Institute of Sociology

Agata Dziuban, PhD – a streetworker and translator as well as a sociologist – talks to us about sex work as a sociological topic. Her academic interests include contemporary transformations of individual identity, (transgressive) bodily practices, biopolitics and sex work.

Your research interests are somewhat unusual for a sociologist and anthropologist…

My academic work is focused on two issues. One is the HIV epidemic in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The increase in HIV infection in the last decade is almost 80%, so we can in fact talk about a pandemic in the region. In Russia alone it is said that over the last ten years the number of infections has increased by around 200%, despite the fact that nowadays – at least theoretically – everybody knows how to avoid infection, and treatment for HIV is available. I'm interested in why it is that this region is seeing such dynamic growth of the HIV epidemic, when for example in Western Europe it is under comparative control, condoms are widely available, and programmes for exchange of needles and syringes, substitution therapy etc. are in operation. Access to treatment in Western Europe is also at a fairly high level. It's reckoned that around 70-80% of the people who need it have access to antiretroviral drugs. In some countries of the former USSR the figure is just over 20%, so very low, and populations particularly vulnerable to HIV infection, that is sex workers or men having sex with men, also face difficulties accessing prophylactic programmes, methadone isn't legal (in Russia, for instance), and the epidemic is spreading ever faster. It's also significant that the HIV epidemic erupted in the region at the time of the transformations, the dramatic disintegration of society and the previous social structures. You could say that a standard anomic situation ensued, in which the old order had collapsed and a new one began to form, which is also rather chaotic, as shown by the political and economic situation in Russia, Ukraine and the countries of Central Asia. Many people in that region began to inject drugs. It's estimated that at present in Russia around 6 million people do so. The old structures disintegrated, the region underwent neoliberalisation, the state withdrew from many of its protective functions, the health service fell into ruin, and, importantly, many people live in extreme poverty. Owing to the difficult economic situation and lack of work, many people became involved in sex work, which operates in the informal sector, meaning that people providing sexual services are criminalised, and have no safeguards or access to any social benefits, for example healthcare etc. So what interests me is, on the one hand, the epidemiological situation in the region, and on the other the situation of sex workers.

And was it this context of the countries of the former USSR that sparked your interest in sex workers?

It's more complicated than that. In the last few years I've been working as a streetworker with people providing sexual services in Krakow. Work in the field, on the street, means that you see sex work in a slightly different light. Sex work often falls under the category of social pathology or deviation. In my case the experience of working in the field allowed me to look at it more from the perspective of the biographical experiences of people doing sex work, their social standing, the factors that led them to get involved in this work. I began to spot various problems and challenges faced by female sex workers because of the work they do. I mean for example the high level of stigmatisation and discrimination, social exclusion, violence or oppression. On the other hand, that kind of experience sensitises you to the dynamic of creating social policies to do with sex work – in what way the topic of sex work is dealt with, how the legal regulations on prostitutions are drawn up, how social workers and medical staff treat sex workers. This is all hugely significant for the quality and conditions of the work of people providing sexual services.

So your academic interest grew out of your social engagement?

Yes, my interest in the subject of sex work grew out of my experiences as a streetworker and activist on behalf of people providing sexual services. At a certain point these interests also took in the HIV epidemic. Working with people providing sexual services is to a greater extent associated with prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (for example we hand out condoms and educate on HIV/AIDS). As a result I started to be more interested in the problem of HIV/AIDS in the region. I realised that it is not so much a medical problem as rather a social and political one. I therefore decided to examine the topic through the lens of situations and experiences of the sex workers active there.

What you're talking about rather shatters our typical ideas of this subject. For instance, we're talking about sex workers, sex work, and not prostitution, for example. The language is changing. How does this approach to sex work differ from what the average person thinks of when they hear "prostitution"?

Prostitution has always caused a lot of controversy. If we look at how the discourse around sex work and prostitution is constructed historically, we see that since the Middle Ages it has had a very heavy ideological and moral load. Even then prostitutes, that is people providing sexual services, were treated as sinners, bad women, who perpetrated extramarital sex, harlotry, etc. On top of this there's the whole area of health. Very often people providing sexual services are perceived and presented as constituting a menace to public health and the well-being of society, as they are responsible for "spreading" various sexually transmitted diseases. Plus there is HIV/AIDS. Incidentally, at the time of the eruption of the epidemic in the Eighties, several countries considered subjecting sex workers, women, men and trans people, to obligatory HIV tests, isolation or quarantine. Along with men having sex with other men, they played the role of scapegoat on whom the responsibility for the rapid spread of the epidemic was laid. The discourse on sex work also includes many discourses concerning morality, femininity, masculinity, the level of autonomy and independence of women towards men etc. In various streams of feminism, for example, sex work is regarded as a form of patriarchal violence towards women, because they are treated as objects and reduced to their sexual attributes.

This idea of sex workers as victims seems to be a strong one, together with the connotation with human trafficking?

Yes, of course. I'd say that there are two dominant perspectives in operation, which, interestingly, are mostly focused on women. Men and trans people are practically invisible in the debates on sex work, which is a problem because as a result few prophylactic actions are aimed at them. So on the one hand there's a very clear discourse in which people providing sexual services are presented as deviants: corrupt, depraved and constituting a threat to public health. This is often reflected in the conceptualisation of sex work as a pathology or social problem. This discourse is very strong in Russia, for example, and also dominates in Poland. For example, if we look through textbooks on social problems, we'll certainly find prostitution there. On the other hand, increasingly popular in Europe is the discourse based on the victim model, based on the conviction that nobody able to take decisions independently would undertake this kind of work, as it denigrates human dignity etc. In this perspective it is assumed that dramatic life experiences, childhood trauma (e.g. linked to sexual molestation), pushed these people into prostitution. There is also, though much less often, the context of economic compulsion, difficult conditions, that leave the person with a small choice of means with which, say, to support their family. Frequently sex work is also presented as a form of gender violence, an expression of the domination of men over women and their objectification as sexual objects. Construction of sex workers as victims of violence perceived in this way is common in feminist discourses. This can be seen with the example of Sweden, where this understanding of sex work has been turned into legislation.

