Sex workers on Yarm road, Stockton

*names have been changed for the confidentiality of the commenter

 

On the screen before me, are the words “WikiSex Guide",”, an online platform which advises “where to find sex, working girls, prostitution, street hookers, brothels, red-light districts, sex shops, prostitutes…” (I’m not sure how much the subjects differ from the practice). The list of services on offer is seemingly inexhaustible. I’ve found myself here not because I’m in the market for some service revenue saucy entertainment, but because I’m investigating the attitudes towards sex work in the northern market-town of Stockton-on-Tees.

 

Known infamously as the home of the friction match and the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the lesser known (depending on who you ask) sex trade is not the small town’s main focal point (despite the act itself possibly inducing some friction matches of its own). What the locals and the town council commonly refer to as the “issue” of prostitution in Stockton is mainly focused on Yarm Road where, as Dave* told me, “gardens, yards, parking areas” all “provide cover for anything “quick”.

 

Dave suggested that on Yarm Road, “the punters (clients) can easily tell the girls who are waiting, and the girls get the safety of a lit, main, busy road.” However, having sent me photos of this area, Dave did clarify below his caption of a photo “showing a working girl in broad daylight”, that “there is a chance the girl is not as I have called it, and she is simply waiting for the bus.” Nevertheless, he continued, “this is a common sight on Yarm Road”.

 

Despite contemporary campaigns and protests for sex workers’ rights, and the formation of groups like the Sex Workers’ Union, for years the selling of sex has caused controversy amongst Stockton locals. The “issue” is still met with fear and animosity today. Most recently, sex workers’ presence in this area was brought up in a Stockton Borough Council meeting last year. The topic incited debate as Councillor Sakeel Hussain, who represents Ropner Ward, described prostitution and sex workers themselves as something “the residents of Yarm Road have had to put up with…for the last 15 years or so.”

 

Dave reckons that “after 15 years…it has improved a little,” as “the number of girls seems to have reduced.” However, it seems to be the “working hours” of the Yarm Road girls, who linger on “doorsteps” during “daytimes, including school drop-off and pick-up times,” that residents are finding most upsetting, rather than the girls’ quantitative value. While it’s obvious that school children shouldn’t be exposed to prostitution, I do think it’s worth contemplating why it is that women selling sex in this area might choose to do so during daytime hours, in which they’re more visible.

 

The problem is ongoing, with one facebook user commenting several years ago that “it’s not just the evening that you don’t feel safe walking down this road!” Despite his opposition to the “Yarm road prostitutes (who) mainly do it to get their next fix,” be it alcohol or other forms of drugs, even Dave is aware of the girls’ need for a safe place to work, such as a “well lit, main, busy road” like Yarm Road.

 

Unfortunately, in part due to their reduced numbers, I was unable to speak to any “Yarm Road girls” about why they might also feel unsafe, or to find out where it is they’ve disappeared to. However, another Stockton resident who had himself been propositioned several times by women working on Yarm Road, commented that it hasn’t made him “feel personally unsafe”, but that he did “believe that these women are unsafe. They are often being pimped by their boyfriends or drug dealers and get into cars with strangers. This makes these women highly vulnerable. Why is more not done to protect them?”

 

In the same comment section of a facebook post about Yarm Road published several years ago, another facebook user expressed concern that Stockton’s solution to this problem would take inspiration from the legalisation model implemented in Leeds in 2016. Despite fewer arrests taking place in this area, the commenter writes that this zone in Leeds has seen “a huge rise in crime” as a result. They add that the management model “has not protected the working girls at all. The girls ply for trade outside of the scheme’s set hours, often seen by families on the school run, and work outside the area, so the (Leeds) council responded by increasing it further. It has impacted negatively on everyone living or working in the area.” Unfortunately, given Dave’s statement that Yarm Road “often has police up and down it”, it seems as if Stockton’s sex workers are already suffering from the same consequences of legalisation faced by their Yorkshire counterparts.

 

However, Councillor Norma Stephenson, the cabinet member for community safety, made a more compassionate case for the protection of sex workers. Sex work, Stephenson argued, needed a “thoughtful, empathetic and varied approach to a complex issue considering residents’ safety and sex workers’ rights and needs, talking to them and offering alternatives.” In the council meeting, Stephenson emphasised the vulnerability of sex workers, many of whom are “often victims of addiction, abuse and control by organised criminals”. She further argued that what sex workers needed, rather than vilification and condemnation, was “support services” to “stop exploitation, tackle causes and lesson risks”.

