Selling Sex, Surviving Austerity: A critical analysis of causes and implications of sex work in neoliberal, post-crisis Britain.

在2007/08年全球经济危机之后，英国政府颁布了一套社会和经济政策，作为其“紧缩措施”的一部分，试图减少国家债务和预算赤字(墨菲，2017)；这种政策在许多情况下被发现是工人阶级，特别是工薪阶层妇女最负面的经历，因为与不断上涨的生活成本相比，削减社会福利，增加失业/就业，停滞不前的工资(见Griffin，2015)。发现自己处于贫困和不安全的境地，似乎导致越来越多的妇女从事‘求生性’，即参与性工作，以满足一个人的直接基本需求，如食物、能源和住房(工作和养老金委员会，2019年)，最近的一份报告将这一增长直接与实行普遍贷记福利改革和与之相关联的制度改革联系在一起，从而减少了在该制度下收到的延迟付款和/或基本上不足的付款(同上)。然而，当政府机构提出这样的调查结果时，这种相关性已被驳斥或最小化(同上)，相反，许多政策和舆论依赖于将性工作者简单化地构建为贩运和胁迫的受害者--“性人道主义”话语(Andrijasevic和Mai，2016)--或者成瘾或精神疾病(Sundahl，1988)。然而，性工作作为一种生存机制并不是只有在紧缩时期才会出现，人们可能会争辩说，紧缩政策是由更普遍的新自由主义国家资本主义提供的，或者至少与之有相似之处(参见Harvey，2007)；正如Hardy(2016)在她对阿根廷的研究中所展示的那样，作为一种政治意识形态的新自由主义是性工作者激增的一个重要因素，面对国家规定的倒退和轻率，性工作者经常发现性工作为她们提供收入的同时，还可以灵活地为自己提供国家不提供的东西，包括儿童保育、医疗保健和教育。

In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2007/08, the UK government enacted a set of social andeconomic policies which, as part of its 'austerity measures', attempted to reduce national debt and thebudget deficit (Murphy, 2017); such policies have on numerous occasions been found to be most negativelyexperienced by the working class, and specifically working class women, through cuts to social welfare,rising un-/under-employment, and stagnating wages compared to rising living costs (see Griffin, 2015).Finding themselves in a position of poverty and insecurity has led a seemingly increasing number of womento engage in 'survival sex', that is the participation in sex work in order to meet one's immediate basicneeds such as for food, energy and housing (Work and Pensions Committee, 2019), with one recent reportlinking this rise directly to the introduction of the Universal Credit benefit reforms and the associateddelayed and/or largely inadequate payments received under the system (ibid.). Such correlations havebeen refuted or minimised by governmental bodies when presented with such findings, however, (ibid.)and instead much policy and public opinion relies on problematically simplistic constructions of sex workersas victims of either trafficking and coercion - a 'sexual humanitarianism' discourse (Andrijasevic and Mai,2016) - or of addiction or mental illness (Sundahl, 1988). Sex work as a survival mechanism is not exclusiveto times of austerity, however, and one may argue that austerity policy is informed by, or at least sharessimilarities with, neoliberal state capitalism more generally (see Harvey, 2007); as Hardy (2016)demonstrates in her study of Argentina, neoliberalism as a political ideology is a significant factor in theproliferation of sex workers who, faced with a rolling back of state provisions and precarity, often find sexwork to offer them an income alongside the flexibility to provide for themselves that which the state doesnot, including childcare, healthcare and education.