers, legal aid lawyers and juvenile justice workers, about their perceptions of the link between residential care and contact with the criminal justice system. Factors identified by the participants included the care environment itself, use of police as a behavioural management tool, deficient staff training and inadequate policies and funding to address the over-representation. These factors, combined with the legacy of Australia’s colonial past, were a particularly potent source of criminalisation for Aboriginal children in care.

Contesting Entrapment: Women Asylum Seekers in Hong Kong

This chapter draws on qualitative research with a diverse sample of female asylum seekers in Hong Kong to reveal the gendered consequences of entrapment and the politico-legal forces that influence women’s asylum seeking. The chapter outlines how women perceive their own legal categorization and how they manage the precarious livelihoods that ensue from ‘doing time’ in this global city. Complex structural economic, social and political factors influence the arrival of women asylum seekers in Hong Kong. These factors give rise to both dynamic and blurred legal categories that the government’s recently established ‘unified screening mechanism’ for all humanitarian protection claimants has sought to disentangle. Processes aimed at sorting women into palatable legal categories permeate the daily lives of asylum seekers and govern their interactions with government and non-government organizations alike. The chapter extends the analysis of entrapment to actors beyond police and state agencies by examining the role of non-government organizations, companionship and employment as dimensions in which entrapment and its resistance occurs, elucidating the varied contradictions that women’s resistance to entrapment may produce.

Entrapping Asylum Seekers: Introduction

Asylum seekers are immediately recognizable as a population that faces increasing levels of legal, social and economic precariousness, inherited from their home countries and exacerbated by widespread hostility in host or destination countries that feel anxious, if not outright threatened, by the risk asylum seekers are perceived to pose. This book conceptualizes the precarity endured by asylum seekers as entrapment, and seeks to identify the agents and processes that contribute to this cycle and produce the lived experience of immiseration that has been brought to bear on asylum seekers. This chapter introduces the conceptual framework that forms the genesis of this book evaluating the entrapment of asylum seekers. The case is made for a strident analysis of agency so that asylum seekers are not represented as passive victims. And yet this chapter reveals how asylum seeker responses to their environment may further their precarity and criminalization, reinforcing the policies, practices and discourses of the securitization of migration.