Abstract
Sex Workers were early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies, such as online classified pages, social media groups and shared content creation files. These technologies were instrumental in improving sex worker safety and empowering workers to establish clear identities and boundaries, screen potential customers and create shared content to improve the safety of all users.
With the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA into law, many of these platforms closed entirely, removed sex-worker-related content or deleted sex-worker accounts, resulting in a dramatic loss of income and a reduction of safety for sex workers. Particularly affected were those sex workers pushed to less safe avenues of sex work for survival, predominately sex workers of colour, trans and non-binary sex workers and others who experience intersectional discrimination.
FOSTA-SESTA has in fact further endangered the very people it seeks to protect as the censorship and regulation it creates removed the tools sex workers had set up for their own safety. Sex workers, however, are continuing to utilise Web 2.0 technologies to organise, and create new Web 2.0 platforms and communities to reclaim their safety, identities and communities.
Introduction
Since the turn of the century, Web 2.0 technologies have facilitated ways for individuals to express their identities publicly online and provided opportunities for collective organising (Aguiton & Cardon, 2007). Sex workers utilise Web 2.0 technologies for identity expression and collective organising despite the impact that the 2018 United States (US) Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) have had on Web 2.0 technologies. While FOSTA/SESTA is intended to curb sex trafficking and is framed as the “protection” of vulnerable women, such regulations censor the shared creation of community and content and contributes to the further marginalisation and reduced safety of these women. The term “sex work” includes the exchange of any sexual services for money or other goods and services and can include full service sex workers, porn actors, strippers, escorts, dominatrixes, web cam performers, or phone sex operator among others (Sawicki, Meffert, Read, & Heinz, 2019). This paper briefly introduces sex work from an intersectional feminist approach, explores how sex workers employed Web 2.0 technologies to express identify and collectively organise to improve their own safety prior to 2018, provides a brief overview of the FOSTA-SESTA laws (along with an exploration of how these laws have affected sex workers use of Web 2.0 for identity expression, collective organising and safety), and investigates how the laws in the US are censoring legal sex-worker communities in Australia and, in fact, making it harder to identify and help victims of sex trafficking.
Sex work has been around throughout history, with attitudes towards it changing based on political and religious climates (Sawicki et al., 2019). While many studies employ a radical or liberal feminist approach to sex work, this paper applies an intersectional feminist approach (with a focus on full-service sex workers), which acknowledges that class, race, sexual orientation, age and ability can inform a person’s experience of gender, discrimination and feminism (Sawicki et al., 2019). FOSTA-SESTA focuses on sex trafficking (which can include slavery and forced sexual acts) using abduction, coercion and other types of duplicity to exploit individuals (Sawicki et al., 2019). By contrast, sex work is undertaken by consenting adults where the exchange of sexual services for goods or money does not violate the individuals human rights (Sawicki et al., 2019). Sex work as paid labour is equivalent to other forms of paid labour. However, it is important to acknowledge that choice is not binary for many, rather it is a spectrum, where the intersections of disadvantage and discrimination inform what choices a person has available to them (Sawicki et al., 2019). This phenomenon, however, is not specific to the sex industry.
Sex Workers’ Historical Use of Web 2.0 Technologies
The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, in particular centralised, searchable classified advertising (such as Craigslist, Cracker and Backpage) revolutionised the sex work industry, particularly for full-service sex workers. These online classified sites, facilitated an increase in independent workers, increasing safety by moving the transactions indoors and online, and away from the more dangerous outdoor street transactions or third party (pimp) transactions (Cunningham, DeAngelo, & Tripp, 2019). Sex workers also found that these sites increased their safety in other ways. The creation of a space for sex workers to establish and publish their identity online allows other sex workers and clients to see what services an individual does and does not offer (Cunningham et al., 2019). Sex workers reinforce this messaging across multiple other Web 2.0 platforms, including social media and blogs (Campbell, Sanders, Scoular, Pitcher, & Cunningham, 2018). This allowed workers to outline their labour boundaries or offer specialised services prior to meeting clients, reducing the risk of misunderstanding and violence (Campbell et al., 2018; Mojumder, 2018b). This meant that sex workers could create individual and specialised identities with which to not only seek work, but confirm their identity as a sex worker and access sex-worker specific communities on Web 2.0 platforms.
