Victoria Needs to Change Its Outdated Sex Work Laws, Here’s Why

It's evening in Melbourne and a young woman paces up and down the street, her eyes looking about for potential clients. She's failed to notice something though: a car creeping behind her, gaining speed.

Suddenly the car takes a sharp left turn into a driveway, blocking her path. The passenger door swings open and a man leaps out. She tries to scream but the man covers her mouth, and drags her back inside the car. The young woman bites at his hand—he shrieks and loosens his grip—she runs, but the car follows.

Before she even reaches the streetlights, the car catches her, running her over. She spends the next few weeks in hospital, in a critical condition with tyre tracks up her back.

This was just one of the stories I heard while researching the dangers facing sex workers in Victoria. It's a reality many sex workers, both male and female, must face every night working on the streets of Melbourne. Aside from their own instincts and judgment, these workers have little protection or policing they can rely on.

Victoria's laws render street-based sex workers unlawful, unlicensed social pariahs. As a result, when street-based sex workers are victims of physical or sexual assault reporting this violence to the police is not an option.

"I've been a victim of crime. But I've never reported it to the police," says Lee, a street-based sex worker who's been working around St Kilda, on-and-off, for four years. "For me it never even comes into consideration."

Not feeling as though they can report crime to police, workers like Lee have very few options. "People will say 'report it to the police' but I always say no," she explains. "I don't want to report it then risk being dismissed or charge myself for soliciting or working."

Victoria's two-tier sex work industry shoulders a lot of the blame for the situation facing Lee and other street-based sex workers. Licensed brothels and escort agencies are permitted (as long as they comply with local council rules). But the government refuses to recognise the profession of those working on the street.

Since the introduction of the Sex Work Act in 1994—known then as the Prostitutes Control Act—sex worker advocacy groups have been lobbying for amendments to recognise the occupation of street-based sex workers.

Jane Green from Vixen Collective, the peer-only sex worker organisation, considers the laws to be "highly discriminative." She says if we want all sex workers to be safe, the laws need to change. "Their work and life is criminalised," says Green. "It's much more difficult for [street workers] to advocate more openly for their rights."

Despite the threat of violence from clients and strangers, Lee says her biggest fear as a street-based sex worker is police. "[It's] their behaviour; their intimidation tactics; the fear of being charged," she explains.

In Lee's experience, undercover police are often the most abusive towards sex workers. "They'll also do stuff that often constitutes stalking, like constantly following me around the block," she says. Although she knows decriminalisation won't solve everything, Lee says it would be a "massive step forward" for all sex workers.

But her views are not shared by everyone in the industry. Jess and Mercedes, who both work in a licensed brothel in Melbourne's CBD, say licensing is beneficial for all sex workers. "It keeps the girls out of it, it doesn't draw that line," says Mercedes.

Both women say they understand the challenges facing street-based workers but neither would ever consider conducting business from the sidewalks. "I feel sorry for them," says Jess. "Girls that work on the street get things thrown at them; they get raped; they get beaten up. It's horrific."

"This is a comfortable environment, " Mercedes adds. "We always feel safe here."

It was Jess who told me the tragic story of the street-based worker in St Kilda, who was ruthlessly run down by an attempted abductor. Jess was good friends with the girl, and says she can't understand why anyone would want to work on the street. "I reckon it's just really sad," she says. For her, splitting wages with the management of the brothel is a small price to pay for the security of working there.

In 2007, the University of New South Wales conducted the Law and Sex Worker Health [LASH] project, which aimed to examine the welfare and individual conditions of sex workers in Sydney, Perth, and Melbourne. Of those surveyed, only eight percent said they had been assaulted by a client. But the researchers only spoke to sex workers from licensed brothels.

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There are currently no official statistics on the number of street-based sex workers assaulted in Victoria. Jane Green believes this lack of information is driven by more than just Victoria's two-tier sex industry—there's also the issue of legal precedents that position the rape of sex workers as a lesser crime.

In R v Hakopian 1991, the defendant was charged for raping and assaulting a sex worker. But the judge declared the penalty must be reduced, because the rape of a sex worker would not result in the "reaction of revulsion which it might cause in a chaste woman." Green says precedence like this must be removed. "It discourages sex workers from pursuing charges in the court, and it contributes to situations where violence against sex workers is discounted," she says.

Green says there have even been cases where the offender will be completely acquitted of their crime, revealing legal discrimination that's a "slap in the face" to the sex worker community. Adrian Bayley, who raped and murdered Jill Meagher in 2012, was sentenced to a mere eight years in prison for the repeated rape of five different sex workers in St Kilda back in 2000.

When I ask Lee what she'd do if she were a victim of assault, she says she'd rather "cut [her] losses" than report it to the police. It's surprising that anyone, regardless of the legality of their occupation, would choose to remain silent following such a traumatic experience. But it does emphasise the flawed legal model dictating sex work in Victoria. Regardless of licensing, this is a model that perhaps never had the worker's best interest to begin with.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International announced a new policy advocating for governments around the world to decriminalise sex work—as well as associated acts, such as buying and soliciting.

VICE reached out to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, questioning whether his government has plans to end the state's two-tier sex work system. A government spokesperson replied: "The Government has no plans to review the Sex Work Act 1994."

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