You have full access to this open access chapter. Decriminalisation recognises sex work as work; it provides opportunities for promoting the health of sex workers and therefore goes a long way to addressing health and human rights inequities for this sector of the population. Although services for sex workers are available in many countries, they tend to focus on street-based sex workers, who are perceived as the most vulnerable and thus most in need.
A decriminalised context provides greater access to peer support Harcourt , which is much better positioned to address the complex needs of all sex workers. In this chapter, we discuss:.
How decriminalisation has enabled interagency collaboration when working with sex workers who have concerns about practices within certain brothels. We use the research literature from New Zealand and elsewhere to expand on the real-life stories of the engagement between New Zealand Prostitutes Collective and sex workers, agencies, and individuals to illustrate the three scenarios.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. Globally, sex work is regulated in very different ways. Repressive measures are used in some countries to criminalise sex workers or their activities or, in the case of other countries, to criminalise clients and other third parties. Then there are countries who either legalise or decriminalise sex work, and while these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there are clear differences between these two models of regulation.
Legalisation is a restrictive regulatory approach, which gives the State a means of controlling sex workers. Sex workers are able to work legally in licenced brothels, but should they work in unlicenced brothels, privately, or on the street, they are criminalised. This creates a two-tiered system. Full decriminalisation, on the other hand, encompasses the complete removal of the laws governing sex work and sex work-related offences, and the sex industry becomes subject to similar controls and regulations as those under which other businesses operate.