Sex workers often use multiple methods of screening to reduce their risk by searching the potential customers name, phone number or email address on social media platforms (Campbell et al., 2018). Over the last 20 years, Web 2.0 technologies have been used by sex workers to create shared content, including blacklists (lists of violent clients, clients who do not respect boundaries, and/or clients who have stolen from workers or not paid for services) and whitelists (recommended clients) (Campbell et al., 2018; Cunningham et al., 2019; Mojumder, 2018). These lists are private and can only be accessed by those who have been confirmed to be sex workers. The advertisements on Web 2.0 platforms are utilised in these instances to confirm a new user’s identity as a sex worker before granting them access (Mojumder, 2018). These lists improve the safety of sex workers, providing them with a method to screen prospective new clients before accepting work. By utilising these advertisements to express identity and creating shared content through blacklists and other shared resources, sex workers create loose community ties, enabling them to work together to improve their joint safety.
An important part of how sex workers use Web 2.0 technologies is to build a community. By being able to use Web 2.0 technologies, sex workers are able to create their own community and individual identity and organise themselves politically. Sex workers use social media groups to post stories about their experiences, share safety tips and comment on each other’s posts, providing support, reinforcing their identity and creating ties within their community (Aguiton & Cardon, 2007; Campbell et al., 2018). They use these groups to politically organise around labour and safety laws in their particular geographical area (Johansson & Scaramuzzino, 2019). These examples make it particularly clear how sex workers use Web 2.0 platforms to create community and weak ties with which to work towards a shared goal. This has been particularly evident in recent years as sex workers organised to fight the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA laws and, consequently, advocate for their rights in the new landscape post FOSTA-SESTA (Johansson & Scaramuzzino, 2019; Renegade & Pottenger, 2019). Since sex workers still experience significant stigmatisation, these communities provide a vital, and sometime lifesaving, source of support.
An example of sex workers utilising social media platforms to create safety and community can be see within the Australian sex-work community and two of their Facebook groups (hereby named Group A and Group B to maintain privacy). To ensure the safety of this highly stigmatised community, these two private Facebook groups remain strictly only for sex workers. To be added to Group A, a sex worker needs to provide links to their advertisements and, ideally, a verification from another sex worker who is already a member of Group B (Sydney (professional name), 2019a, 2019b). Once a sex worker has been verified and added to Group A, they need to demonstrate that they are actively engaging in sex work through their discussions and participation in the group. Only then can they be added to Group B, where conversations can include information about specific clients and any related safety concerns. This can include the sharing of potential new client names, phone numbers and email addresses to ascertain any potential safety concerns as well as debriefing after shifts. Group B is also where sex workers can contribute to and access the shared content, such as blacklists (Sydney (professional name), 2019a, 2019b). This shows that Australian sex workers have been active adopters of Web 2.0 technologies, utilising many features to improve their own safety and create a community to garner support and share knowledge.
FOSTA-SESTA and its Impact on Sex Workers Use of Web 2.0 Technologies
In the 1990s, US politicians were interested in developing the internet as a forum for free speech with minimal regulations while also protecting children from being exposed to explicit material (Leary, 2018). The US congress intended to limit liability for Web 2.0 platforms. However, congress inaction and progressive case law resulted in what was, in essence, broad immunity for technology platforms for the content their users posted (Leary, 2018). In 2017, two new laws were introduced to the US parliament, FOSTA and SESTA, both designed to reduce immunity and hold platforms to account for advertisements for sex work and services of trafficked victims. These laws particularly focused on sex trafficking and the platforms which enabled sex trafficking (Leary, 2018). While initially the laws received little traction, in 2017, journalists revealed foreign governments utilising Web 2.0 technologies to interfere in the 2016 US election. This resulted in a renewed interest in the regulation of technology platforms across the political spectrum, and FOSTA-SESTA became politically popular as a tool to regulate the very large technology companies (Bridy, 2018). FOSTA-SESTA removed the protections for platforms that promote or facilitate sex trafficking (Bridy, 2018) and, essentially, conflated sex trafficking and consensual sex work, making it illegal for platforms in the US to contain content involving any sex work (Hagen, 2018). This means that, overnight, sex workers’ advertisements and Web 2.0 communities were deleted. These actions effectively deleted vital community ties, critical safety mechanisms and important ways sex workers expressed their identities.