 

When I reached out to ask how the council was responding to complaints around the presence of sex workers on Yarm Road, and to see if she had any more matters on the topic herself, unfortunately Councillor Stephenson wasn’t available for comment. However, I was assured by Marc Stephenson, her assistant director, and the officer responsible for community safety in Stockton on Tees, that they “have a significant amount of work ongoing at the moment through [our] Project Harmony”, and would be willing to share their findings once the program has progressed.

 

Unfortunately, not everyone has the intention of working “with sex workers”, rather than working to “rid the streets” of those working the streets. In February last year, the owners of a sandwich shop on Yarm Lane described the rate of crime in this area as “out of control”, claiming that many of their customers were “too scared to visit” the shop. The owner of Flavours Sandwiches and Desserts told Teesside Live that “there’s so much crime that goes on in front of our eyes…drugs being sold on corners and prostitution. It’s not safe.” However, their concern is directed solely towards their customer’s security, who “see what goes on and get scared”, rather than the position of vulnerable women involved in the sex work industry.

 

Through the conflation of sex work with other forms of criminal activity, sex work - and the people who participate in it - are often vilified as alcoholic drug users by many Stockton residents, who neither consider the circumstances which may have led to addiction, or the possibility of respecting sex workers as labourers who deserve workers’ rights. A reason for this might be, considering what Dave told me, that while Escorts (of which WikiSexGuide suggests there are many available in Stockton), “make a very healthy living out of sex work online”, the “street girls often have very cheap prices and very quick services”.

The comparison between Escorting as a legitimate “healthy living”, derived from a perception of how Escorts spend their money (on “housing, large tvs, cars etc”), and road-side sex work apparently carried out only by “heavily alcohol dependent”, people who “do not work, have never worked, and largely will never work”, is certainly an interesting one.

 

The difference between Escorts and Prostitutes therefore seems to be, not, as Dave suggests, the intention behind selling sex (whether for “money” or their “next fix), but rather the appearance of these women (as perceived through the male gaze) as either “professional” and “radiant” or “very poor, with cheap clothing”. Although perhaps not Dave’s intention, his distinction between the presentation of online and in-person sex workers largely disregards the role of socio-economic disparities—or at least the appearance of such factors—in terms of individual career opportunities, as prevalent in sex work as with any other profession.

 

Whilst a sex worker is hardly likely to list their achievements on a CV like someone going for a more conventional job role might do, the connotations of professional-therefore-respectable, and cheap-therefore-deplorable still apply to the sex trade. The dually paradoxical facilitation and impossibility of self-commodification as a means of survival when the only job you can get stagnates any possibility for social mobility through the inaccessibility of overpriced material means emphasises the gravitas of unequal wealth distribution under modern-day capitalism. This means, effectively, that even “dressing for the job you want” (or perhaps undressing in this case) becomes unrealistic.

 

Upon consideration of the economic circumstances which may lead someone into sex work, Dave attributed the rise in “Onlyfans” to “free time rather than financial need”, as he hadn’t “personally heard of anyone coming into prostitution from losing work.” However, numerous accounts of “survival sex” tell a very different story.

 

MP reports carried out in 2019 indicated that many women had turned to sex work while waiting for slow payments of Universal Credit since changes to the credit system meant that initial payments took longer to arrive, and were often less than they had been before 2013.

 

According to a Yahoo!finance article in 2019, one woman reported carrying out sexual acts with a shop manager in order to be “let off” when caught shoplifting out of desperation to support her family. While this specific case involving gender exploitation and blackmail certainly wouldn’t constitute consensual sex work, for many women sex work is seen as a viable means of selling their services in order to acquire money they need, which they are unable to obtain in a way that is regulated by a government which has proved itself classist, incompetent, and unreliable again and again.

 

In terms of the criminality of sex work and drug dealing on Yarm Road, the latter is perhaps easier to prosecute given the clear statement from The Crown Prosecution Service that “it is illegal to possess, supply and produce controlled drugs.” That’s not to suggest that, just because it's easier to draw clearer lines around the legality or illegality of the sale of harmful drugs compared with the sale of sex, it’s not also important to consider the economic disparities produced by capitalism which may lead someone into selling drugs as a viable option. However, the difference between the sale of sex and the sale of class A drugs is partly due to the autonomous role that sex workers play in the sale of a not inherently harmful product i.e their own body.

 

Whereas drug dealing involves the possession of something which is always illegal, by comparison, the sexualisation or pleasuring of someone sexually has more contextual connotations owing to the conceptualisation of sex as a different, albeit still potentially addictive, form of consumption.

