The past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the global sex industry. In the UK alone, the number of men paying for sex acts doubled in the s. Harms attendant to prostitution are framed as resulting from the failure of society and state to recognise prostitution as a job like any other, as opposed to an inherently harmful and exploitative transaction, and it is a claim that has influenced funding, policy, and legislative programmes around the world. Thank goodness, then, for Maddy Coy and the authors whose collected articles make up Prostitution, Harm and Gender Inequality.
In this hugely important work, the authors expose prostitution as a fundamental practice of gender inequality. It is shown to be both a cause and a consequence of unequal relations between women and men. Together the works blast through the fog of neoliberal rhetoric around individual choice and agency, and using evidence-based analysis place the harms inherent to prostitution centre-stage. Drawing on empirical evidence of women recruited into prostitution in the USA, Jody Raphael reveals how processes of coercion used to entrap such women constitute domestic trafficking, and yet a focus on transnational trafficking and the dominant narrative of individual choice and agency frequently renders such systematic exploitation invisible to policymakers.
The work challenges the oft-assumed distinction between free and forced prostitution, particularly in policy responses to trafficking. This is regardless of whether the setting is indoor or outdoor, legal or illegal.
The chapters here also put front and centre what is so often absent from discussions on prostitution: the male demand driving the industry and the pimps and prostitution business owners profiting from it. To start with, it is only a minority of men who pay for sex.
The issue of legal frameworks is picked up by Mary Lucille Sullivan and Josefina Erikson in their contrasting accounts of policy responses to prostitution. Demand for prostitution has increased, accompanied by a large expansion of both the legal and illegal brothel trade.
