After a two-decade campaign by sex worker rights advocates, and 13 previous attempts to pass a sex work decriminalization bill through the state parliament there, the upper house of the legislature in Australia’s fifth most populous state has passed a bill that would remove criminal penalties for most activities associated with getting paid for sex, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The South Australia upper house passed the bill after two days of debate last week, and the legislation must now be approved by the state assembly in Adelaide.
Under the bill, if passed, living off the proceeds of sex work, engaging in sex work, and soliciting sex for hire will no longer be criminal offenses. The term “common prostitute” would be stricken from the South Australia criminal code, and sex workers—and former sex workers—receive protection from discrimination on the basis of their profession, under the bill.
But according to a report on the bill on The Conversation site, the bill would also remove the threat of police raids on sex workers.
“You feel like there’s a slight concern that someone, a client might hurt you or something like that,” said one sex worker quoted in the Conversation report. “There is absolutely no comparison to the fear that I have of the police.”
According to an ABC report, charges filed for sex work “crimes” have spiked over the past two years in South Australia. Sex workers there say they believe that the increase in what they call police harassment coincided with a 2017 attempt to pass an earlier sex work decriminalization bill through the South Australia parliament.
Police in the state filed 211 sex work charges in the 2017-2018 fiscal year, 200 more than in 2016. More than eight out of 10 of those charges were for “keeping a brothel” or "receiving money in a paid brothel,” both of which would no longer be crimes under the new bill.
The development in South Australia came about a week after legislators in New York introduced a sex work decriminalization bill in that U.S. state, as AVN.com reported.
Photo By Rocky88 / Wikimedia Commons
