Dear NUS National Executive Committee,

We, the undersigned, implore you to support the motion calling NUS to stand up for student sex workers by supporting the full decriminalization of sex work. The evidence to support this motion is informed by extensive academic research and most importantly the lived experiences of sex workers who are best placed to know what measures are necessary to improve their lives. We join other sex worker, research, and legal experts across the world and urge the NUS to follow the decisions of the SCOT-PEP, the Sex Worker Open University, the English Collective of Prostitutes, World Health Organization, the World AIDS Campaign, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, the Royal College of Nurses, the New Zealand Government, the Supreme Court of Canada, UN Women, NUS Scotland Women’s Campaign and the NUS Disabled Students Campaign and support decriminalization of sex work as a critical evidence-based approach to ensuring the safety, health, and human rights of sex workers.

A large body of scientific evidence from Canada, Sweden and Norway (where clients and third parties are criminalized), and globally clearly demonstrates that criminal laws targeting the sex industry have overwhelmingly negative social, health, and human rights consequences to sex workers, including increased violence and abuse, stigma, HIV and inability to access critical social, health and legal protections. These harms disproportionately impact marginalized sex workers including working-class, migrant, undocumented, LGBT, women, black, brown, disabled and street-involved sex workers, who face the highest rates of violence and murder in our country. In contrast, in New Zealand, since the passage of a law to decriminalize sex work in 2003, research and the government’s own evaluation have documented marked improvements in sex workers’ safety, health, and human rights.

While some members of NUS may feel that this motion is too niche an issue to be heard at the NEC and should instead be relegated to the Women’s Campaign we argue that this view is underlined by white-centric, ableist heteronormative and cis-sexist assumptions which NUS claims to actively challenge. As we have noted, sex workers often define into all of the liberation campaigns NUS represents and indeed, those sex workers who do, are most at risk of police brutalization and state violence. Sex workers are sidelined, ignored and spoken over by those who claim to know best time and time again in discussions of their safety, well-being and choice of work and we demand that NUS does not follow this damaging and dangerous path.    

 Below is a link to the motion:

https://docs.google.com/…/1Fg4G_G63EPz65ZPkO9xR0kMdgH…/edit…