While there is limited academic literature detailing the effects that FOSTA-SESTA has had on the sex work community so soon after its implementation, more and more articles are becoming available outlining the experiences of sex workers in this new climate. One study found that platforms such as Craigslist reduced the incidence of women being murdered in the US but the homicide rate increased again after FOSTA-SESTA passed (Cunningham et al., 2019). 13 sex workers disappeared in the US in the first week after FOSTA-SESTA was enacted and another two sex workers were murdered and their bodies found that same week (Lawless, 2018). Most data, however, at this stage, comes from sex worker and anti-FOSTA-SESTA organisations providing firsthand accounts of sex workers whose livelihoods have been jeopardised and safety reduced (Cox, 2018; Grant, 2018). During the period surrounding FOSTA-SESTA’s passage through the US parliament, multiple Web 2.0 platforms shut down entirely, such as Backpage and sex-worker specific platforms, such as CityVibe and Erotic Review (Kessler, 2018). Other Web 2.0 platforms, including Craigslist, Skype and Reddit, changed their terms of service to specifically exclude sex workers from their platforms (Kessler, 2018), with Reddit removing some sex-worker specific subreddits (Adair, 2018). Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google have been removing the accounts of sex workers, including legal Australian sex workers’ accounts (Adair, 2018; Lawless, 2018). The removal of sex workers from Web 2.0 platforms censors the voice of already marginalised and stigmatised people, and puts lives at risk, in contradiction to the supposed intent of FOSTA-SESTA.
Technology platforms conforming to the new FOSTA-SESTA laws remove sex-workers’ ability to work independently and screen potential customers, putting them at risk from violent customers and unscrupulous third parties if they wish to continue working (Adair, 2018). Sex workers are reporting a reduction in customers due to a reduced ability to advertise, with those who have been hardest hit coming from even more marginalised communities (such as women of colour, trans and non-binary women, women with disabilities, trafficked survivors and migrant sex workers) (Hagen, 2018; Lawless, 2018; Witt, 2018). Many of these women have limited options beyond sex work to start with due to their intersecting disadvantages and are, therefore, pushed to the riskier options of street-based and pimp-facilitated sex work in disproportionate numbers (Lawless, 2018; Witt, 2018). As sex workers are forced offline, pimps and traffickers are taking advantage of the situation and exploiting sex workers who have limited other options (Cole, 2017), in direct contrast to what FOSTA-SESTA set out to achieve.
Since becoming law, critics of FOSTA-SESTA claim it has had another unintended consequence, i.e. the further endangerment of victims of sex trafficking (Lawless, 2018; Witt, 2018a). Websites, such as Craigslist and Backpage, were not only used by consenting sex workers. Research has identified that sex trafficking organisations also utilised these platforms to advertise the services of trafficked or coerced victims (Mojumder, 2018). Police and law enforcement are hindered in their ability to fight sex trafficking as sex traffickers are no longer able to utilise these easily searchable platforms, which police can monitor, and have moved to the dark web (Lawless, 2018; Woolery, 2018) or moved offline altogether (Sawicki et al., 2019a). The inability of police to identify and rescue victims of sex trafficking means that the impact of FOSTA-SESTA goes directly against the stated aims of the legislators, further endangering these victims.
