Why You Need to Stop Using the Term "Prostitute"

I realise that this is an issue that I have already touched upon in my post discussing the Vancouver Women's March. However, I ended up writing the following as a piece for one of my classes and as this is a topic that is relevant to current debates in Vancouver and Canada as a whole, I thought I would share it here as well. 

"My Feminism includes Sex Workers and Trans Women".

Why You Need to Stop Using the term "Prostitute".

It is a rainy and cold Saturday morning at the Vancouver Women’s March 2018, but there is still an atmosphere of triumph and defiance. This is the atmosphere in which Hailey Heartless, a transgender sex worker based in Vancouver, takes to the stage and delivers her excellent speech on why sex workers have a place within the women’s movement.

Hailey is absolutely right. These women undeniably do have a place within feminism. Yet sex workers continue to face extensive stigmatisation, even from those that claim to be feminists and supposedly support women’s rights. This stigma comes in numerous forms, but one message from Hailey particularly stood out to me: that the stigma sex workers face is rooted in the word “prostitute”.

Indeed the term “prostitution” is cloaked in violent meaning.  “Prostitutes” are viewed by the public and portrayed in the media as immoral, criminal, addicted and diseased individuals. This stigma is directly harmful. 67 Women have gone missing or been murdered from the Downtown Eastside. While we cannot ignore the racialized aspect of these disappearances and how Indigenous women are disproportionally the targets of such attacks, we also cannot ignore that sex workers face these dangers too. A significant number of the missing women are sex workers. It is clear that these women are vulnerable and are the victims of attacks. They are in inherently more danger than other women in our society. And what is one central reason for this? The stigma that they face.

Sex workers are viewed by the majority of society as vulnerable, desperate addicts. These women are de-humanised to the extent that they exist only on Vancouver’s margins. Such marginalisation places them in direct danger, as it makes them easy and obvious targets for predators and abusers. There is the perception that if a sex worker goes missing, no one in wider society will notice or care. Indeed, police ineffectiveness has even confirmed this as fact. Without a doubt, if 100 white, middle-class Canadian women had gone missing from Vancouver’s streets there would have been a full scale police investigation immediately, but this did not occur for the Indigenous sex workers that disappeared from the Downtown Eastside. There is even the perception that sex workers deserve what they get, due to their chosen line of work. These attitudes are directly damaging! By dismissing these women from society and turning our backs from them when they go missing, we only increase the danger that other sex workers operating in the Downtown Eastside face. We confirm the perception that society does not care about these women.

Perceptions of sex work as criminal and immoral have even infiltrated into Canadian law. Currently, the Canadian legal system criminalises sex work by making it illegal to purchase and to communicate the sale of sexual services. The belief behind these laws is that criminalisation will eventually end the “exploitative trade”. However, criminalisation has not reduced the amount of sex work in Canada, but has only made it more dangerous. The criminalisation of sex work forces sex workers to more isolated locations so that their clients can avoid the police. This directly increases their vulnerability to violence or attack, as they are removed from their familiar environment and placed in more remote areas. Sex workers are also forced to make faster transactions in order to avoid the police, which can prevent them from screening their clients effectively.  They have less time to check for weapons, recognise number plates, discuss prices or negotiate condom use. For transgender sex workers, there are increased chances of them getting into a car before their client has realised they are transgender, which immediately places them in danger. It is undeniable that Canada’s current laws in regards to sex work make the work more dangerous.

So the stigma that sex workers face is inherently damaging. It dehumanises the workers, making them easy targets for abusers and predators, and it results in criminalising laws which make the work more dangerous. As feminists, we should be working to make the lives of these women safer, not more dangerous. We need to remove the stigma surrounding sex work in order to re-humanise these women and to reverse these dangerous, criminalising laws. But how can we, in our everyday lives, help to reduce the stigma sex workers face? The answer is simple: by discontinuing our use of the word “prostitute”.

As Hailey Heartless said at the Vancouver Women’s March, the term “prostitute” is used by the police and the law. It is a word that criminalises the trade and thus disregards the workers as immoral and unlawful. It is also a term used by abolitionists - those that want the sex trade ended entirely. These radical feminists believe that all sex work, regardless of its form, is exploitative and a form of slavery. Although some women may be in the sex industry because they are left without a choice, this is not the case for everyone. Deciding that all sex work is exploitative removes the legitimacy from those women that have chosen to be sex workers. By using the language of the police and abolitionists, you remove the sex worker’s agency and you remove their own voice.

So you need to stop using the word “prostitute”. The first step towards making these women safer is removing the stigma that they face, and the first step towards removing stigma is changing your language. As Hailey Heartless so perfectly said, “when you use the language of the people trying to cause us harm, you’re sending a clear message of exclusion”. If you care about the lives of these women, you will adopt the language that they choose, not the language of their opponents. They are sex workers, not prostitutes.