Legitimising sex work is not a substitute for support and welfare
Some institutions believe that endorsing a dangerous industry is caring for their student body. However, universities are a major reason why students feel the need to enter the sex industry in the first place.
Source: The Guardian
On Thursday 11 November, The Times broke a story titled "Durham university offers safety training for student sex workers". The piece prompted significant backlash online. Some people were strongly against the provision of the course; Labour MP Diane Abbott spoke out against Durham, tweeting “sex work is degrading, dangerous and exploitative”. Likewise, the Further Education Minister, Michelle Donelan, stated that Durham was “badly failing” in its duty to protect students. Others were supportive, in equally strong terms. The DSU President scathingly condemned the backlash on Twitter, saying “Apparently educating students on their RIGHTS, SAFETY and the RISKS in the adult sex industry is scandalous.” The DSU Welfare & Liberation Officer posted a lengthy statement on the Durham SU website, claiming that the training targets those people who support students, “so they understand the legal, safety, and wellbeing concerns of students and how to respond to disclosures sensitively.” Durham University itself released a statement which made “no apologies” for trying to help students “from accessing the support they need and to which they are entitled.”
What this has made clear is that there is an important question at stake here: are universities “legitimising a dangerous industry” if they offer such training, or are these courses analogous to those on mental health and wellbeing and drug and alcohol awareness, as Durham stated?
There is no doubt that sex work is a dangerous industry: female sex workers are 18 times more likely to be murdered than women who aren’t sex workers. The sex work industry has been shown to be misogynistic and highly abusive. Physical and sexual violence are endemic in sex work, sometimes even resulting in death. A majority of women experience brutal, repeated violence, resulting in more than two-thirds suffering from PTSD, a statistic comparable to war veterans. It is also an industry riven with sex trafficking. In international law, there are numerous treaties such as the Palermo Trafficking Protocol trying to tackle sex trafficking, emphasising its widespread, global nature. Most people, especially women, who turn to sex work do it because they are in a vulnerable position. A 2004 consultation showed that about half of the women engaging in sex work were coerced into the industry, starting before they were eighteen or when they were homeless.
This world seems far away from student halls and universities’ concerns. However, student finance website Save the Student found that 20% of students in 2020 would turn to sex work in a financial emergency - a significant increase from 6% in 2019. Why would students get involved in this world?
Funding education has become a bigger concern for students. Loans are the main method students use to fund their education, however most will never repay them. There is also a steady rise in accommodation costs: rent increases have outstripped inflation and average rents are a growing percentage of the maximum loan. This situation means that students have found themselves having to supplement any income they have with more paid work. The Student Sex Work Project found that around half of respondents made around £300/month, with a minority of 13.4% earning around £1,000/month. In a survey conducted by the Project, students who worked in the sex industry were asked what motivated them to engage in sex work: 63.5% of students said they would engage with sex work to fund their lifestyle; 56.9% said that it would specifically fund their education; 56.3% said they engaged in sex work to cover their basic living expenses. One of the attractions of engaging in sex work is that students can choose their hours: 56.3% of students surveyed said that the hours suited their studies. Universities have turned into a money-making enterprise, rather than looking out for student welfare.
Universities’ lack of concern with student welfare is exemplified in a record high number of sexual misconduct cases involving students. In 2019, following the ‘rape chat scandal’ in which male students at the University of Warwick sent each other violent sexual comments about female students, an independent report criticised the university’s handling of the scandal, saying that “the overwhelming view was that the university appeal process has let down the victims”. Warwick apologised, but students considered it too little too late, describing there being a “huge culture of fear” around the university’s handling of victims of sexual abuse. In 2020, an anonymous Instagram account, St. Andrews Survivors, collected sexual assault stories at the University of St. Andrews; survivors from the account describe an “endemic rape culture” across the university sector. On the Everyone’s Invited website, a website which collects anonymous accounts of sexual harassment and assault, more than eighty British universities have been named.
This is why universities’ provision of sex worker safety toolkits and courses is at best, hypocritical, and at worst, dangerous, given the landscape sketched above. If presented against a backdrop of a systemic inability to address a widespread rape culture, these toolkits and courses have not considered that they might be interpreted as implicitly condoning the risks of the sex industry. They might be seen as encouraging and entrenching sexual misconduct towards students. Durham is not the only university which has provided such toolkits: Leicester, Newcastle and Manchester are three others. Leicester’s provision of such a toolkit prompted a petition to revoke it, which to date has over 13,000 signatures.
Ostensibly, these toolkits are a way for universities to appear to be helping students who are in a dangerous industry. While students should not be penalised or prevented from entering any line of work they might wish to, sex work is not like any other form of work. Universities cannot treat courses on sex work like courses for drug or alcohol safety, because the legal and political consequences for the universities, and the potential physical and mental ones for the students, are significantly more controversial.
Universities should be focusing their attention on fixing the problem of the marketisation of education and their problems with sexual misconduct, rather than taking a stance on sex work. Whether it is a positive or negative stance, there is no way to guarantee a student’s safety in the sex industry. Such toolkits and courses combat and highlight the problem: universities may be willing to appear to help students handle the dangers of working in the sex industry without trying to address why they might have needed to work in that industry in the first place, or the similar dangers they might face at the universities.
Only when they have sorted out these issues can they begin to have constructive discussions about sex work and make sure that their students do not feel like it is a necessity for them to go into the sex industry. This is possibly beyond the power of Durham – and other universities – alone. The risks of the sex industry are far beyond what any university should be tackling when they are part of the reason students might choose to enter such a line of work.
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