Barbara Sullivan

When (Some) Prostitution is Legal: The Impact of Law Reform on Sex Work in Australia

In Australia, prostitution regulation has taken a very different path from many other countries. Law reform has led to the opening of some significant new spaces for legal sex work, including the (very different) regulatory regimes established in two Australian states – Queensland (brothels legal if their owners are licensed) and New South Wales (most commercial sex businesses and some street prostitution decriminalized; no licensing regime). The main research question is: how has regulation impacted on the positive rights of sex workers? I argue that law reform has engaged a mix of neo-liberal and other approaches – not to increase personal or corporate freedom but as part of a practical strategy designed to control a range of social problems, such as police corruption and organized crime. Neo-liberal regulation of prostitution in Australia has always been deployed in tandem with other modes of regulation – including new criminal law and policing strategies, planning law, health regulations, and (of course) moral regulation.

Rape, Prostitution and Consent:

Abstract Sex workers are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. However, until recently, there were significant barriers to the prosecution of those who raped sex workers. Prostitutes were seen as ‘commonly’ available to men, as always consenting to sex and thus as incapable of being raped. This article examines 51 judgments — from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand — where evidence of prostitution was presented between 1829 and 2004. It demonstrates an important change in the 1980s and 1990s when, for the first time, men began to be prosecuted and convicted for raping sex workers.This change was partly due to rape law reform, but also to feminist activism and broader changes in social attitudes to rape. The article argues that sex workers have recently been ‘re-made’ in law as women vulnerable to rape, as individuals able to give and withhold sexual consent. This development needs to be taken seriously so that law and policy addressed to the sex industry works to enlarge (not reduce or constrain) the making of prostitutes as subjects with consensual capacity. This necessarily involves attention to more legal rights for prostitutes, as workers, and calls into question the conceptualisation of prostitution as always involving rape.

Working in the Sex Industry in Australia: The Reorganisation of Sex Work in Queensland in the Wake of Law Reform

ABSTRACT Sex work is a highly gendered form of labour performed mostly by women. This article explores the impact of recent law reform—particularly the introduction of brothel licensing—on workers in the sex industry in Queensland. It argues that these reforms have enabled improvements in working conditions for some sex workers. However, these improvements are not unequivocal, and law reform has impacted negatively on other workers in the prostitution industry. A comparison with New South Wales (NSW), where there is no brothel licensing and where a partial decriminalisation of prostitution has occurred, draws attention to a number of key issues. While the regulatory regime in NSW is far from ideal, it does offer some better conditions and opportunities for workers. In light of this finding, it is argued that Queensland should change its approach to the governance of prostitution.

The Business of Sex: Australian Government and the Sex Industry

The expansion of the sex industry over the last three decades has been met by a range of political strategies and responses. This paper examines some of the concerns that have been taken up by Aus tralian parliaments in relation to the trade in both pornography and prostitution. It identifies several important discursive shifts in the postwar period around the figure of the prostitute, the client of prostitution services and the consumer of pornography. While the consumption of pornography has increasingly been regarded by Australian parliaments as a private and legitimate activity for adults, the prostitution industry has become the object of a new patholog ising discourse. For the first time in Australian culture, both pros titutes and their clients have been located as sexually problematic. Since the early 1960s, therefore, the prostitution trade, unlike the pornography trade, has become subject to increasing legal surveil lance and criminalisation. Some of the implications and conse quences of these trends are examined within the broad context of sexual politics in Australian society and government.