Voicing Consent: Sex Workers, Sexual Violation and Legal Consciousness in Cross-National Contexts
Editors: Teela Sanders, Jane Scoular, Barbara G. Brents, Susie Balderston, and Gillian Abel
Publisher: Springer Nature, 2025. 270 pages.
Reviewer: Michelle Annett | Spring 2025
Voicing Consent: Sex Workers, Sexual Violation and Legal Consciousness in Cross-National Contexts (2025) emerges from a four-year international collaborative project led by a large team of sex workers, peer researchers, academics, and practitioners. Edited by leading sex work scholars Teela Sanders, Jane Scoular, Barbara Brents, and Gillian Abel, this book interrogates how sex workers understand and negotiate consent, experience unwanted sexual contact, and the factors that shape sex workers’ willingness, or reluctance to seek justice. This transformative text reshapes consent discourse across regulatory regimes to include labor contexts and transactional frameworks, often ignored in mainstream legal and feminist approaches.
This book addresses the central question: how do social, legal, and judicial contexts shape the safety and well-being of sex workers? Spanning four jurisdictions with distinct sex work regulatory regimes, this research provides a unique and invaluable comparative lens on the impacts of sex work governance. Drawing on a myriad of surveys (n = 483), in-depth interviews (n = 160), and legal analysis, combined with peer-led methodologies, this book advances a nuanced picture of how laws and social norms mediate safety, harm, and autonomy in sexual labour. At its core, this book explores sex workers’ legal consciousness- how they perceive and interpret the law, consent, and their rights, and how this shapes sex workers’ decisions about reporting sexual violence. Findings demonstrate how legal norms, institutional practices, and social stigma intersect with sex workers’ perceptions, shaping sex workers’ experiences of harm, particularly for those most marginalized.
This book comprises nine critical chapters. Chapter 1, “Introduction: Understanding Consent and Legal Consciousness in Sex Work,” establishes the book’s conceptual and empirical foundation. This chapter extends notions of sex workers’ legal consciousness beyond formal statutes to further encompass factors including workplace norms, social stigma, and interactions with law enforcement. This chapter further interrogates definitions of sexual violence, highlighting how formal legal definitions are limited and frequently misaligned with sex workers’ lived experiences. By examining these laws ‘from below’, this chapter underscores the book’s contribution in identifying the structural, relational, and legal factors that shape experiences of sexual violence in sex work altogether.
‘Chapter 2: Sex Work and Sexual Violence Laws in Each Jurisdiction’ maps the formal laws, court cases, and workplace laws governing sex work in four legal landscapes, including Nevada (legalization), Northern Ireland (criminalization), New Zealand (decriminalization), and the United Kingdom (partial criminalization). Nevada’s legalized brothel system imposes regulatory oversight but leaves many unprotected outside licensed venues. Northern Ireland’s criminalization of clients perpetuates stigma and deters reporting. The UK’s partial criminalization generates confusion, producing vulnerability to police action and a lack of recourse. By contrast, New Zealand’s decriminalization framework, developed in partnership with sex worker organizations, fosters a stronger sense of safety and legal legitimacy. The comparative analysis illustrates how divergent laws produce profoundly different experiences of consent, breach of contracts, stealthing as abuse, and other violations.
‘Chapter 3: Negotiating Consent: Setting Boundaries in the Sexual Contract’ explores how sex workers negotiate consent and boundaries, noting these sexual contracts must be perceived as being dynamic and ongoing, not a one-time agreement. Findings revealed that sex workers establish explicit sexual contracts and protocols, such as setting payment terms, expressing boundaries, safe words, and condom use, that reflect professional norms aimed at preventing violations. Yet, breaches of sexual contracts, including stealing or non-payment, remain frequent. These formal and informal boundary-setting practices were described as skills shared and circulated within the industry. These harms are rarely recognized under existing legal codes, yet workers consistently identify them as violations and as forms of violence. This chapter is pivotal for the book, challenging reductive and simplified models of consent and underscoring its relational, labour-specific dimensions, and how sex workers mobilize their knowledge to help protect each other.
‘Chapter Four: Defining Violation: Sex-Worker Experiences of Unwanted Incidents’ examines how sex workers define and interpret violations and unwanted sexual contact within their professional lives, and the extent to which the law shapes these understandings. The findings show that sex workers’ perspectives on sexual violence are influenced by both legal alienation and rape consciousness. While participants frequently regarded the law as arbitrary or ineffective, they nonetheless recognized severe assaults in ways aligned with dominant legal standards, particularly when force, injury, or police validation were present. At the same time, they articulated a distinct, work-based lens for interpreting violations—a transactional legal consciousness—through which breaches of professional agreements, boundaries, or safety protocols were treated as harms alongside physical coercion. This dual perspective highlights how alienation from the law coexists with partial alignment to it, shaping both the limits of legal recourse and the strategies sex workers develop to address sexual violence.
