Conflicts of Mobility: Migration, Labour and European Citizenship

Abstract

In their reflection on the regulation of sex work in today’s Europe, Phil Hubbart, Roger Matthews and Jane Scoular (2008) suggest conceptualising sex workers as exemplary figures of new forms of exclusion in Europe. The analysis that the authors undertook of the legislative changes in three different locations, namely the Netherlands, Sweden and England and Wales, prompted them to conclude that despite the different and apparently contrasting laws regulating prostitution in the three countries the outcomes of the law were very similar. Whether the law enforced legalisation of prostitution as in the Netherlands, prohibition as in Sweden or abolition as in the UK, it has invariably repressed first and foremost on-street sex work and displaced it to suburban areas where sex workers are less visible, more isolated and difficult to get to by outreach groups. Consequently, streetwalkers find themselves in situations of greater social isolation and vulnerability to abuse. Geared allegedly towards combating of trafficking, prostitution policies have produced, the authors argue, new and variable geographies of exclusion whereby sex workers end up occupying social spaces which are remote from ‘respectable’ society and removed from the protection of the law (Hubbard et al., 2008: 149).