Safety in the New Zealand sex industry

Abstract

The paper uses 2006 survey data to examine sex workers' safety in the post-decriminalised sex industry in New Zealand. We use probit analysis to examine institutional and individual factors that affect the likelihood of sex workers experiencing physical and sexual violence, theft and threats by clients. We find that alcohol and/or drug dependency more than doubles the risk of violence across the three sectors within the industry. After controlling for individual factors, including alcohol and drug use, we find no significant sectorial differences for the probability of violence, while the street sector has more theft and threats than the other sectors.

Keywords:

• decriminalisation
• sex work
• violence
• theft
• threat

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the Editor of New Zealand Economic Papers and the two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank Catherine Healy, Anna Reed, Dr Calum Bennachie, and other volunteers and outreach workers from New Zealand Prostitutes Collective for their insights into the New Zealand sex industry. We would also like to express our gratitude to the conference participants in the 2014 New Zealand Association of Economists Conference in Auckland and the lunchroom crew at the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Canterbury for their comments and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Plumridge and Abel (2000, 2001) report results of a survey of Christchurch female sex workers conducted prior to decriminalisation. Unfortunately for comparability, the questions about adverse experiences ask if the sex workers have ever had such an experience, which contrast the question in Abel et al. (2007) that asks about such experiences in the previous 12-month period.

2. See also El-Bassel, Witte, Wada, Gilbert, and Wallace (2001), Blanchard et al. (2002) and George et al. (2011).

3. Whether or not the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquakes, which displaced sex workers from their usual places of work, have changed the relative risk of street sex work in Christchurch is unfortunately outside the scope of this study as the survey data we use was collected before the earthquakes.

4. Abel et al. (2007) report that street sex workers account for 27.7% of Christchurch sex workers and 12.7% of sex workers in Auckland and Wellington.

5. Dropping these observations changed the estimated coefficients and P-values of our independent variables only marginally. The level of significance of any of our estimated coefficients (e.g. if the coefficient is significantly different from zero at 1% or 5% level) was not affected.

6. The complete list of explanatory variables Z_i is: ‘under 18’, ‘18–21’, ‘30–45’, ‘45+’, ‘Maori’, ‘Pacific’, ‘NZ European/Maori’, ‘NZ European/other’, ‘ethnicity other’, ‘primary’, ‘secondary 1–2 years’, ‘tertiary’, ‘experience < 6 months’, ‘experience 6–11 months’, ‘experience 2–4 years’, ‘experience 5–9 years’, ‘experience > 10 years’, ‘experience NA’, ‘male’, ‘transgender’, ‘alcohol/drug’ and ‘gambling’.

7. The 45+ age group was dropped from the private subsample in this probit estimation due to predicting failure perfectly, so we cannot report how much less likely they are to have experienced violence than the control group. However, this group is included in the whole-industry results in column pair 2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Canterbury School of Business and Economics Research Committee; Health Research Council of New Zealand (05/147); Ministry of Justice.