“Sex work is work,” is a mantra increasingly echoed in policy circles, academic spaces and activist slogans. But who is behind the megaphone? And who is paying the price?
For most women and girls, especially from the Global South (and poor, racialized and displaced women everywhere), the notion that prostitution is freely chosen collapses under scrutiny. More often than not, entering the sex trade is not a choice, but an act of survival under patriarchal and capitalist constraints. So, who is sex work legalization really for?
Legalization is often framed as pragmatic, humane, even feminist—but too often it amounts to legal accommodation to systems that already fail women. Legalizing sex work as a solution to women’s economic conditions and sexual exploitation is akin to telling formerly enslaved people that sharecropping is their best option: a temporary fix that reinforces the injustice it claims to address. It doesn’t empower women, it commodifies them.
For women in the Global South, in particular, the line between “voluntary” and “forced” sex work is not just blurry, it is irrelevant. That binary is a Western invention, a privilege for those whose other options aren’t starvation, migration or abuse.
A 2025 survivor-led statement by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) makes plain: “There is no meaningful distinction between trafficking and prostitution in our lives. The systems of exploitation are the same, and the harm is the same. Legalizing prostitution has only made it easier for exploiters to operate with impunity.”
A 2012 study by Cho, Dreher and Neumayer analyzing data from 150 countries found “countries with legalized prostitution experience higher reported human trafficking inflows. … [This] suggests that legalization of prostitution increases demand, creating incentives for traffickers.”
When prostitution is legal, it is harder for us to escape.
Okoedion Blessing, a Nigerian trafficking survivor
If legalization doesn’t regulate, but instead expands, the sex industry, it not only makes it more lucrative—it also makes it more dangerous. Trafficking increases because demand increases. And what is demand, if not the legalized entitlement of (mostly male) buyers to the bodies of (mostly marginalized) women?
Yet the loudest voices pushing for legalization are rarely those of the women selling sex. According to CATW’s “Ten Reasons for Not Legalizing Prostitution, most pro-legalization discourse originates in Western institutions: academia, NGOs and so-called human rights organizations. Most supporters of sex work legalization are male. Missing from these conversations are the perspectives of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American and Eastern European women and girls—the majority of whom are targeted by traffickers and buyers precisely because they lack power, protection and access to alternatives.
The global survivor movement is saying loud and clear: We want out.
SpaceWOC, a coalition of feminists of color against the sex trade from around the world assert: “We are not a special interest group. We are the majority. Prostitution is not liberation for women of color, it is our exploitation repackaged.”
Yet their voices are dismissed, patronized or excluded altogether from policy platforms shaped by predominantly white, liberal and male stakeholders.
These groups also offer concrete alternatives: funding grassroots women’s organizations, implementing basic income to reduce vulnerability and adopting the Nordic Model, which decriminalizes individuals in prostitution while penalizing exploiters.
Okoedion Blessing, a Nigerian trafficking survivor who was enslaved in Italy after being unable to find a job in Nigeria, reaffirms the harms of prostitution: “Traffickers exploit our poverty and our dreams. They tell us we’re going to be hairdressers or caretakers. But we end up on the streets. And when prostitution is legal, it is harder for us to escape.”
Her story is not rare—it’s the norm. Legal sex industries provide cover for modern-day slavery.
In the U.S., Vednita Carter, founder of Afrocentric survivor-led organization Breaking Free, says: “It is mostly Black and Brown women who are targeted by pimps and buyers. Decriminalization lets these men off the hook. If a pimp is selling women, it doesn’t matter what his color is; he must be held accountable.”
Meanwhile, legal scholar Cheryl Nelson Butler critiques the dominance of empowerment narratives in Western academia: “These narratives erase the perspectives of women of color who view prostitution as a form of racialized and gendered oppression.”
We must ask: Why is prostitution the most viable option? What conditions make it seem like the only choice? And what would it mean, for all women, if buying sex were not legal, not normalized, but abolished?
This is certainly not about criminalizing women. It’s about building exit ramps before and after prostitution. Around the world, survivors call for investment in education, housing, trauma care and job training. In New York, GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services) helps girls leave the sex trade. Over half are now in college or completing high school.
Their success proves a simple truth: When women are given real alternatives, most choose freedom.
Instead of offering women legal exploitation, we can do better: We can offer safety, real economic opportunity and the dignity of work that does not require the sale of our bodies.
And even if some women “choose” sex work, should we organize society around that choice? Should freedom for some come at the cost of dignity and safety for most?
Legalizing sex work is not a step forward. It is a failure of imagination and justice.
