What I want to say about ‘sex work is work’

I used to believe that sex work was work, and could be made safer through rights-based advocacy. I don’t believe that anymore.

From 2000 to 2011, I worked for (what was then) a migrant women’s self-organization in Austria. It was my first real job. Not student-union activism or the self-discovery through transnational youth platforms. I was 24 when I started. By the time I left at 35, I had published, spoken, petitioned, and organized for sex workers’ rights on every level from local to European. We campaigned in front of Parliament under provocative slogans like ‘Sex workers lust for… their rights!’ I knew the talking points inside out. I had written many of them.

The organization itself had been built by Latin American women, many of them exiled feminists who had fought against military juntas in their home countries. Some had been persecuted, imprisoned, tortured. Many had lost friends and relatives. Disappeared. They carried pain and rage and wisdom and courageous conviction. They had a deep understanding of themselves as political beings. One that came from risking your life and your family to stand up to totalitarian regimes. The political establishment in Vienna didn’t know what to do with them. It oscillated between awe and fear. These women brought clarity and confrontation to a technocratic class of institutionalized feminism.

It was where I grew up and matured—not just professionally, but personally. I learned, explored, argued, celebrated, and got politicized in an all-female environment. I remain deeply grateful for having had that experience in my youth. Most of my colleagues were migrant women. We worked exclusively with female clients. And we cherished our team meetings, red wine-fueled festivities, dramatic Latin American music blaring at social gatherings after exhausting days. Sisterhood and survival and solidarity.

Toward the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, many migrant women’s organizations in Austria and Germany, including the one I would later join, began paying close attention to two interconnected developments in the wake of the AIDS crisis. First, the rise in sex tourism: Western European men traveling to countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa to exploit women facing economic hardship and dependence. Second, the so-called feminization of migration: an increasing number of women migrating alone from countries in the Global South to find ways to support themselves and their families. These women often came from profoundly patriarchal contexts and entered Europe as third-country nationals, subject to harsh immigration regimes that made legal labor migration nearly impossible. And yet, as women, they were highly sought after in specific sectors: domestic work, elder care, marriage—and the sex industry.

It became clear that many of these women had been trafficked. Some had been promised jobs as dancers or waitresses, only to find themselves in exploitative and coercive conditions. Others knew they would be involved in prostitution, but not under the circumstances they ended up facing. That’s how my organization began working on issues of trafficking, by listening to the stories of the women themselves. And it’s how we began supporting migrant women in the sex industry.

For eleven years, I worked as a cultural mediator—later as project manager and regional network coordinator—alongside women, many of them Hungarian and Nigerian, who had been pulled into this system. With Hungarian as my first language and being half-Egyptian, I could at times bridge divides and offer support on subjects that required trust, delicacy, and shared context. We did outreach and streetwork, accompanied women to health check-ups and abortion clinics, wrote letters to the police and to courts on their behalf, phoned landlords and activist friends to find emergency housing. We held workshops, facilitated training programs, organized conferences. Devised campaigns, petitioned policymakers, stopped the Nordic model from being implemented. We fought for the recognition of migrant female sex workers as subjects in a deeply gendered and globalized industry that made profit off their vulnerability and weak legal status. Rights, not rescue. Decriminalization, not paternalism.

This is me, megaphone in hand, at a protest we organised in front of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna together with activists from our transnational network for sex workers’ rights. (And yes, that’s someone in a condom costume next to me.)

I knew of Julie Bindel before I ever met her. We all did. Our Scottish network partner told us everything we needed to know: she was vile, hateful, dangerous—and, worst of all, an abolitionist. And those were our enemies.

When I finally got to know her in 2022—after she graciously reached out to me following my ban from attending a lesbian conference—it was one of the first things I told her: You know I’m not an abolitionist, right?

Luckily, she never made that a condition of engagement. And neither did the many other feminists I’ve met in the years since—gender-critical, radical, or otherwise aligned with perspectives critical of the sex trade. Some didn’t even identify strongly as feminists, but they still rejected the idea that prostitution could be made safe or empowering. They didn’t exile me for disagreeing. But we tended to avoid the topic altogether. I was too easily pulled into defensiveness, and from there, I could quickly become confrontational.

And while I knew there was something I needed to revisit and test properly, I chose to stick to the arguments I knew best. Most centred on migrant women and their specific situation—arguments that shifted the focus to overlapping layers of discrimination, racism, insurmountable immigration laws, and how they were often framed as solely victims of trafficking within feminist analysis. I avoided the growing conceptual insecurities I had about it and pushed them to the back of my mind. It was hard enough to dismantle one belief system at a time.

It took something horrific to force me to stop circling.

