Abstract
Sex work was decriminalised in New Zealand in June 2003 by the Prostitution Reform Act [2003] (‘PRA’). Citizens and permanent residents over the age of 18 are no longer subject to criminal sanction for participating in sex work, whether as sex workers, buyers of sex or brothel operators. Decriminalisation positions brothels as businesses like any other, subject to the same laws that govern businesses in other sectors. In its principled purpose, the PRA establishes the conditions under which sex workers’ wellbeing, safety and sexual health can be facilitated.
Historically, those who manage sex workers have been conceptualised as categorically harmful, although research in other jurisdictions has shown far greater diversity of management approach than such stereotypes suggest. However, very little research has been conducted in New Zealand to understand how decriminalisation and, particularly, the PRA, informs brothel management. This study therefore seeks a better understanding of how brothel operators in New Zealand approach management, and how sex workers experience being managed. It is informed by a conceptual framework that draws on Foucault’s articulation of power in its various modalities, suggesting that brothels are made governable through the organised practices by which subjects are produced and deferred.
Whilst research has demonstrated the benefits of decriminalisation, the persistence of stigma prompts operators to respond by seeking legitimacy. This is a claim given substance by the liberal notion that this will lead to improved working conditions for sex workers. However, these responses both appropriate and displace the PRA, establishing corporate norms and producing sex workers as workers accordingly. Operators promote and require professionalisation and responsibility, producing a sex worker ideal as a normative standard by which to govern sex workers in the brothel. This subverts the potentially emancipatory principles of decriminalisation and has negative implications for the extent to which sex workers can work is self-determinative ways. This is particularly evident in sex workers’ experience of violence and their ability to exercise consent in the brothel.
The study uses a qualitative methodology shaped by a constrained participatory model. It involved in-depth interviews with 31 participants and two key informants from the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective. Eighteen participants were sex workers who were mainly or exclusively brothel-based. A further five sex workers also worked on an occasional basis as brothel operators. The remaining eight participants were operators. Twenty-four separate businesses were represented, covering the organisational models for managed brothels in New Zealand: parlours (or walk-ins), clubs, and agencies. I use Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to examine how disciplinary power informs brothel management, prompting the production of normative discourses of work that destabilise sex workers’ safety at work.
Although the decriminalisation of sex work in New Zealand offers a framework to limit workplace harms, operators’ practices frustrate this ambition. Operators frequently adopt legitimising techniques common in other sectors to govern brothels and those who work within them. In this way, operators subtly diminish sex workers’ agency by promoting the idea of professionalism as compliance with rules, responsibilisation and norms of productivity. Such legitimising norms attenuate the benefits of decriminalisation by reifying the grounds for exclusion and exposing brothel-based workers to harms that, in a precarious and stigmatised environment, remain unchecked and often enabled.