Page 2166 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2018
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In 2012 the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety completed its inquiry into the Prostitution Act, and the majority made 17 recommendations to improve the regulation of the sex work industry in the ACT. The government agreed to a number of those recommendations which formed the basis of discussion for the implementation working group established afterwards. Following extensive consultation, a number of legislative amendments have been developed to implement key recommendations of the standing committee.
The regulation of sex work is a controversial issue. Some believe that in order to best protect sex workers, the majority of whom are women, we need a robust legal framework to ensure that the sex work industry is safe. Others are of the view that in order to protect women and vulnerable individuals the sex work industry should be criminalised altogether. What both sides have in common is the desire to protect individuals in our community who are working as sex workers from issues such as trafficking, violence, exploitation and illness. Regardless of how we think it should be done, the desire to protect one another is an admirable one.
However, nobody has better knowledge and understanding about how their rights and safety should be protected than sex workers themselves. It is sex workers who will be most affected by any changes to the Prostitution Act, and therefore it is sex workers that we must listen to. The government have listened to key representatives of the sex worker advocacy groups and we have heard that, under the current legislative framework, sex workers have concerns about ongoing stigma, safety issues and discrimination.
The amendments proposed by this bill seek to address those issues and also to uphold the objects of the act by helping to promote the welfare and work health and safety of sex workers. Another very important goal of the bill is to better protect children from sexual exploitation.
The amendments in this bill will help to reduce stigma against sex workers by removing pejorative terminology. The Prostitution Act will be renamed the Sex Work Act 1992 and the terms “prostitute” and “prostitution” will be replaced with current terminology, “sex worker” and “sex work”. The word “prostitute”, which has a negatively moralistic dictionary definition, is derogatory and stigmatising and contributes to the discrimination against individuals in the sex industry. Changing the language to “sex work” and “sex worker” will shift the focus to the individual rights of those engaging in commercial sexual services.
The bill will also amend sections 12 and 13 of the act to remove the requirements for sole operators to register or provide annual notices to the Commissioner for Fair Trading. Sometimes laws, despite their best intentions, simply do not work in practice and, given the very low rate of compliance, the requirement for sole operators to register with Access Canberra has not been working. Instead of protecting sex workers as it is intended to do, the requirement for sole operators to register causes many sex workers to have serious concerns about their privacy and personal safety.
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