Cubides Kovacsics María Inés, Santos Wáleri, Siegmann Karin Astrid
International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague, the Netherlands.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Sex Res Social Policy. 2023;20(2):810-824. doi: 10.1007/s13178-022-00729-4. Epub 2022 May 25.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbates the existing insecurities of sex workers. This paper asks: What are sex workers' everyday experiences of (in)security? And: How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced these?
We engage with these questions through collaborative research based on semi-structured interviews carried out in 2019 and 2020 with sex workers in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Revealing a stark mismatch between the insecurities that sex workers' experience and the concerns enshrined in regulation, our analysis shows that sex workers' everyday insecurities involve diverse concerns regarding their occupational safety and health, highlighting that work insecurity is more multi-faceted than sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Widespread employment and income insecurities for sex workers are exacerbated for transwomen and male sex workers. Their legal liminality is enabled not only by the opaque legal status of sex work in the Netherlands, but also by the gendering of official regulation. The COVID-19 pandemic made visible how the sexual and gender norms that informally govern sex workers' working conditions intersect with hierarchies of citizenship, complicating access to COVID-19 support, particularly for migrant sex workers.
Sex work regulation in the Netherlands leaves workers in a limbo-not without obligations and surveillance, yet, without the full guarantee of their labour rights.
To effectively address sex workers' insecurities, a shift in regulation from its current biopolitical focus to a labour approach is necessary. Besides, public policy and civil society actors alike need to address the sex industry's harmful social regulation through hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race.
新冠疫情暴露并加剧了性工作者现有的不安全感。本文提出以下问题：性工作者日常的（不）安全体验是怎样的？以及：新冠疫情如何影响了这些体验？
我们通过合作研究来探讨这些问题，该研究基于2019年和2020年对荷兰海牙性工作者进行的半结构化访谈。
我们的分析表明，性工作者所经历的不安全感与监管中所体现的担忧之间存在明显脱节，这揭示出性工作者的日常不安全感涉及对其职业安全与健康的多种担忧，凸显出工作不安全感比性传播感染更为复杂多样。跨性别女性和男性性工作者面临的就业和收入不安全感更为普遍。他们在法律上的边缘地位不仅源于荷兰性工作不明确的法律地位，还源于官方监管的性别化特征。新冠疫情揭示了那些非正式地规范性工作者工作条件的性与性别规范如何与公民身份等级制度相互交织，使得性工作者，尤其是移民性工作者，在获取新冠疫情支持方面变得更加复杂。
荷兰的性工作监管让从业者处于一种两难境地——既有义务且受到监管，但劳动权利却没有得到充分保障。
为有效解决性工作者的不安全感，有必要将监管重点从当前的生物政治转向劳动视角。此外，公共政策和民间社会行为体都需要通过性别、性取向和种族等级制度来解决性产业有害的社会监管问题。
