This is an edited transcript of Sarah Green’s talk at the Nordic Model Now! TUC fringe event held in Brighton on 8 September 2025.

Hello, I’m Sarah Green, the chief executive of a small charity in King’s Cross, in very central London. Some of you will already know that King’s Cross is, or used to be, synonymous with prostitution. The term itself had that ring about it, and going to King’s Cross was associated with, “I’m going to go out and buy a woman who’s in prostitution”.

I going to tell you a little bit about the organisation, Women At The Well, and the work that we do, and what actually happens to women, who may be around prostitution and other sexually exploitative practices. What happens to them, if and when they’re trying to seek support, for example, now that the ‘sex work is work’ ideology has captured some of our services, some of the mainstream, and parts of our culture. This has real consequences and implications. It’s not just ideas, which is the way it’s treated by some of those who play with it.

I’ll give you a little background on our organisation so you get the context I’m coming from, but then I’ll talk about the women we’re working with, and what that framing is already doing in women’s lives.

Women At The Well

Women At The Well is about 20 years old. We run three integrated services.

A drop-in centre, in a strictly women-only building where women can come for food, showers, laundry, some basic needs stuff, some company. We’ve got activities on every day. It’s quite a nice place to be. Women-only daytime provision is very rare in central London. Some women walk quite a long way to come and be with us – and it’s valued and important.

Having a drop-in – where no appointment is necessary, where there won’t be any pressure on you, where there won’t be somebody problematising you, or who’s obliged to help you in a statutory service setting – is really important.

Women all over the world, over decades, have developed a method for what works around prostitution and for supporting women to get out when they’re ready. And one of the answers is drop-in work like this, just being an open door and ready, being non-judgmental, and being able to go at each woman’s pace. Not rushing women or saying, “Right, let’s hammer down your problems into categories,” and not being bossy about sorting things out. We need to go at your pace and have absolutely zero judgement of you.

After our drop-in service, we’ve got wrap-around advocacy. There are workers who are ready to do some accompaniment type work with women, often, tackling things like housing problems. All of the women who come to us have got insecure housing – it’s London – but that will be the case in many parts of the country.

We work with many women who’ve got problems with their health, physical health as much as mental health. Chronic physical health problems keep you in poverty and are a real barrier to making changes in your life. There are lots of issues around destitution and poverty. Our advocacy workers are there to help try and work that out and go at each woman’s pace.

They also work alongside outreach workers. We have a mini team of three women who go out to different parts of London where there’s still street prostitution. These often involve extremely vulnerable women and a lot of risk. The outreach team also visits women-only hostels and other similar places.

I’ve taken some time to explain what we’ve got, as a very small charity, before I tell you that we’re not commissioned. This means that neither the local council nor the London mayor, for example, and nor any part of national government is paying for the work that we do, because there is barely any commissioning of this kind of support.

When we talk about what as a society we want for women and what is women’s equality, and when we talk about what should the legal model be around the ability to exit, we’ve got to be serious about the fact that already, right now, we don’t do anything to enable women to exit, even those who are able to articulate and say they want to exit. There isn’t commissioning of this work, and we’re doing it off the back of trusts and foundations: old-fashioned, shake a tin charity fundraising.

And really, in the future, we need to envision something quite different: the right to have support to get out of sexually exploitative and abusive situations. It shouldn’t be done on the basis that we’re doing it. This is a big issue for us.

So that is a bit about what we do and the women we work with. Now for the numbers. We are quite a small charity. We employ twelve people, have twenty volunteers, and our turnover is about £700,000. Last year we reached more than a thousand women – that includes women who came to our drop-in centre, women we’ve met on the streets, and the approximately 200 women who at any one time are engaged in long-term work with us to try and sort out some issues in their lives. That’s a good reach and good social value – if you measure charity work that way.