Sex work is illegal in Sweden?

It's more complicated than that. Selling sexual services isn't illegal, because we can't punish the victims – what has been criminalised is buying sexual services. So it's the "perpetrator" who's punished. Also everything surrounding sex work is illegal, such as pimping and procuration, more or less like in Poland. In addition in Sweden all forms of making financial gain from the sex work of another person are criminalised, which means that, for example, someone renting out a flat in which sex is sold can end up in prison. This leads to the mere suspicion that somebody is selling sexual services in a flat contributing to that person being thrown out of the flat. As I mentioned, this system is based on the conviction that prostitution is a form of gender violence of men towards women. The women selling sex are perceived as victims of male domination, and as a result it is the aggressors who should be punished, not the victims. This perspective, although at first glance seemingly to some extent well-founded, de facto to a large degree removes the subjectivity and agency of the people selling sexual services. It assumes that a self-aware person in a good biographical or economic situation would never make the decision to provide sexual services, so since they make this decision, they must be disturbed, self-destructive, or have a "false consciousness". This argument often appears in the public debate in Sweden.

How do the people involved in sex work react to this way of thinking?

The sex workers movement itself is struggling to break away from these two models of thinking about them, which are opposing but lead to similar consequences. The battle to redefine what sex work is began around the 1970s in the USA. The organisation Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) was founded, in which on the wave of the moral and sexual revolution women engaged in sex work began to fight to get rid of the stigma of the fallen woman, the depraved prostitute. They started to adopt the category of sex work, which is supposed to be less stigmatising and redirect our attention to the fact that this is a form of work – sexual, emotional or intimate – and not a social problem or deviation. Even today, sex workers around the world are demanding that sex work be recognised as work, whereas in most countries it still remains outside of the legitimised labour market. The Seventies in the USA and Europe was a groundbreaking, symbolic beginning of the movement for the rights of people providing sexual services, and the struggle for a change of attitude towards sex work that began then is still going on today.

In Poland we certainly haven't got past this duality of the discourse on sex work. The discourse of the victim is still strong here. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that there is a problem with sex work, e.g. in the context of human trafficking?

Of course that happens too. The debate on the phenomenon of human trafficking has been strong of late. And of course it's a very broad category. It takes place in various sectors of the economy: domestic and care work, fishing, agriculture.

It doesn't just concern the sex sector.

Yes, but attention is paid to sex work most of all. If we look at contemporary cinematography, we don't find many films about human trafficking in various sectors of the labour market, such as care for the elderly, agriculture or fishing, but there's a large number of films on human trafficking in sex work. This is quite problematic, and shows that in the public and media discourse sex work is very strongly identified with human trafficking. As a consequence, a person selling sex is very often perceived as a victim of domination and human trafficking. Abolitionist organisations – those that want to end prostitution – don't even try to define these two phenomena separately. But we should remember that sex work is a voluntary provision of sexual services in exchange for financial reward, while human trafficking is a form of violence and compulsion. Equating these two categories is very problematic and harmful for people providing sexual services, especially migrants. In Europe there are many attempts to implement legislation to prevent human trafficking, but which in fact hit sex workers. I mean the aforementioned Swedish model that criminalises the clients of sex workers and which has also been considered in France, Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland. The legislation introduced to prevent human trafficking has serious consequences for the safety and health of sex workers as well, as it drives the whole of sex work underground.

Criminalisation of the clients and working community doesn't seem to improve the situation of the workers themselves. Why is that?

As soon as the clients hide, the people providing sexual services have to adapt to the demands of the market and go underground themselves. As a result many people have to work in isolation and in hiding, which cuts them off from the informal support networks often formed by people working in the field (for example exchanging information on dangerous clients, hostile places etc.). The risk of arrest means that the contract between the person providing the service and the buyer is concluded in a hurry, so sex workers don't have the time to "scan" clients, determine whether they're sober, that they're not armed etc. Reports from Sweden and Norway also show that another result of criminalisation of sex work is that sex workers have greater fears, e.g. over reporting cases of violence that they experience etc. As a consequence this legal model causes increased risk to the people involved in sex work. This is also why for many years the sex workers movement has been against any forms of criminalisation of sex work, the workers themselves, clients or so-called "third parties" – that is the people who organise and facilitate sex work. The model that the people working in the sex business prefer is the so-called New Zealand model, based on recognising sex work as work and assuming its complete decriminalisation. In this model, implemented in New Zealand in 2003, sex work is "removed" from the penal code and becomes subject to the same regulations of civil, administrative and labour law as all other forms of work and employment. Many sex worker organisations also point out that reform of the laws concerning prostitution is not sufficient to improve the situation of the people providing sexual services. Actions geared towards changing society's attitude towards sex workers are also essential. Another issue is the struggle for social justice in the broadest terms, the protest over social inequalities and poverty. For many people sex work is an answer to a difficult economic situation, or indeed poverty. This is why many sex worker organisations highlight the need to implement a basic income, assure greater economic security for immigrants and refugees, and improve working conditions for women. They show how these changes can help people whose lack of economic alternatives makes them opt for sex work.

Interview by Anna Szwed