There is a disturbing trend among gender and sexuality focused activists and scholars to extend arguments in defense of the rights of sex workers into a defense of sex work itself. While the former is necessary, the latter is unacceptable.

Protecting the rights of sex workers while they are surviving through sex work is a must. But this does not and should not mean a defense and glamourising of sex-work as an industry. Protecting sex workers and abolishing sex work are one and the same thing, extensions of the same human rights principles. For sex work – like many other types of “work” – can never be a dignified “industry” free from exploitation.

Induced consent is not consent. The whole premise of consensual sex work is flawed since that consent is induced by the power of money. And yet, degreed individuals in the development sector and humanities departments put forth all manner of rhetoric that makes them no better than educated collaborators of human traffickers and pimps.

Sex work cannot be an eternal category of work. There is no place for sex work in a civilized society. And all efforts to secure the rights of sex workers must lead in that direction.

Otherwise, more people always get pulled into sex work due to economic hardships and human trafficking and the struggle to protect all of them becomes a slippery slope because an exploitative economy will just find a lesser paid or more vulnerable person to turn into an exploited sex worker.

At The Change Project, the aim is to protect the rights of sex workers in the truest sense. And that includes making conscious efforts towards the abolition of sex work.