About the women we work with

The women we’re working with are involved, sometimes, in what people usually understand as prostitution: the exchange of sex acts for cash, either in their history or at the moment. Many are involved in what some people call survival sex or exchange. That’s where there isn’t cash, but where they might be exchanging sex to feed an addiction or for basic life needs, somewhere to stay, for safety, because they’re safer with the person they’re with than elsewhere.

We are working with women whose properties have been cuckooed, which is a huge problem, in London, and around the country. Cuckooing, which is extremely vicious and which the law is still not settled on, is when people who are typically involved in the drugs trade take over vulnerable people’s flats. When those people are single women, it commonly involves sexual coercion.

We work with migrant women who’ve been trafficked for sexual exploitation. And despite some of the claims that we hear about having good law and practice and anti-slavery stances around this, actually those women get lost. They can be very unsure of their status and what will happen if they are known to the authorities. They can also be being threatened and often have been told by traffickers that, if you make yourselves known, you’re going to be principally an immigration offender, so don’t try to seek any kind of support.

The women we’re working with are vulnerable in many ways. And I know language is difficult in this area. A lot of people don’t like that term, but I can’t find another good term that is appropriate for some of the women we work with. Some of those women will, for example, come across OnlyFans as an option and might ask our workers, “do you think this is better?” or “do you think this is safe?” or “can you help me with it?”

It’s extremely worrying that OnlyFans presents itself as simpler, easier, and safer than the in-person sexual exploitation these women might have already experienced. It’s extremely worrying because of what is already known about OnlyFans, and the way that women are groomed into what initially seems to be quite simple activity and are then approached by those who market their pages and content, and will soon encourage them into something that they’ve not understood.

The intrusion of that invitation, because of how fluid both real life and contact prostitution and sexual exploitation are, with everything that’s available digitally, is concerning. In terms of law and policy, what we’ve got is indifference to all of this and prostitution.

Our charity’s big challenge is at the moment, beyond trying to stay open and to fund it well, is trying to work out what is the most effective outreach we can do for women, where the prostitution is brokered entirely online and then takes place in flats, parlours, and other private places.

The models we use for reaching women on the streets are obviously not going to work for that. We need to work out how to reach these women. We’re doing this in a context where in the same way that exiting services are generally not commissioned and are not supported to help women to exit, we’ve also got official indifference about how much is happening, where it is happening, what is its nature, who is it happening to, and what is its scale, even in a city like London.

Official indifference

It’s important to understand, when we talk about the law and policy, and where we want it to be, we don’t even have a good answer to questions like how much prostitution there is in England and Wales and what is its nature and how does it happen? What is its connection to the economy and crime, and everything else? The Government is not trying to understand this. The last study that had a chance of assessing it was done in 2019 and it didn’t answer these questions.

And since then, despite all of our awareness of this incredible digital transformation of the so-called industry, we don’t know enough about it in terms of what’s happening and who it’s happening to. We’ve got a policing context and a social context, where there’s not good comprehension of what’s happening in our neighbourhoods. Who does it involve? What kind of support might they need? And that’s a really difficult context to operate in.

Personally, I think it suits commissioners at a local level through to national politicians, for it to be out of sight and out of mind. And it is a bit more out of sight than when there was more prostitution on the streets in all of our towns. There’s something important about that, I think, in terms of why it’s not coming onto the policy landscape the way we need it to. A certain amount of indifference.

The living consequences of the ‘sex work’ framing

The question then that I wanted to try and get to is, what is the living consequence of the creep of the ‘sex work’ framing for women who are at risk of, or in, prostitution now?

I recognise that for many workers, in particular in public sector settings, the tendency to start using the ‘sex work’ term often comes from a good place. ‘Sex work’ as a term has been presented as neutral, polite, respectful, and in particular sexually non-judgmental. I understand why individual workers might catch the language and believe that they’re being helpful in using it.

But the reality when ‘sex work’ is taken on as a term, by people working in health, addictions, housing, and so on, is that you’re signalling that you find the activity morally neutral and not that meaningful. And you’re also closing down a woman’s opportunity to talk about it if she wants to and if in fact she needs to disclose that what is happening to her now or in the past is harmful and there are reasons why she got there.