Sex workers, however, were early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies (Cox, 2018) and, in this post-FOSTA-SESTA climate, have continued to utilise Web 2.0 technologies to serve their purposes. A Swedish study found that sex workers were employing similar Web 2.0 platforms and strategies to other labour unions to organise and advocate for their workplace rights. This includes maintaining social media accounts, YouTube channels and blogs to create and coordinate their community and allies to advocate for change (Johansson & Scaramuzzino, 2019). Similarly, in Australia and around the world, sex workers organised almost immediately after FOSTA-SESTA passed to protect both their community and themselves (Cox, 2018). Their comfort with technology and strong global networks (facilitated by their extensive use of Web 2.0 platforms) allowed them to quickly find new hosts for websites and blogs in countries with strong privacy laws which could better protect them from US laws (including FOSTA-SESTA) and potential future sex-work related laws (Cox, 2018). A promising example of this is the new advertising platform built by, and for, sex workers, crockor.com.au, hosted in Iceland (Cox, 2018; Hosting Checker, 2019). Additionally, sex workers are moving to non-US-based emails, platforms and other online communication methods (Adair, 2018). The impact that FOSTA-SESTA has had on the legal sex work community in Australia emphasises the fact that many online spaces and large Web 2.0 platforms are owned by the US and accountable to their laws (Adair, 2018). In Australia, sex workers have reported that, while some sex-worker accounts on Facebook have been deleted, so far, the private Facebook Groups have not been deleted and they are now using advertisements on new sex-worker Web 2.0 platforms (such as Crockor) to verify group members’ identities as sex workers (Sydney (professional name), 2019a). Thus, despite FOSTA-SESTA impacting the creation of identity, community and safety for sex workers, sex workers continue to utilise Web 2.0 platforms to rebuild communities and take ownership over their own safety. However, at this stage, the emerging sex-worker specific Web 2.0 platforms are still small and do not have the reach that previous platforms had.
Conclusion
FOSTA-SESTA
are two recent laws, introduced in the US, designed to regulate the internet that
are changing users’ relationships with the internet and Web 2.0 technologies. Overall,
FOSTA/SESTA has not been successful in its intention to curb sex trafficking. Rather,
such regulation has censored the shared creation of community and content and
contributed to the further marginalisation and reduced safety of women who are
already vulnerable. However, it has also revealed that, while FOSTA-SESTA had a
brutal and significant effect on sex workers abilities to generate income and
ensure their safety, sex workers are fighting back. Their confidence with
technology and strong community links forged on Web 2.0 platforms enabled them
to organise, advocate and promote their own political interests and rebuild
their Web 2.0 platforms and communities on websites hosted outside of the US.
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Hi Emily
Many thanks for your enlightening paper on the sex-worker industry and the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on their lives. Your paper addresses issues that I was previously unfamiliar with and has broadened my perspective on and has raised awareness of the plight of sex workers and their safety after the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA laws.
These laws, which in theory, was meant to protect them from the lived-reality of sex-trafficking. However, as you argue in your paper, “FOSTA-SESTA has in fact further endangered the very people it seeks to protect as the censorship and regulation it creates removed the tools sex workers had set up for their own safety”.
It was interesting to read that law enforcement agencies monitored these online communities set up by sex workers because these very sites were also being utilised by sex-trafficking organisations. These new laws have now had “unintended consequences” as you have mentioned because law enforcement officials are unable to identify and rescue victims of sex-trafficking.
Coincidently after reading your paper, this particular issue was brought to the fore in the recent political scandal with One Nation’s, Steve Dickson. The Guardian article is one written pseudonymously by Gala Vanting, which is the professional name of a Sydney-based sex worker, writer and educator.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/steve-dicksons-comments-reveal-an-ugly-truth-about-our-attitude-towards-migrant-sex-workers?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=soc_568&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1556704732
Other articles included this Rolling Stone article
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/kentucky-derby-sex-traffic-debunked-825885/
Many thanks, Emily for raising awareness on a topic that has been often too taboo to discuss.
