Selling Sex, Surviving Austerity: A critical analysis of causes and implications of sex work in neoliberal, post-crisis Britain.

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2007/08, the UK government enacted a set of social and economic policies which, as part of its 'austerity measures', attempted to reduce national debt and the budget deficit (Murphy, 2017); such policies have on numerous occasions been found to be most negatively experienced by the working class, and specifically working class women, through cuts to social welfare, rising un-/under-employment, and stagnating wages compared to rising living costs (see Griffin, 2015). Finding themselves in a position of poverty and insecurity has led a seemingly increasing number of women to engage in 'survival sex', that is the participation in sex work in order to meet one's immediate basic needs such as for food, energy and housing (Work and Pensions Committee, 2019), with one recent report linking this rise directly to the introduction of the Universal Credit benefit reforms and the associated delayed and/or largely inadequate payments received under the system (ibid.). Such correlations have been refuted or minimised by governmental bodies when presented with such findings, however, (ibid.) and instead much policy and public opinion relies on problematically simplistic constructions of sex workers as victims of either trafficking and coercion - a 'sexual humanitarianism' discourse (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016) - or of addiction or mental illness (Sundahl, 1988). Sex work as a survival mechanism is not exclusive to times of austerity, however, and one may argue that austerity policy is informed by, or at least shares similarities with, neoliberal state capitalism more generally (see Harvey, 2007); as Hardy (2016) demonstrates in her study of Argentina, neoliberalism as a political ideology is a significant factor in the proliferation of sex workers who, faced with a rolling back of state provisions and precarity, often find sex work to offer them an income alongside the flexibility to provide for themselves that which the state does not, including childcare, healthcare and education.