In minimising and neutralising it, we’re cutting off the opportunities, and actually the rights that women should have, to be able to be explicit and clear about the nature of what’s happening to them, how they got there, the real conversations they need to have, and the help that they need to get.

We work with women all the time who are also encountering other services, such as healthcare and sexual and reproductive health services, GPs, primary care through to hospitals. If the fact of prostitution comes up, these workers will use the neutralising terms, and are, in effect, sometimes closing down the opportunity for a different conversation about what’s going on in these women’s lives.

Those who are working in addictions, who might understand that a woman is involved in prostitution, will similarly, when using these terms, approach prostitution as something that’s really just about harm reduction and safety. And that’s also a missed opportunity for somebody who might need to talk.

In other services, there’s a contrast which helps to give the lie to some of what’s going on. In housing, for example, it’s probably better if your involvement in prostitution is not known, because it’s not going to help your chances and your points for where you are in the system, or for landlords to trust you as a reliable tenant.

In terms of other charities who are doing commissioned, state-funded work with women – they might be running hostels or advice services, refuges, or mental health services – when they are captured by this language, they signal to women that prostitution is not a priority and this is not a place where you might be able to make a disclosure and to seek some extra help.

In social care, if involvement in prostitution in your past or present is known, that can significantly count against you. Women often know not to disclose at all, but if it did become known, for example from a third party, it is going to affect the judgment on a woman about whether she’s able to and should be able to, look after her children. Which is ironic when you think about that alongside the way domestic violence victims are also judged for their ability to care properly for their children and to be trusted to do so. You’ve got a recognition of victimhood in one place and not in the other.

In policing, from my experience in London and from what I know of other organisations like ours in a couple of other parts of the country, our legal situation, our legal and political model, means that actually we’ve got something very laissez-faire, quite British, an approach which is undecided about prostitution. It means that different police forces are doing very different things, and actually quite unaccountable people at the top of those forces can make their own minds up about what their approach should be in a given area.

So that’s a bit of a reflection on how different workers doing their job, often with every good intention, can be closing down or affecting women’s ability to seek support, and sending a signal about what prostitution and the harms that are in different kinds of sexual exploitation really mean, and the impact of that.

And I think it’s important for those in unions and public sector professions to really think about the implication of this. Because lots of us are being gaslit when we’re encouraged to just accept the sex work terminology. Lots of women, I believe, have a strong sense that it doesn’t feel quite right, but I’m not supposed to say that anymore because it’s somehow impolite.

The women who are actually in prostitution or who have been in their past, they are having language transmitted at them that is neutralising what’s happened to them, and that is saying that it’s not a moral question and that it should be regarded as any other work. And for some women that’s actually quite insulting and problematic.

The need for prostitution to be at the heart of VAWG strategy

In terms of where we go next, I think a part of this message today is about the questioning of this terminology and what it has already done, culturally, politically, socially. Policy-wise, the government has this huge mission to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade. There is a real question about whether prostitution is going to feature in that strategy.

If you look at the harms, if you look at rates for domestic violence and sexual violence, which are fairly well counted, those factors are always drivers in the lives of women who become involved in prostitution. You can’t have a strategy that’s about halving violence against women and girls in a decade and that sets out to do that in a purposeful way, and then not include the set of women who are the most serially offended against and who are subject to the most harm, and actually at the most risk.

It also has the effect of having absolutely no curiosity about who the men who are using those women are, because as we’ve also already said, it’s not average or ordinary men who often do this. It’s men who already have extremely misogynistic attitudes, and those men are part of the harm in the rest of the community. It’s foolish in the extreme, more than foolish, politically, to think of leaving prostitution out of violence against women strategies. But that’s what we’re facing. And it’s really important that trade union activists and others and everybody around Labour lobbies hard for that not to happen.