Thanks for your comment. Gala Vanting has been busy this last week. There is also this article in the ABC News discussing sex-workers rights at work in Australia and legal aspects of filming that sex-worker without consent in the first place:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-30/what-sex-industry-workers-think-of-one-nations-steve-dickson/11058972
Frustratingly, as sex work is a woman dominated industry, and sex trafficking predominately affects women, they are both used as excuses to further regulate and control women’s bodies as we can see from the Rolling Stone article you linked. In the same way that sex-workers have utilised Web 2.0 technologies to further their own agendas, so too have those whose agenda it is to control and regulate women and their bodies. We can see this in the way that American right wing conservatives used Facebook to try and influence the abortion vote in Ireland last year. This News Week article outlines this incident well:
https://www.newsweek.com/american-pro-lifers-are-using-facebook-sway-irelands-abortion-debate-902355
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Murdock, Jason. 2018. “U.S. pro-Lifers Are Using Facebook to Meddle in Ireland’s Abortion Referendum.” Newsweek, April 26, 2018. https://www.newsweek.com/american-pro-lifers-are-using-facebook-sway-irelands-abortion-debate-902355.
Vanting, Gala. 2019. “This Is What Sex Industry Workers Think of Steve Dickson’s Strip Club ‘Scandal.’” ABC News, April 30, 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-30/what-sex-industry-workers-think-of-one-nations-steve-dickson/11058972.
Hi Emily
What a great read! Thank you.
There is no doubt in my mind this “censorship” has impacted the lives of innocent people.
Indeed the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post: “It’s easy to see the impact that this ramp-up in liability will have on online speech: facing the risk of ruinous litigation, online platforms will have little choice but to become much more restrictive in what sorts of discussion — and what sorts of users — they allow, censoring innocent people in the process.”
I see some similarities with the impacts of FOSTA SESTA on Sex Workers and members of the LGBTIQ community. The personals ads in the classified section sites such as Craigslist provided a space where connections (and support networks) for people struggling with their sexual identities. Especially for those who were not open about their own sexual preferences and who would not be comfortable using web applications such as Grindr.
It is widely known in the Gay community that men who would not necessarily define themselves as being “gay” or “bi” would choose to meet other men using the personals section of Craigslist. The majority of these “meets” would be non commercial in nature.
For openly queer people the loss of sites such as Craigslist would have largely gone unnoticed. However, for people struggling with their sexual orientation, the loss of these sites and associated communities and networks, I suspect would have increased levels of loneliness and depression.
Very Sad.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored-internet
Thanks David.
As Harmon points out in the article you linked, “when platforms choose to err on the side of censorship, marginalized voices are censored disproportionately”. My paper and your example of men who have sex with me (MSM) who may not be out both highlight this fact. And, to further reinforce my point about intersectionality and compounding disadvantage, a significant number of the LGBTIQ+ have undertaken sex work at some time in their lives. Jesse Jones (2017) states that 1 in five queer men have undertaken sex work during their lifetime, and while I couldn’t find statistics on how many queer women or non-binary folk had undertaken sex-work, Duff et al (2015) found that 20% of sex workers in their study were also part of the LGBTIQ+ community. In fact, in a blog post against FOSTA-SESTA, D’Adamo (2018) states that due to discrimination in educations, work and services, poverty is an LGBTIQ issue and as a result, LGBTIQ people have relied on sex work as a means of survival.
Like other sex workers, LGBTI sex workers and the broader LGBTI community in general has continued to utilise Web 2.0 platforms to fight against FOSTA-SESTA and the discrimination it causes. There are multiple blogs posts, such as D’Adamo’s along with user generated content on article based sites such as Medium (here is an example: https://medium.com/@lauralemoon/why-its-not-okay-to-kill-sex-workers-one-year-of-fosta-sesta-257ed73011c1 ) are continuing to advocate for change, sharing resource and rally allies in a post FOSTA SESTA internet.
As I mention in my paper, sex -workers are creating new Web 2.0 platforms to fulfill their needs and I would be interested to see if MSM are doing the same thing. I suspect they are.