In late February 2024, three Chinese women were murdered in Vienna. They were working independently from a small apartment—a discreet, anonymous studio with no red lights, no signage, nothing to indicate what happened inside. It was exactly the kind of work setting that, back in our mapping projects, we had identified as the safest option in the sex industry: no alcohol, no smoking, no bouncers. Women managing their own appointments, their own space, their own rules.

Their killer was a 27-year-old Afghan asylum seeker. He had never been to the studio before. There was no advertising, no visible reason for him to find it—yet he sought it out and specifically targeted the women inside. Of the four women present, three were stabbed to death—dozens of times each. One woman survived by locking herself in a room. In court, the perpetrator claimed to have been bewitched by a woman he met en route in Serbia, and cited religious delusions and hallucinations. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital.

This was, of course, not the first murder, or the first act of extreme violence, against women in prostitution in Austria. There have been others, some equally brutal. But this one pierced the narrative we had spent years defending. If something like this could happen in the very setting we had long identified as the safest, what did that say about the entire framework our advocacy had been built on?

And what did the new generation of advocates in my former organization say about it?

The response—from them and from the broader sex work advocacy network in Austria—was robotic. The same lines about destigmatization, visibility, and labor rights were rolled out, as if this hadn’t been a targeted massacre of women in one of the few environments we had deemed relatively safe. There was no re-evaluation. No one admitted we might have been mistaken about the “autonomy, protection, and community” that this work setting was supposed to offer—where three women had just been slaughtered. No discomfort, either, with the idea that violence might not be incidental to the sex industry, but inherent to it.

The gap between that brutal reality and the sanitized ideology they were promoting had become impossible to bridge. Why keep pretending this industry can be made safe? That women can somehow not be exploited? That migrant women, of all people, could ever find true autonomy in a system designed—by its very nature—to degrade and violate them? But how do you challenge any of it when you’ve already sacrificed conceptual clarity to dogmatic relativism?

In recent years, the language of sex work advocacy has drifted further and further from the actual lives of women. Feminist concerns about male violence were reframed as moral panic. The overwhelming fact that most people in prostitution are women, often migrants, was constantly undercut by qualifiers: but men sell sex too, not all clients are men, queer and trans people are also part of this. Which is all technically true. But allowing marginal cases to reshape the entire analytical framework is reckless. The strategy is clear: dissolve the category of woman to avoid naming male violence and confronting prostitution as a patriarchal system of exploitation. Political clarity is replaced with complexity—and feminism is expected to include everyone, or be called exclusionary and violent.

The more expansive the definition of woman became, the more invisible actual women were—especially poor, migrant women. We stopped saying “men are violent toward women in prostitution,” and started saying “sex workers face violence.” Even naming the perpetrator became controversial. Feminists began apologizing for ever having centered women. Every reference to women now had to include “and queers.” And when race entered the frame, the focus began to widen: migrant women became the entry point for expanding the category, adding identities, layering experiences, until the term itself no longer fit. “Migrant women” became “marginalized communities.” Eventually, prostitution was no longer about sexual violence. It was another feminized labor sector, like cleaning, care work, or tourism.

My former organisation has since gone full asterisk, dutifully adding it to every word that might otherwise be understood to mean women. The feminist colleagues I had learned from are mostly gone. The intergenerational handover failed, as it often does when it requires slaying the symbolic mother. Our once-feminist organisations have become unrecognisable. They’ve been queered—in both form and content. Analysis has been replaced by slogans; politically grounded solidarity by performative allyship. The fierce feminists gave way to punk-styled activists, queered-up NGOs, and a new era of LGBT organisations eager to adopt the sex work agenda as their own. “Sex work is work” became a political posture—a subversive, edgy allegiance to the underdog, performed for visibility and approval.

Watching this unfold from a distance, I kept waiting for someone to pull the brakes and reverse course. No one did. And for too long, neither did I. I hesitated to take a closer look at what had become of our advocacy. I held on to parts of the original analysis: the conditions shaping the lives and survival of migrant women in the sex industry, the need to recognise them as subjects in a system that exploits everything out of them. But eventually, I began seeking out more discussion, more confrontation. “Why should it be acceptable for migrant women to do something that would be considered too dangerous, too violent, too degrading for anyone else—even if a few don’t experience it that way?” an advocate for the rights of migrant and refugee women asked me. She was right.

What started as an attempt to name and confront the exploitation of migrant women had become something else entirely: a celebration of the system itself. A cover-up of its brutality, complicit with a structure it has no intention of disrupting—rebranded in the language of autonomy, choice, and pride.

For over a decade, I was one of the most prominent voices in Austria arguing for the “sex work is work” framework. I no longer believe that rights language can compensate for the inherent risks at the core of this system—especially when everyone has become so skilled at explaining the violence away. But it’s not incidental. It’s structural. And we have to stop protecting the systems that make it inevitable.