13: Rape and Sex Work

Posted on | July 25, 2009 | No Comments

It’s pretty much impossible to find accurate statistics on the rate of rape among sex workers. That’s both because sex workers are a hugely diverse group and not particularly easy to survey, but also because many people doing the surveys have an anti-sex work ideology that cause many sex workers to question the methodology and results.

But while the idea that all sex workers are rape victims is false, it is pretty safe to say that sex workers are victimized at a highly disproportionate rate to other women.  This is especially true for women who work in prostitution (as opposed to stripping, phone sex work, porn, etc.), and even more so for those who work on the streets.  And of course, a woman who is a trafficking victim cannot consent to sex and is being raped every time she “works.”  (It’s worth noting here that while the vast majority of sex workers are women, some men are sex workers, too, and also victimized.)

And what places these women at extra risk is the way that they are pushed to the margins.

We all know that rape victims are rather unlikely to report their assaults to the police, for a variety of reasons, including the fear that they won’t be believed.  Sex workers face that fear compounded many times over.  And even worse, if they were raped while working, they face the fear of being arrested if the work they do is illegal.

Sex workers are also blamed for their own rapes at an incredible frequency, and in uniquely appalling ways.  There’s this idea that a woman who engages in prostitution cannot be harmed by non-consensual sex — which is really just an extension of the “well she wasn’t a virgin” excuse.  Sex workers are also blamed for “placing themselves in a position” where they were more likely to be raped — an extension of “why was she wearing that skirt?”  In a recent study done in England and Wales, only 52% of respondents said that a woman who is raped while engaging in prostitution should never be blamed for the rape.  Victim-blaming, of course, is even more likely when the woman faces multiple oppressions, such as if she is a woman of color, and/or transgender.

A particularly famous and appalling example of the ways in which sex workers are routinely construed as unable to be raped is the case of Philadelphia’s Judge Deni, who ruled that a woman who was gang-raped at gun point after agreeing to have sex with a single man for money was not actually raped.  Instead, Judge Deni called this a theft of services.  She decided that the only crime was that the victim was not paid, rather than that her bodily autonomy had been grossly and violently violated.  She decided that because the victim was a sex worker, her body and rights had no value.

For more on sex workers and sexual violence, and talking about the issue without treating sex workers and their experiences as a monolith, I recommend checking out this post by Jill over at the Sex Workers Outreach Project East.

Comments