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D’Adamo, K. 2018. “Sex Work Is an LGBTQ Issue.” #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA (blog). March 11, 2018. https://survivorsagainstsesta.org/lgbtq/.
Duff, Putu, Jean Shoveller, Jill Chettiar, Cindy Feng, Rachel Nicoletti, and Kate Shannon. 2015. “Sex Work and Motherhood: Social and Structural Barriers to Health and Social Services for Pregnant and Parenting Street and Off-Street Sex Workers.” Health Care for Women International 36 (9): 1039–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399332.2014.989437.
Jones, Jesse. 2017. “The Blurry Line in Queer Sex Work.” Star Observer, March 31, 2017. http://www.starobserver.com.au/features/in-depth-features/blurry-line-queer-sex/156517.
Thanks for your response. I think that Harmon point, “when platforms choose to err on the side of censorship, marginalized voices are censored disproportionately” – is really beginning to resonate. A laissez-faire approach for internet regulation is clearly not working – but as we can see from FOSTA SESTA, marginalised voices are often the first to suffer when platforms err on the side of caution.
Reading your paper and other papers at this conference is really opening my mind to the complexities of the internet and how over regulation can stifle. I believe doing nothing and outsourcing societal decisions to private companies – is not an option. We are rightly taking a stand against evils such as people trafficking, child exploitation, Islamic and white nationalist terrorism, however, we are also seeing SNSs becoming the modus operandi of the alt right (think Brexit and Trump) and the anti vax movement. Nations are now battling each other in cyberspace. The rate in which technology is changing and advancing I believe is only going to get faster. Add to this the fact the technology is no longer “chained to a desk or a wall” – it is with us constantly (we wear it, we carry it in our pockets) to me demonstrates the questions on how we manage the online, border less world will only become more pronounced.
I totally agree with you David, reading Mary’s paper on the role of Social media in the Christchurch massacre as well as yours makes for a really interesting contrast in censorship and regulation.
Looking at issues of white surpremessism and extremist violence makes a good case for regulation and some form of censorship online. My concerns with FOSTA-SESTA however stem from the fact that this law is not actually about protecting trafficking victims. As Leary(2018) points out, the support for FOSTA-SESTA did not come about as support for trafficking victims or to support vulnerable women / other minority communities. It was revealed that social media sites “were used by the Russian government to spread disinformation and possibly affect the 2016
Presidential election. This revelation, combined with a discussion of the role of social media in inspiring white supremacy and violence, caused some to question the passivity with
which tech companies approached third-party content (Leary 2018).” These laws were actually a convenient way to regulate the large tech companies and address the very issues you and Mary discuss.
However instead of creating laws specifically aimed at addressing these issues, they instead piggybacked on these problematic laws.
And I don’t believe the consequences are just as a result of legislators (predominately old white men in the US government) oversight. I believe it is the continued undervaluing of women in general, the devaluation (and criminalisation) of sex work as work and the ongoing misogynistic legislating to control women’s bodies.
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Leary, M. (2018). The Indecency and Injustice of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Scholarly Articles and Other Contributions. Retrieved from https://scholarship.law.edu/scholar/990
This is very interesting read as I have not heard of the FOSTA-SESTA laws before this. After reading your paper I researched a bit on the history of the law and found that it was supposed to be an amendment to Section 230 safe harbors of the Communications Decency Act which was setup to provide immunity from liability for the interactive service providers. Section 230 was preventing sites like Backpage to take responsibility of its users who might be engaging in illegal child sex trafficking activities. So FOSTA-SESTA was supposed to amend this act so they can be legally responsible if they knowingly assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking. So I think their intention was good but maybe they needed to come up with a better law to protect all parties involved.
Hi Fredrick,
I don’t actually believe most of the legislators involved in this decision had good intentions.
As you can see in my comments to David above, the timing of the support around these legislative changes reveals a true intention: to regulate the big tech companies to prevent such things as the Russian interference in the US election. This is not necessarily a bad thing to stop, nor a bad intention, however I believe that a general disregard for women, particularly more vulnerable women such as sex workers and trafficking victims meant that that were happy to use these bills to further their own ends at the expense of vulnerable women.
