Jackson, Crystal A. “Framing Sex Worker Rights: How U.S. Sex Worker Rights Activists Perceive and Respond to Mainstream Anti–Sex
Trafficking Advocacy.” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, pp. 27–45., https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121416628553.
In this journal article, Crystal Jackson, a sociologist whose teachings include gender & sexuality, social justice, sex labor, and feminism, interviews 19 sex worker rights activists within the U.S. between 2010 and 2012. With her research focusing on feminist and queer understandings of sex work, Jackson is well-versed in critiquing institutionalized inequalities within the criminal justice system. The main results drawn from the interviews focused on rejecting the conventional victimization of sex workers and confronting the unsound anti-sex trafficking efforts. The victimization of sex workers can easily, even if it’s indirectly, further silence sex workers and fail to address their oppression and lack of rights. While my paper isn’t focused solely on the rights and legalization of sex work, this journal article is one of the few that not only considers but is based on the perspectives of sex workers and sex worker rights activists. It’s important to consider the concerns that the workers who are personally and daily affected by these issues in order to reach a healthy compromise between protecting their rights while also keeping trafficking laws a priority.
- In an interview with Charm, a Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) member, she “puts it twofold: first [the problem] is a victimizing framework is heavily emotional, whereas a workers rights framework may not evoke the same level of emotion.”
- “In a way, the U.S. anti–sex trafficking movement has galvanized and mobilized sex worker rights organizers as sex workers feel the impact of antiprostitution policies enacted to end trafficking.”
