Outdated laws and benefit cuts: Why women can’t leave sex work

Poverty and cautions trap women in sex work – good policies could resolve this. But politicians don’t want to know

There are a few dates in the calendar that sex workers mark. The day to end violence on 17 December is often a sombre affair, when we honour the sex workers who were murdered over the last year. But International Whores Day, on 2 June, is when we come together to celebrate survival and resistance.

This year, we, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), took our celebrations – and our protests – to Downing Street to demand the abolition of “prostitute’s cautions”. Eighty organisations, including Amnesty International UK and Liberty, signed an open letter to the home secretary supporting this action.

Prostitute’s cautions stem from the Street Offences Act 1959. Police are supposed to issue one when they have “reasonable cause” to believe that someone is loitering or soliciting. In practice, these can be given without warning and on the faintest of pretexts. I attended one court proceeding where the only evidence presented was that the woman was “standing on a street corner looking in the direction of several men.” Once, the ECP successfully had a caution removed from a woman’s record because the police did not even bother to record what evidence they had based it on.

Prostitute’s cautions must end because they are wrecking people’s lives. Thousands of women in the UK have received them since they were introduced. In the London Borough of Redbridge, 639 were issued between 2013 and 2015 alone. There is no right of appeal, and a caution remains on a person’s record until they are 100 years old.

Getting a caution can result in sex workers losing custody of their children, prevent them from securing jobs in other industries, cause them to be denied compensation or insurance, and even lead to deportation or travel bans. A number of women interviewed for our report Proceed Without Caution said they had hesitated to report rape and other violence because they had cautions on their records. They assumed these would lead to disbelief and hostility. Others described how employers had used their record of cautions to trap them into low waged work, as both sides knew they couldn’t easily leave and find another job.

The bottom line is that prostitute’s cautions directly undermine what many people in government say they want: namely fewer women in sex work. They, and other government policies like them, instead trap women into the sex industry by making it much harder for them to do anything else.

Poverty is the root

“At the age of 25, seven years into the industry, I tried to leave,” said one woman who spoke to us anonymously. “I had three kids to feed and looked for a job in an office, but they did a DBS check and the cautions and convictions came up. So I didn’t get the job. I had to carry on with prostitution.”

Such stories are easy to find, and the effects of criminalisation are compounded for sex workers who are migrants, trans, women of colour, street workers and working class. If politicians are serious about wanting to reduce prostitution, addressing the negative effects of cautions would be a good place to start.

Hundreds of women have told us they had little choice – they couldn’t survive doing other jobs, and the benefits system was failing them

Most sex workers are mothers working to support their families. Jenny Pearl, a member of the ECP who worked on the street for decades, told the Public Bill Committee of the Policing and Crime Bill in February 2009 that she and many other women she’d met did sex work "purely to keep their families together”, and to keep their children out of care. She said in her testimony that, “They go out for an hour and make enough money to pay a bill."

Austerity cuts and benefits-slashing policies have disproportionately harmed women, especially single mothers. Research shows that policies like the two-child benefit cap are increasing child poverty, but children don’t exist in a vacuum. Children are poor because their mothers are poor.

In 2018, the UN Rapporteur on poverty called austerity a “political choice” that specifically targets women. In 2019, a Work and Pensions Committee inquiry also acknowledged that benefits sanctions and delays to Universal Credit were pushing women into “survival sex”.

Since then, hundreds of women have reached out to ECP for support whilst starting or returning to sex work. They said they had little choice – they couldn’t survive doing other jobs, and the benefits system was failing them.

If they are unlucky enough to get a caution in the course of trying to make it to another day, they will find it much harder to exit the business later on.

No good alternatives

Claims that sex work is ‘degrading’ is often used when justifying crackdowns on prostitution. But sex work is not the only industry which degrades women. As Nickie Roberts, an author and former sex worker, put it:

Working in crummy factories for disgusting pay was the most degrading and exploitative work I ever did... Why should I have to put up with a middle-class feminist asking me why I didn’t ‘scrub toilets’ instead of becoming a stripper? What’s so liberating about cleaning up other people’s shit?

Is it because the industry is based on sex that critics feel free to indulge their repressive tendencies? Does it attract particular condemnation because sex workers are effectively illegal workers, and less able to publicly defend their right to survive?

Many people stay in sex work not because they lack the will to exit, but because they don’t have any realistic alternatives. In 2019, when we conducted research for our report ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a job like this’, we found that the jobs available to women are often low paid with exploitative and even dangerous working conditions.

Mothers face particular discrimination, including a lack of consideration for their caregiving responsibilities. One woman told us she tried taking a bar job because she wanted to stop sex work. But the late hours, low pay and lack of flexibility for childcare responsibilities, on top of transphobia and sexual harassment, all pushed her back into it.

Nearly 20% of UK working women earn below the Living Wage, and women are 50% more likely to be low paid than men. Women are also more likely to be on exploitative, zero hours contracts than men. One migrant woman in the ECP shared that she tried jobs in bars, shops, and care homes, only to be harassed, underpaid, or sacked unfairly. Eventually she turned to sex work because she judged it to be her least exploitative option.