Continuing this legislating against women’s bodies, this week sees Georgia being the 4th state in the US this year alone to ban abortions, despite significant evidence that abortions save women’s lives (Donegan 2019).
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Donegan, Moira. 2019. “Georgia’s Six-Week Abortion Ban Reveals the Cruelty of the Anti-Choice Movement | Moira Donegan.” The Guardian, May 9, 2019, sec. Opinion. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/georgia-effective-abortion-ban-cruelty-anti-choice-movement.
Hi Emily,
When we were looking at topics of interest and thesis statements, you raised the topic of FOSTA/SESTA and I was intrigued, going on to read a number of articles and commentaries from a range of sources.
I have really enjoyed reading your paper. It is well researched, stays on topic, is cleary written and makes clear and precise arguments. I am particularly interested in the (perhaps) unintended consequences of the legislation, with it having effects globally.
Your contention that
“those who have been hardest hit coming from even more marginalised communities (such as women of colour, trans and non-binary women, women with disabilities, trafficked survivors and migrant sex workers) (Hagen, 2018; Lawless, 2018; Witt, 2018). Many of these women have limited options beyond sex work to start with due to their intersecting disadvantages….. “,
is particularly poignant, given that according to Pew Research while nearly 51% of the American population are women and only 25% of the House of Representatives are women, and while African American and Native American representation is equal to the general population, Hispanic and Asian representation is only half of the population. 78% of Congress is non-Hispanic white which is over-representing the 61% of the American population that fall into the same deographic, meaning that it is a majority of (white) men making laws that particularly affect women and other vulnerables, which you have well stated.
I must admit, I also appreciate the that fact that your paper intersects quite nicely with my own, supporting my argument that communities exist over space and time, and that “place” is not the only reason for participation. The use of online “blacklists” and “whitelists” that can span across distance is a good example. Clients seeking services outside their “home-place” perhaps while travelling for work or pleasure could potentially be vetted through this sort of service.
As an aside, the use of terms use as “blacklist” and “whitelist” also highlights the discriminatory micro-agression that Simon speaks of in his paper “Pan-identity on Facebook: A community reaction to racial battle-fatigue”, and highlights the on-going use of colour to denote good and bad.
Thank you Emily.
Hi Vivian,
Thanks for you response. I just read your paper (also a very well researched and written paper) and I agree that the sex-work community is another good example of a community which exists across time and space as you say. The community that I was looking at and talking to when writing this paper has member all over Australia and a few from other countries. The members regularly travel for work though and you’re right, see clients who travel a lot for work.
I really appreciated your nuanced understanding of the effects of communities moving online, appreciating both the pros and cons of this change in community space that Web 2.0 has give us. I have been frustrated at the overly simplistic view that moving communication online and away from face-to-face is an inherently negative action that some writer have.
Your comments:
” Communities can be real, meaningful and lasting and they can just as easily be transient and ephemeral. The validity of a community is not determined by whether communities are formed and located in the same physical space or online and across time. The validity of any community will be determined by the participants that form the community. ”
reminded me of an article I read earlier in the week by Clark, Algoe, and Green (2018).
Clark et al (2018) talk about the fact that within communities, connection-promoting behaviour has positive effects on well-being while non-connection promotion behavior has negative effects on wellbeing. This was true in both online and offline communities. They also found that the same behaviour could have positive or negative effects depending on the context!
Thanks for your aside. It’s not something that I had previously considered and it will definitely something I will keep in mind in the future. The terms “blacklist” and “whitelist” are IT terms, not used by the sex work industry. They actually call the bad list the Ugly Mugs list here! IT has traditionally been the domain of a fair bit of privilege so it’s unsurprising that these terms are there however in my future career I will rename as many as I can.
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Clark, Jenna L., Sara B. Algoe, and Melanie C. Green. 2018. “Social Network Sites and Well-Being: The Role of Social Connection.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 27 (1): 32–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417730833.