Standing up for Hackney’s sex workers

Outspoken: Georgina Perry of Open Doors

“If Open Doors doesn’t fight on behalf of sex workers in Hackney, nobody does. If we don’t articulate their needs, nobody does.”

Georgina Perry’s devotion to sex workers’ rights stems from a strong sense of injustice. Sex workers, she explains, are often blamed for problems they didn’t create and vilified when they themselves are the victims of crime. They are increasingly subject to punitive as well as moral policing, diminishing their wellbeing and increasing their vulnerability.

Perry and her team at Open Doors – a clinical case management and outreach service for sex workers in City and Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets, run from Homerton Hospital – aim to meet these challenges head-on by providing an integrated service to support the health and wellbeing of over 2,000 sex workers annually.

With Amnesty International’s recent decision to support the decriminalisation of consensual sex work, it seemed everyone suddenly had an opinion on the matter. The problem, says Perry, is that sex work is often presented in a simplistic way.

While debates are often black and white, the reality is “nuanced, layered lives and worlds”. There’s the deliberately obfuscated law, stigma and discrimination, human sexuality and behaviour… and not least general discomfort with talking about sex. Sex work is usually dismissed as ‘Other’ – part of an ‘undesirable nighttime economy’.

Yet, far from being a distant underworld, sold sex is relatively common. Research shows that around ten per cent of men in the UK, from all walks of life, have paid for sex – a percentage that would surely be much higher if it included people other than heterosexual men, and more ambiguously transactional intimacies.

In a culture that often sidelines open discussion about sexuality, sex workers have become a scapegoat for the subversion of moral codes, if not victims to pity for their ‘powerlessness’.

But having worked with thousands of sex workers and their clients over more than twenty years, Perry knows that “a lot of people do act outside the dominant discourse [of sexuality], they just can’t articulate it,” which was nicely (or, nastily) demonstrated with this year’s Ashley Madison hack.

If we can’t understand “all the shades of grey in life,” then we cannot support sex workers in a meaningful way, argues Perry.

The simplifications and stereotypes “only add to the stigma faced by sex workers,” she says. There are many reasons why people are engaged in sex work, and in Perry’s view we need to approach their work like any other type of occupation, rather than sensationalising it.

Perry has supported sex workers in Hackney for thirteen years, and she has noticed stark changes in the borough’s approach to the phenomenon. “Gentrification has changed the face of Hackney,” she says – and the new demographics have, in turn, altered attitudes towards sex workers.

“People who have just paid a fortune for a flat don’t want to see sex work: socially excluded people make them feel uncomfortable. I find that incredibly distasteful. What people don’t seem to realise is that most of the UK sex workers here are Hackney women, with long connections.”

But Perry does not blame regeneration for the problems sex workers are facing and she is sceptical of a recent report by the police’s that complaints relating to sex work are up by 70 per cent. “Policing sex work is quite an easy thing to do in terms of enforcement – sex workers don’t run very fast, they’re pretty visible.”

Perry sees sex workers becoming easy targets, scapegoats for other nighttime economy undesirables: “drunks, sex in doorways, fighting – nothing happens to them.”

However, with sex work in the borough, the police are increasingly going down an enforcement route – dispersal orders, arrests, fines, even though government regulations recommend against this.

It was not always this way, as Perry is eager to highlight. “This is a borough that has historically worked very well, in a joined-up and cohesive manner, in order to address the needs of people selling sex.” There is “really good public health commissioning, really good local and elected representative support – there is a lot of evidence-based thought behind it.”

Perry credits this partnership working – between the police, Open Doors and other supportive bodies – with saving many lives. “When we first started working here, there were high rates of morbidity and mortality among sex workers; infections, communicable diseases, housing problems.”

However, she laments,“it only takes a small change in local perspective – a certain moral agenda in local authorities – to change everything, completely.”

While selling sex is legal, many of the activities that go along with it are not, and police in Hackney “are returning to enforcement after a decade of collaborative partnership working,” increasing sex workers’ vulnerability, rather than supporting them and safeguarding their wellbeing.

For example, the police hand out ‘dispersal orders’ (a 48 hour ban from a designated area) to women soliciting on the streets. As a result, women might choose not to carry condoms, and enter cars with less discernment, to avoid being caught.

If they are caught, says Perry, this often initiates a downward spiral: “women are given punitive dispersal orders for soliciting and a court order if they breach it; when they don’t go to court, they are arrested, which means they get fined. If they don’t pay the fine, they go to prison; or, to pay it, they go back to the streets – either way, their lives are immeasurably worse.”

This focus on enforcement of the Crime and Policing Act is endangering women through “nonsensical acts of institutional aggression on the poorest and most vulnerable,” says Perry.

“Criminalisation isn’t, under any circumstances,” she argues, “a useful approach in supporting sex workers to make changes in their lives.”

Not only does it paint over the complex issues at hand for the workers themselves, it encourages sex workers to believe that the police will not act when they themselves are victims of crime; that, if they report a theft or a rape, their work, rather than the crime they reported, will become the focus of inquiries.

Though the challenges that sex workers face are obvious, what is also abundantly clear to Perry and her colleagues is the ambition and potential of their clients. They have seen sex workers save up to start their own businesses, volunteer and work in different fields, star in West End shows and speak to politicians about policy.

With her clients’ wellbeing and safety at stake, Perry is deeply concerned by current approaches to sex work in the borough. To secure their futures, she hopes that the borough will return to genuine partnership work, “looking at sex workers who require support as people with complex needs, and working with them in a joined up, case management approach.”