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Is it possible for prostitution to conform to employment norms and law?

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

Hello, I’m Esther. I’m the policy adviser at Nordic Model Now! and a survivor of prostitution and pornography. I’m going to talk to you about what whether prostitution can ever conform with our employment laws, regulations and practices, and what the impact on these laws, regulations and practices might be if prostitution were fully decriminalised in the UK.

Job description and person specification

When employers recruit staff it’s standard practice to create a job description and person specification explaining what the role involves and the type of person they are looking for.

Let’s consider what that might look like for prostitution. Time is limited, so I’ll just take some of the general categories.

General tasks:

  • Sexual activity with multiple male strangers, regardless of their age, appearance, attitude, health, and hygiene.
  • Every orifice must be available.
  • Re-enact degrading scenes from porn.

Responsibilities:

  • Do whatever the buyer wants, even if it hurts or disgusts you.
  • Never complain.
  • Simulate pleasure. Be convincing.
  • The buyer is always right.
  • Abandon personal boundaries, and health and safety standards to stay competitive.

Desirable qualifications

  • As young, or with as little previous experience in the sex trade, as possible.
  • Ability to dissociate.
  • Preferably poor and vulnerable with a lack of social support.
  • A history of sexual abuse, exploitation, self-harm, homelessness or a childhood spent in care.

Career development pathway

  • Downwards the longer you spend in the role
  • Lengthy experience in the industry makes you less desirable to punters.
  • Potential negative impact on future career, health and wellbeing, and even the ability to work.
  • Social isolation. Substance abuse.

I think you must agree that this does not represent anything like a normal job.

Over-recruitment

Over-recruitment is standard in the sex industry because punters demand choice over the type of person they choose to pay – and let’s be clear, they are not just paying for sex but paying for someone who won’t say “No” to whatever he wants. If punters don’t have a satisfactory choice, they look for another provider who is able to supply it.

So, when prostitution has free rein, the supply of available women involved in it always tends to exceed demand. The resulting competition lowers the prices women can charge and increases the risks they face as they will need to engage in more extreme and dangerous acts or have larger numbers of prostitution encounters to keep the same income.

Over-recruitment reflects punters’ demands for “new” bodies and the fact they pay more for recent recruits and pay less the longer a woman has been in the industry. This is not standard practice in any other work environment. Does it happen in the NHS? In the railway industry? In the financial sector?

Punters pay less to use women with longer involvement and commonly post reviews on prostitution advertising websites and punter forums saying things to the effect that more “seasoned” women are more “practised” and less “genuine”. This is an implicit admission that longevity in the industry damages women and suggests that buyers clearly recognise that prostitution is harmful.

Another industry would only overrecruit on a similar scale if it anticipates a very high turnover of staff due to serious harm to physical or mental health or death, such as might happen if you were maximising recruitment of soldiers to send into combat zones.

Health and safety

Employers must post notices in workplaces advising employees of health and safety risks. This is what one might look like for prostitution:

Heli has already mentioned the homicide rate for women involved in prostitution. The incidence of PTSD is also higher and more complex than that found in combat veterans.[*] Traumatic brain damage in women who have lived experience of prostitution is typically at rates comparable to victims of torture and professional boxers.

The risks are intrinsic to prostitution

Exposure to such huge risk is not a consequence of the introduction of the Nordic Model.

In July 2024, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously held that France had not violated Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights – the right to private and family life – by introducing the Nordic Model in 2016.

The court said that the negative effects relating to the dangers and harms which the applicants described and attributed to the introduction of the Nordic Model had already existed and been observed in France before the Nordic Model was introduced there. The Court noted that you could reasonably infer from this that prostitution is inherently violent. Prostitution should therefore be seen as a form of violence against women and girls, not work.

What would be the implications for workplace health and safety practices, which are costly for employers to implement and maintain, particularly in the health and social care sectors, if these were considered acceptable workplace risks?

Commodities vs. people

Prostitution treats women as commodities.

A photograph of a variety of international cheeses.
Retailers can legally price commodities, like these cheeses, differently based on their country of origin, age, etc.

Consumer protection laws let you choose to buy or sell goods of a particular description or place of origin, such as these cheeses from different countries, and agree a price based on this description. However, employers can’t legally pay people differently based on their age, sex, race, or other protected characteristics.

Paying a person less on the grounds of their ethnicity, nationality or national origins, is unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, as is paying someone less based on their age, sex, gender identity, disability or any of the other protected characteristics set out in the 2010 Act.

In the sex trade it is standard to charge different rates for women based on their age and ethnicity.

An advert for a brothel in South East Asia, with the following list of prices: China girl - 250 Hong Kong girl - 250 Malay girl - 180 Philippine girl - 200 Russian girl - 500

This image is a photo of a advert for a brothel in South East Asia. Notice that it charges twice as much for (white) Russian women than for Asian women.

Similar price discrepancies based on ethnicity of women in the sex trade are seen in many other countries. On UK punter review forums where sex buyers mention how much they paid a woman for sex acts, the premium for being white, speaking English fluently and appearing to be educated is almost 100%, so this doesn’t only happen in Asia.

These payment practices are standard in the sex trade because the sex buyer is king and punters fetishise ethnicity and social class.

Some of the characteristics buyers use to determine how much they are willing to pay are also hate crime characteristics in the UK.

The price differences reflect notions of subjugation and conquest and myths about female sexuality. They wouldn’t be accepted or defended based on “autonomy” or choice in any other service industry because they are incompatible with equality legislation and human dignity.

The legal sex industry in Germany likes to market itself as a form of “healthcare”. Some German mega-brothels segregate prostituted women by ethnicity and other characteristics, including gender identity, on different floors of the building.

Would you expect to be able to choose which floor of a healthcare facility you went to based on the protected characteristics of the staff?

If prostitution were fully decriminalised or legalised in the UK, other industries would inevitably question why they must cover the financial and regulatory costs of complying with equality laws while prostitution does not.

It’s highly likely that equivalent demands would be made by users of other services, particularly health and social care. How could that be prevented? How could a union that supported these practices in one industry deny them in another?

All of this would seriously affect the operation of the 2010 Equality Act itself.

Workplace sexual assault and harassment

Headlines about sexual abuse in the workplace by Mohamed Al Fayed, Harvey Weinstein and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.

Agreements involving paying for sexual acts are regarded as contracts for an “immoral purpose” in England and Wales and are generally unenforceable on the grounds of illegality.

This would have to change for prostitution contracts to be enforceable if full decriminalisation were introduced. Doing so would have wider implications.

A “consistent course of previous dealing” between parties to a contract, or “the custom of the relevant trade” can result in terms becoming incorporated into contracts over time without being written down. Could that include providing sexual services for benefit outside the sex industry?

Courts can refuse to enforce what they consider “onerous or unusual” contract terms but would these include expectations that staff provide sexual services to employers or managers in return for advancement if courts would enforce providing payment for the same services in prostitution?

When would sex at work not be “work”?

Further reading

References

[*] Multiple studies have found very high rates of PTSD among women who have experienced prostitution. For example:

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