Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR)
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00502.x |
| Author | Maggie O'Neill |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2010
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 210±32
Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation
through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action
Research (PAR)
Maggie O'Neill*
Taking a feminist cultural criminological analysis to the regulation of
sex work in the United Kingdom, this paper argues against the
dominant deviancy and the increasingly abolitionist criminal justice
model for regulating sex work. The paper begins by offering a critique
of the dominant regulatory regimes which have operated since the
Victorian era, amended in part in the 1950s with Wolfenden, and
currently being reinscribed with the Home Office strategy on
prostitution and various pieces of legislation. The focus is specifically
upon research with female sex workers and the usefulness of using
Participatory Action research methodologies (PAR) with sex workers,
agencies, and policy makers in order to foreground the diverse voices
and experiences of sex workers, challenge the current focus on
abolitionist criminal justice regimes and outcomes, and offer an
alternative framework for a cultural materialist analysis of sex work,
drawing upon the work of Nancy Fraser.
INTRODUCTION
This paper takes a feminist cultural criminological analysis to the regulation
of sex work in the United Kingdom. It argues against the dominant deviancy
and criminal justice model for regulating sex work and suggests that
Participatory Action Research methodologies (PAR) and Participatory Arts
(PA) have a vital role in the process of developing a radical democratic
imaginary. PAR and PA offer interventions in the governance of sex work by
210
ß2010 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2010 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Durham, 32 Old Elvet,
Durham DH1 3HN, England
maggie.o'neill@durham.ac.uk
Thanks to Jane Scoular for sound editorial advice and to Kate Green for permission to use
the artworks.
creating spaces for dialogue and fostering more integrated horizontal and
vertical processes of inclusion around the principles of social justice and
cultural citizenship
1
that include rights, recognition, respect, and redistribu-
tion for sex workers.
2
Moreover, our task as researchers is to take respon-
sibility for catalysing what Bauman describes as the need for `dialogic
understanding in the general public, to opening up and keeping open spaces
for what has been called ``critical discourse''.'
3
The paper proceeds by: highlighting key themes, discourses, and inter-
ventions in the regulation of sex work; outlining the trajectory of cultural
criminology as the basis for a cultural materialist analysis of sex work; and
moves the debate on prostitution beyond binaries (that lead to divisions and
paralysis and ultimately help to reinforce the Othering of women and men
who sell sex), arguing for a politics of inclusion. A politics of inclusion
makes use of participatory, biographical, and visual methods in order to
create spaces for the voices of sex workers, leading to dialogue, knowledge
transfer, and transformative interventions in the governance of sex work.
REGULATING SEX WORK: DISCOURSES, INTERVENTIONS, AND
IDEOLOGY
Prostitution and the broader sex industry is a deeply embedded global
institution that is tied to social, cultural, economic, and political structures,
processes, and practices. Prostitution and sex tourism are global phenomena
and they help to constitute the political economy of prostitution. Structured
currently by capitalism, commodification, sexuality, and sexual relations,
4
it
is a major task to generate knowledge and understanding of this complex
issue; and concomitantly to develop feminist responses that take us beyond
the fixity of a deviance model towards a cultural materialist analysis that
may lead to a more realistic model for the governance of sex work in the
twenty-first century. The selling of sex is associated in the public
imagination and embedded in law as (moral) deviance. The regulation of
the sale and purchase of sex takes place predominantly through the enforce-
ment of laws which focus mainly on women who sell sex. In the process, a
particular ideology of prostitution is reproduced.
5
By ideology, I mean
211
1J.Pakulski, `Cultural Citizenship' (1997) 1 Citizenship Studies 73±86.
2N. Fraser, `Recognition as Justice? A Proposal for avoiding Philosophical
Schizophrenia' in Law, Justice and Power Between Reason and Will,ed. S. Cheng
(2004).
3Z.Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (1995) 242.
4C.Pateman, `Defending Prostitution: Charges against Ericsson' (1983) 19 Ethics
561±5.
5M.McIntosh,`Who needs prostitutes? The ideology of male sexual needs' in Women,
Sexuality and Social Control,eds. C. Smart and B. Smart (1978).
ß2010 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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