sex-work, stigma, Garda, legislation, decriminalization, resilience
“Working it” was a project funded by the Dormant Accounts, Department of Justice and Equality and the Anti Human Trafficking Department, 2018. It was from the application phase, a collaboration between GOSHH and Psychology at the University of Limerick. And the main aim was to answer 2 questions: To what extent do street sex workers in Ireland know the law and their rights? How do sex workers organize their working practices around the law?
We were funded to add a psychological perspective to understand and describe the lives and experiences of street sex workers, through their own eyes and words. Psychology allows one to identify Macro-level factors (true for all); Meso-level factors (negotiated in context with others) and Micro-level factors (different from person to person).
Two important clarifications. First, sex work in our research is not sex trafficking or sexual exploitation. Sex work, like sex, can only be consensual and voluntary. Any non-consensual sexual activity or intercourse should be defined as sexual assault or rape. The 2017 Criminal Law (Sexual Offences Act) officially criminalised the purchasing of sexual services, while seemingly decriminalised the selling of sex.
Secondly, our main focus here is with the people behind street sex work: how do people, who are human beings like everyone, deal with the stigma and shame of their job, with the paradoxes of the (Nordic Model) legislation, on the brink of poverty, in homelessness, struggling with addiction and yet also having to raised a family, maintaining a social life and having hopes for the future.