On sex work decriminalization, carceral feminism, and who gets to decide.
By Monique Johnson
Watch what happens when you introduce the word decriminalization at a dinner party.
You say the word, and you watch the table rearrange itself. Someone suddenly becomes deeply interested in their wine. Someone else puts on their Thinking About Feminism face—the one that mimics concern but functions like a closing door. And inevitably, at least one person will say, very carefully, that they "support sex workers, but just think the industry itself is the problem."
That sentence is doing a massive amount of heavy lifting. It is also completely incoherent. Yet, it moves through polite, progressive conversation unexamined, primarily because the people saying it are rarely the people it affects.
I am not here to write a dry policy explainer; there are white papers for that. My goal is to cut through the suffocating layer of abstraction that floats over every mainstream conversation on this topic. It is this abstraction that allows politicians and pundits to claim they care about sex workers while actively endorsing the legal conditions that get them killed. I want to get to what is actually being argued about.
If you look closely, the debate isn't about safety. It is about control. It is about who gets to have an unmediated relationship with their own body and labor.
Photo credit: @chiquilovelovelove by @hxxdz
The Noise: Four Frameworks, One Solution
There are roughly four policy frameworks that dominate global debate: full criminalization, the Nordic (or "end-demand") model, legalization, and decriminalization. Mainstream conversations lazily collapse these into two camps—"ban it" versus "allow it"—which flattens material distinctions that matter enormously in practice.
Here is what the actual policy landscape looks like:
1. Full Criminalization: The Moral Panic
This model is largely indefensible on harm-reduction grounds and is almost exclusively defended on moral ones. It penalizes everyone involved. I will leave it there, because anyone still making this argument in good faith is working from a puritanical premise about human bodies that no amount of empirical evidence will dislodge.
2. The Nordic Model: The Compassionate Illusion
This is where things get interesting, because it aggressively positions itself as the compassionate middle ground. Originating in Sweden in 1999 and since adopted by France, Ireland, and Canada, this framework criminalizes the buyer of sex while nominally "decriminalizing" the seller. The logic dictates that sex workers are inherent victims of demand, and punishing clients is a more enlightened approach than punishing everyone. It has become the preferred position of a certain strain of carceral feminism.
However, the data is damning. Sex worker-led organizations, human rights groups, and public health researchers have been universally consistent: the Nordic Model does not make sex workers safer. * It displaces work: To protect their clients from arrest, workers are forced into isolated, poorly lit areas, stripping away their ability to screen clients safely.
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It weaponizes police: Police often still use the possession of condoms as "evidence" of sex work, discouraging safe sex practices.
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It creates structural barriers: Under this model, third parties (like a landlord renting to a sex worker, or a roommate) can be charged with "living off the earnings of prostitution," leading to routine evictions and forced homelessness.
UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all landed on the same conclusion: The Nordic Model improves the moral self-image of the state. It destroys the material conditions of the people it claims to protect.
3. Legalization: The Bureaucratic Trap
Operating in places like Nevada, Germany, and the Netherlands, legalization regulates sex work through heavy state licensing, strict zoning, and mandatory health registries. In theory, it formalizes and protects. In practice, it creates a rigid two-tiered system.
You have a small group of licensed workers operating within a narrow, heavily taxed, state-sanctioned framework. Meanwhile, the vast majority—particularly undocumented workers, trans women, and workers of color who cannot clear the bureaucratic hurdles—are pushed into a larger, unlicensed sector that becomes even more heavily policed. It hands the state enormous power to define which bodies and which practices are permissible.
4. Decriminalization: The Labor Rights Approach
This is the model fully implemented in New Zealand via the 2003 Prostitution Reform Act (PRA). It is the framework supported by virtually every major sex worker rights organization globally.
Decriminalization simply removes criminal penalties for all parties without imposing an exceptional regulatory framework designed specifically to corral the industry. Sex workers are granted the same baseline labor protections, occupational health and safety standards, and legal recourse as any other independent contractor.
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They can report violence to the police without fear of arrest.
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They can legally work together in pairs or groups for safety (which under other models is criminalized as "brothel-keeping").
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They can refuse clients at any time for any reason.
New Zealand’s two decades of data provide the most honest evidence base we have. The government's 2008 Prostitution Law Review Committee found that the law did not increase the number of people in sex work, thoroughly debunking the trafficking-expansion myth. Instead, over 60% of workers reported feeling more empowered to refuse clients, and workers demonstrated vastly improved confidence in accessing police protection. It is not a utopia. But it treats sex workers, legally, as human beings.
3. Legalization: The Bureaucratic Trap
Operating in places like Nevada, Germany, and the Netherlands, legalization regulates sex work through heavy state licensing, strict zoning, and mandatory health registries. In theory, it formalizes and protects. In practice, it creates a rigid two-tiered system.
You have a small group of licensed workers operating within a narrow, heavily taxed, state-sanctioned framework. Meanwhile, the vast majority—particularly undocumented workers, trans women, and workers of color who cannot clear the bureaucratic hurdles—are pushed into a larger, unlicensed sector that becomes even more heavily policed. It hands the state enormous power to define which bodies and which practices are permissible.
4. Decriminalization: The Labor Rights Approach
This is the model fully implemented in New Zealand via the 2003 Prostitution Reform Act (PRA). It is the framework supported by virtually every major sex worker rights organization globally.
Decriminalization simply removes criminal penalties for all parties without imposing an exceptional regulatory framework designed specifically to corral the industry. Sex workers are granted the same baseline labor protections, occupational health and safety standards, and legal recourse as any other independent contractor.
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They can report violence to the police without fear of arrest.