 

While the exchange of sexual services for money is legal in the UK, under the 2003 Sexual Offences Act, many pragmatisms of sex work are deemed unlawful. These include “soliciting on the street or other public place”, “advertising sexual services”, “owning or managing a brothel” (deemed as any premises used by more than one person for sex work), “paying for the services of a sex worker who’s forced or threatened into it”, or “pimping”. Many of these related activities express concern for the presentation of sex work at a public level, which suggest that it isn’t the soliciting of clients in general that is unlawful, but rather the act of approaching potential clients in plain sight, such as during daylight hours.

 

This list specifies the illegality of purchasing sex only if the worker is “forced or threatened into it”—in which case surely this wouldn’t constitute buying, but rather an act of theft of the sex worker’s services/property. However, in recent years there has been a major push for the UK to adopt the Nordic model (also known as The Equality Model). This model criminalises the act of buying but not the selling of sex work.

 

The initial implementation of the Nordic Model, introduced into Sweden in 1999, was to completely eradicate the sex work industry under the radical feminist view that “all sex work is considered sexual servitude as no person can consent to engage in commercial sexual services.” However, by extending this commercial caveat to any form of labour exchanged for capital which allows the worker to obtain their basic material needs, it becomes questionable whether any form of labour casts the worker in any position other than one of servitude to their employer.

 

Nevertheless, in line with this view of sex work as inherently (and differently) exploitative from other forms of labour, the Nordic Model proposes the criminalisation of sex workers’ clientele, rather than the sex workers themselves, to deter those looking to buy and sell sex by reducing the industry.

 

However, many protestors of this Nordic Model, such as Dr Nina Vuolajärvi, the assistant professor in international migration at the London School of Economic European Union Institute, have contested that this one-way criminalisation actually “pushes people in the sex trade into precarious or dangerous situations in order to prioritise the protection of their clients—negotiations are hurriedly moved from the street and workers feel obliged to move to move to private spaces chosen by the client”. Again, economic factors play into the safe working environments of sex workers.

 

Rather than protect sex workers, this model ultimately reduces their consumer market, meaning that many sex workers who are already operating in a precarious and vulnerable trade, may take more risks and prioritise appeasing their reduced clientele over their own safety, due to a lack of alternative options.

 

Whilst not yet officially implemented in the UK, the Nordic Model has already influenced the management of areas in which sex workers operate. This indirect policing of sex work often leads sex workers to, as one Stockton resident described, “get what they can, as and when they can, for whatever they can”. This could include, for example, “daytime, including school drop-off and pick-up times” on Yarm Road. This suggests the negative impact of the ineffective policing of sex work not only for sex workers, but for Stockton residents and their children, and for local businesses such as Flavours Sandwiches and Desserts.

 

Dr Nina Vuolajärvi further suggests that, far from supporting sex workers, the Nordic Model “shifts the focus away from sex workers and functions as a smokescreen for continuing punitive and racialised policing.” Although there is an important distinction between an individual’s voluntary participation in sex work (so far as one can voluntarily participate in work-culture under capitalism), and coercive sex trafficking, Vuolajärvi points out that many sex workers are migrants. Therefore, many migrant sex workers, who are often unable to obtain alternate forms of employment due to their legal status, aren’t entitled to state services such as social benefits and public health care, including STI testing. This means that many migrant women find themselves not only forced into sex work due to a lack of alternative options and a lengthy waiting period due to the incompetency of the UK Home Office, but forced into unsafe working conditions.

 

Furthermore, as Vuolajärvi highlights, many “migrants without permanent residence permits have no access to state legal support, and while the sale of sex has been decriminalised (in the UK), it is still a ground for deportation in immigration laws”. Alternatively, to legalise sex work would generate many of the same issues, especially for migrant sex workers. Legalisation would require sex workers to obtain a permit by registering their profession with the government, which means they would be liable for prosecution without one.

 

Considering the reasons why someone may choose to participate in sex work, such as impoverishment or unsettled status due to a lack of state support, or financial stability, perhaps we might surmise that the most dangerous thing about the sex trade, despite the fears of the Stockton residents, isn’t the individuals who sell sex, but the vulnerable working conditions in which these women find themselves, presented before school children in broad daylight. This is exacerbated by the refusal of many people to see sex work as genuine work, and the policing of sex workers who have been otherwise failed by a government unwilling to support them.

 

The view of sex work as a burden rather than an occupation prohibits those who participate in the trade to gain any sort of worker’s rights or protections under the current legal system and perpetuates the stigma around the trade.

 

While it may not be true for all of the working women on Stockton’s Yarm Road that they are, as one resident suggested “being trafficked and abused”, she is right to advocate for “more support for these women”, and for other Stockton residents to “give a thought to what these women go through”.