‘Chapter 5: After The Violation: Sex Workers’ Responses to Unwanted Incidents’ explores how sex workers respond to unwanted contact, from ignoring incidents to confronting clients or turning to peer mediation. Responses span inaction, informal strategies, and occasional formal legal measures, shaped by both legal consciousness and workplace conditions, as well as the barriers and strategies sex workers navigate. Findings reveal that formal reporting remains rare. Workers describe reliance on informal strategies not simply as avoidance but as pragmatic and resilient responses in contexts marked by mistrust in law enforcement. The findings highlight how stigma and fear of recrimination, especially under criminalization, push workers toward community-based remedies over formal reporting.
‘Chapter 6: Formal Reporting: The Barriers and Enablers of Legal Mobilisation’ analyzes how sex workers’ decisions to report incidents and engage with the criminal legal system are shaped by broader structural and legal factors. In criminalized regimes, prior negative experiences with police, coupled with fear of exposure, deterred reporting, whereas New Zealand’s decriminalized model, with institutionalized peer advocacy and police training, offered greater access to justice. This comparison highlights why alignment between formal law and lived realities is essential for fostering trust and enabling legal mobilization, even as sex workers’ own experiences of alienation and violence are nonetheless shaped by broader mistrust in law enforcement.
‘Chapter 7: Bridging Gaps: Peer Recommendations for Better Services’ focuses on practical strategies developed in collaboration with sex worker peers, drawing directly on their lived experiences. This chapter highlights ways to enhance healthcare, legal support, and community services while promoting sex workers’ rights, fairness, and service quality. Key proposals include implementing trauma-aware policing practices, establishing transparent work agreements, hosting community-driven legal rights workshops, and expanding decriminalization measures. In line with Chapter 6, this chapter underscores that involving peers is both ethically necessary and strategically effective, ensuring programs and policies reflect the realities and expertise of those they are meant to serve.
‘Chapter 8: Legal Consciousness and Sex Work: Towards More Inclusive Policy’ argues that current legal frameworks are inadequate because they fail to recognize the transactional nature of consent in sex work. Harms central to workers’ safety remain largely invisible to the law, while diverse circumstances of sex workers’ lives shape their decisions to interact with legal systems. The editors call for reforms that expand definitions of consent violations, embed sex worker voices in policymaking, implement decriminalization, and acknowledge the complexity of workplace realities. ‘Chapter Nine: The Sex Work and Sexual Violence Study: Research Methods’ details the participatory design of this book, including surveys, interviews, and legal analysis conducted with sex worker peers as expert advisors. This approach grounded the findings in lived experience, enhanced validity, and offered a model for ethical, community-engaged socio-legal research.
Voicing Consent is both empirically rich and theoretically significant. It reconceptualizes consent as negotiated, dynamic, and transactional; develops conceptual tools such as transactional legal consciousness and legal alienation; and models participatory research that centers community expertise. Its comparative design demonstrates how different legal regimes shape safety, autonomy, and access to justice, highlighting decriminalization as the most enabling framework for aligning law with lived realities. At 270 pages, the book is rigorous, accessible, and open access, making it available to activists, scholars, and sex workers alike. For socio-legal researchers, it advances theoretical debates; for policymakers, it provides evidence for reform and workplace protections; and for sex workers, it affirms the legitimacy of their definitions of harm.
If the book has a limitation, it lies in its breadth: covering four jurisdictions necessarily sacrifices depth of ethnographic detail, limiting the findings’ applicability to more marginalized populations or Global South contexts. Another key limitation is its minimal attention to how racism and intersecting structural inequalities shape sex workers’ experiences. Nonetheless, the editors are clear about these parameters, presenting the study as a foundation for future global comparative work that can address race, ethnicity, and other intersecting oppressions at length. Voicing Consent: Sex Workers, Sexual Violation and Legal Consciousness in Cross-National Contexts is a landmark contribution that challenges narrow legal and feminist framings of sexual violence while advancing theoretical understandings of consent and justice.
Michelle Lesley Annett is a Contract Instructor at St. Francis Xavier University. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6638-8592.