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They can legally work together in pairs or groups for safety (which under other models is criminalized as "brothel-keeping").
-
They can refuse clients at any time for any reason.
New Zealand’s two decades of data provide the most honest evidence base we have. The government's 2008 Prostitution Law Review Committee found that the law did not increase the number of people in sex work, thoroughly debunking the trafficking-expansion myth. Instead, over 60% of workers reported feeling more empowered to refuse clients, and workers demonstrated vastly improved confidence in accessing police protection. It is not a utopia. But it treats sex workers, legally, as human beings.
Photo credit: @chiquilovelovelove by @hxxdz
The Feminist Question
Let’s stay with the Nordic Model for a moment, because its ideological home is worth dissecting.
The abolitionist feminist position—championed historically by figures like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and carried forward by groups like the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW)—holds that prostitution is inherently coercive. The argument is that no woman freely chooses it, and that any "choice" is merely a product of structural forces that have foreclosed better options.
There is a kernel of something real here. Structural coercion is real. Poverty is real. Not everyone in sex work would be there absent the capitalist conditions that pushed them into it.
But the policy conclusion drawn by abolitionists—that the appropriate response is to criminalize demand and forcibly collapse the industry—does not follow the premise. The people in the industry are still there, living in the meantime, trying to survive in conditions actively worsened by policies designed in their name. The theoretical liberation at the end of the abolitionist road requires dragging actual, living women through immediate physical harm to get there.
Furthermore, the underlying logic—she cannot really consent, she is a victim of false consciousness, we must protect her from her own choices—has a deeply regressive history. It is the exact same paternalism applied to women in factory work in the 19th century, to women seeking contraception, and to women in domestic service. The belief that marginalized women cannot be trusted to know their own interests, and that affluent external actors must legislate their bodies for them, is not a radical feminist position. It is a patriarchal one, dressed in progressive language.
The abolitionists and the sex worker rights movement are not disagreeing about facts. They are disagreeing about the protagonist. In one story, the sex worker is a tragic victim whose only narrative function is to be rescued. In the other, she is a resilient agent navigating material realities, making economic decisions that deserve the exact same legal protections as a bartender or a massage therapist. Only one of these frameworks was built by the people it describes.
FOSTA-SESTA: The American Case Study
If you want to know what happens when carceral feminism meets conservative morality politics, look at the United States in 2018.
Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA (the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act), amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to hold digital platforms liable for any content that could be construed as facilitating sex trafficking.
The stated goal was to combat trafficking. The actual effect was immediate, catastrophic, and entirely predictable. Platforms that sex workers used to independently screen clients, advertise safely, and share "bad date" lists went dark overnight. Craigslist's personals vanished. Backpage was seized by the DOJ.
The digital infrastructure of a harm-reduction ecosystem that took decades to build was vaporized in weeks.
Sex worker organizations screamed that this would happen. They predicted the exact consequences: a forced return to street-based work, the absolute loss of client screening, increased reliance on exploitative third-party managers (pimps), and a spike in violence.
The data followed swiftly. A 2019 study documented a severe spike in violence against street-based sex workers following FOSTA-SESTA. By 2021, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report acknowledging that the legislation had failed to produce any meaningful increase in trafficking prosecutions.
It did not stop traffickers. It simply concentrated immense harm into the bodies of the people it claimed to protect. This is what happens when policy is drafted by politicians and celebrities, for a marginalized workforce, entirely without their input.
What Is Actually Being Argued
I keep coming back to this fundamental truth: Every framework for managing sex work, other than decriminalization, involves someone other than the sex worker having final authority over the conditions of her labor.
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Under legalization, it is the State.
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Under the Nordic model, it is the Police.
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Under abolitionist feminism, it is the Academic.
Full decriminalization is viewed as threatening not because the evidence against it is compelling—it isn't—but because it entirely removes that external authority. It treats safety as a labor rights issue rather than a morality issue. It refuses to make a worker's physical protection conditional on her exiting the industry.
When sex worker-led organizations—SWOP, COYOTE, the sex worker mutual aid networks, and the global umbrella of the NSWP—speak, they are not ambiguous. They demand:
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Full decriminalization.
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Comprehensive labor rights.
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An end to the dangerous legal conflation of consensual sex work with human trafficking.
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Centering the people most at risk in the design of their own legal protections.
The fact that this consensus—backed by decades of lived experience and global public health data—keeps being treated as just "one position among many" tells you everything you need to know about who society views as fully human.
The Knowledge That Doesn't Get Counted
Here is something I know from having done this work: the skill set is enormous, and it is entirely invisible to the outside world.
It is reading a room in real-time. It is knowing within thirty seconds of a conversation whether a man feels safe or if the baseline tension is wrong. It is building a persona that is genuinely warm while remaining structurally fortified. It is managing someone else's emotional state, regulating their physical entitlement, negotiating terms explicitly without rupturing the fantasy, and knowing exactly when and how to exit a room.
None of this shows up in economic analyses. It does not appear in the sweeping policy literature penned by politicians. It shows up only in the oral histories, the peer-education zines, and the testimonies that workers produce when given the microphone—which is never often enough, and rarely in the rooms where the laws are written.
The case for decriminalization is made most clearly, most urgently, and most completely by the people who have the most to lose from the wrong answer. The consistent refusal to treat their knowledge as data, as expertise, as the thing most worth listening to, is not a coincidence. It is a feature of a culture that is vastly more comfortable debating what to do with sex workers than it is sitting down and listening to them.
That is the thing that needs to change before any of the policy does. Because policy frameworks are always downstream of who we allow to be the expert on their own life.