“It’s a Business Doing Pleasure with You”: A Case for the Decriminalization of Sex Work in South Africa

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2016
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Haverford College. Department of Economics
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This work centralizes a ubiquitous yet often ignored sector of global society: sex work. Situated in the criminalized context of the South African sex work market, my work attempts to predict how the welfare of sex workers might change in a decriminalized climate. Under a criminalized state, sex workers remain one of the South Africa’s most marginalized and targeted populations. Those who participate in the trade run the highest risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and are susceptible to much community and state-based stigma and violence. The motivations for this research, then, are to understand the ways in which opposing legal models affect a globally vulnerable population. There are two notable case studies (New South Wales and New Zealand) that present evidence to oppose criminalization policy from a rights-based perspective. This work furthers such research by approaching the question of sex work and (de)criminalization with economic assessments and applications. My work attempts to estimate three measurements of security and safety for sex workers – condom use and accessibility, symptoms of STIs, and experiences with violence – when moving from criminalization policies to decriminalization policies. My findings demonstrate that place of work has tremendous effects on all of measurements of sex worker welfare. Working outdoors decreased the likelihood of condom use by 4.91 percentage points and the likelihood of always having access to condoms by 4.97 percentage points. In estimating the impacts of policy on sex worker health, I find that working outdoors increases the likelihood of experiencing STI symptoms for sex workers by 19.8 percentage points as compared to working indoors. Finally, estimates on experienced violence illustrate that working outdoors increases the likelihood of experiencing violence by 30.9 percentage points. Given that evidence shows decriminalization policy to shift sex work indoors, my research offers strong cause for the consideration of such policies.
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