Degradation can also come directly from the state. Asylum seekers forced to survive on £49.16 a week, and immigrant women made destitute by ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’, often have little choice but to engage in sex work in order to survive.

Politicians offering more pain, not solutions

The Crime and Policing Bill 2025, currently in the House of Lords, could have been an opportunity to address the harm caused by the criminalisation of sex work. And, tantalisingly, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi put forward an amendment to repeal the offence of “loitering and soliciting for the purpose of prostitution”. This would have effectively ended the use of prostitute’s cautions by police.

Unfortunately, she coupled the repeal with measures to criminalise people who associate with sex workers, including clients, and to close down the platforms that sex workers depend on to advertise. These would have isolated sex workers further and made exiting the industry harder. Luckily, the amendments didn’t pass.

This isn’t an isolated incident. For decades there have been repeated attempts to increase the criminalisation of sex work via the criminalisation of clients. This is known as the Nordic model or the end-demand model. It is sold as a method of reducing sex work that does not punish women, but it is despised by sex workers because of the many ways it makes us more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

Criminalising clients increases the danger and stigma of sex work

Let me try to summarise what sex workers have been put through in the last decade and a half. In 2009, Labour MPs including ministers, such as Hariet Harman, Jacqui Smith, Caroline Flint, Vera Baird and Fiona Mactaggart, helped instigate a moral panic around “sex trafficking”, which was then used as justification criminalising sex workers’ clients. They peddled misinformation to back up their arguments. Statements like“80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker” were quickly shown to be baseless, yet these officials continued to spout these false claims.

One year later, the government introduced a strict liability offence for paying for sex with someone "controlled for another’s gain." This meant that buyers could be prosecuted even if they didn’t know the person was controlled. The English Collective of Prostitutes spearheaded a campaign against this and managed to narrow the clause, resulting in a final text that penalises only people paying for sex with someone “subjected to force, deception or threats”, rather than people “controlled for gain”. The offence has rarely been used since. But the fallacy that the majority of sex workers are trafficked has endured.

Mactaggart tried again in 2014 to criminalise clients as part of the Modern Slavery Bill. We again fought back, and found that we had many allies on our side. As we wrote in 2016: “Hundreds of individuals and organisations responded to our plea and lobbied MPs to oppose the amendment. Hampshire Women’s Institute, Women Against Rape and the Royal College of Nursing were three notable groups that lent their name to the campaign.”

Sex workers made it clear that criminalising clients increases the danger and stigma of sex work. They explained how existing kerb-crawling legislation robbed them of the time to check out clients, negotiate what services they would provide, forced them to work in more isolated areas, and caused them to work harder and take more risks to make the same money. As one put it:

To avoid the police, clients drive by and signal to follow them into a side street. As soon as I get to the car, I have to jump in. You get no chance to see who it is that is driving, I can’t really see his face, or check if he is drunk. I have to just hurry up and get in before the police come.

Within a few weeks the amendment had dropped without a vote.

The issue fizzled under the surface for a number of years, occasionally coming back up for debate. In 2016, the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce argued for a sex buyer law. Labour MP Sarah Champion did the same in 2018. In 2020, there was another call to crackdown on the platforms where sex workers advertise, led by Labour MP Diana Johnson.

In 2024, a new take on the issued emerged. Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham at the time, tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which proposed to redefine “prostitution for gain” as “sexual exploitation of an adult”. This sparked immediate outrage from sex workers, who reject being categorised as victims of exploitation regardless of how we name our own experience. We warned that this would criminalise as an exploiter anyone who associates with a sex worker. Prosecutions would undoubtably have increased.

The amendment fell, but the term “commercial sexual exploitation” has entered common parlance among organisations funded for VAWG (violence against women and girls) work. It is within the realm of possibility that this is because Jess Phillips, now minister for safeguarding and violence against women, holds the purse strings for some of the £157 million VAWG budget.

Now we have the Crime and Policing Bill 2025, where Antoniazzi’s (failed) amendments again attacked sex workers by characterising us as victims of exploitation in order to justify greater police powers and more repression.

Prostitution rates would fall off a cliff if every woman in this country had financial independence

All these attempts to criminalise clients have had the same end goal: to end prostitution through the back door. Why are MPs, many of whom are self-described feminists, so hell bent on shutting down one of the last remaining options that many women have for making a living? And why, if the objective is to reduce prostitution, don’t they focus on strengthening women’s hands and giving us more choices?

Ending women’s poverty, low benefits, disability discrimination, housing insecurity, lack of recognition for care responsibilities, and pay inequality – this is where the focus needs to be. We, the English Collective of Prostitutes, guarantee that prostitution rates would fall off a cliff if every woman in this country had financial independence and security. But making the work more dangerous while not even attempting to address these causal factors will only get more women hurt.

Published 21 August 2025 on the portal https://www.opendemocracy.net/