Laura Graham is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Northumbria University. Laura has researched in the area of sex work, with a particular focus on regulation, governance, and human rights, for over 15 years. When considering human rights, Laura looks at both the legal and social impact of human rights on sex workers' lived experiences. She has worked closely with sex worker groups throughout this time, including for six years as Trustee and Academic Lead of National Ugly Mugs, the UK’s biggest charity fighting against violence against sex workers. Laura was co-editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law on ‘Sex Work and the Law’ and a book entitled 'Navigating Contemporary Sex Work' (Palgrave 2024).
Laura’s current research has two strands: first, she is undertaking a participatory project on sex workers’ experience of transactional sex with humanitarian workers in South Sudan, focusing on transactional sex workers’ perspectives of risks, harms, accountability and justice; secondly, she is working on several projects and papers broadly around sex work, human rights and epistemic injustice.
Outside of work, Laura enjoys walking, reading, and spending time with cats!
Transactional Sex with Humanitarian Workers in South Sudan: A Community-Led Response
Dr Laura Graham*, Dr Annika Jones, Kerry Akers, Oxfam, South Sudan Women’s Empowerment Network
The Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) Sector has expanded and professionalised exponentially over the past ten years. Its expansion is rooted in failings within the humanitarian sector to address exploitation of sex workers alongside other members of the community, including internally displaced persons and refugees. At the same time, a crisis of under-reporting of harms experienced by sex workers indicates that their needs are not being met by a PSEA strategy which still predominantly focuses on investigations and reducing organisational risk, rather than survivor and community support. UN and NGO policies and practices to protect communities from sexual exploitation by humanitarian workers, which largely take a zero-tolerance approach, have not yet centred the (difficult to access) lived experience of those engaged in transactional sex with humanitarian aid workers. Community voice and agency is missing, leading to a lack of nuance, with implications for protection, justice, and reparation. The protection needs of the diverse community of sex workers, and their views on justice, accountability and reparations are not currently known. Recent funding cuts have also had a direct impact on aid-receiving communities, as well as on the extent of PSEA work conducted by humanitarian organisations, making the continuation of a lack of support and protection likely.
A nuanced and practical approach to implementing PSEA in a way which protects sex workers from harm by humanitarians, while recognising their agency and varied perspectives, is needed. Drawing on our participatory research project with the sex worker/transactional sex community in South Sudan, this paper brings together voices from the community, academic, and humanitarian expertise. It will provide an overview of our community-centred, decolonial approach to the question of transactional sex, and initial data and findings.
*presenting
I am a socio-legal scholar who researches gendered work and workplace issues. These include sex work, nannying and au pairing, and sexual harassment. Methodologically, I combine doctrinal analysis, empirical data (interviews, surveys, ethnography), and feminist and Marxist theory to assess the possibilities and limitations of existing legal frameworks, in the UK and internationally. My legal research on sex work has focused on developing a labour approach that takes seriously the social forces shaping the sexual exchange and legal regulation. My most recent publication,
Sex Work in Three Dimensions: Labour, Sexuality, and Law
This keynote outlines the materialist feminist approach to sex work and law that I have developed through almost two decades of research. From the beginning, I had a sense that there was more to sex work than appeared in law, and that no single perspective could adequately apprehend that complexity. What has taken much longer to work out is how to hold these different perspectives and realities together: how to understand them not as competing accounts of what sex work really is, but as different dimensions of the same social relation.
I trained in sociology and law, primarily as a lawyer, and have always wanted to start with the social rather than law. By a social relation, I mean the relations between people and institutions through which activities, resources, identities, and forms of power are organised and reproduced. Sex work is a social relation in this sense: it involves relations between workers, clients, and intermediaries, but also between workers and the institutions that govern and organise their work. These relations are situated within wider relations of labour, migration, gender and sexuality.
My research has taken me through different dimensions of this social relation and the legal frameworks that govern it: from sex workers' uses of rights language and the different meanings that rights acquire in activist contexts, to sex work and labour law, including an exploration of basic income, to the sexual-economic relations of sex tourism in Jamaica with Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, to the conditions of what I have conceptualised as ‘unfreedom’ that structure migrant sex work, with a focus on London, UK. More recently, my attention has returned to labour law, including the unionising efforts and policy frameworks through which sex workers are making demands and agitating for recognition.
Across this research, I have repeatedly encountered the same problem. Sex work tends to be apprehended through categories such as consent or force, choice or coercion, contract or crime, labour or exploitation, and competing claims about rights. None is simply false; each apprehends something real about sex work. The difficulty arises when one dimension is taken to capture the social relation as a whole. I now describe the approach that has emerged from my research as a three-dimensional materialist perspective: labour, sexuality, and law/governance. Rather than treating these as separate realities, I seek to apprehend them as different dimensions of the same social relation. Sex workers move between and across these dimensions, and the contradictions between them become productive sites of inquiry, revealing the different ways that sex work can be organised and reproduced. Importantly, law and governance are part of this social relation. They do not simply regulate sex work from the outside but participate in constituting its different dimensions.
In this keynote, I show how this approach emerged through my research and is illustrated by it. My work on sex workers’ unionisation, for example, shows how claims to recognition as workers can bring relations of labour, sexuality, and law into view together, including the contradictions between them. In conclusion, I return to the intuition with which I began: there is more to sex work than appears in law. Not because law presents a false picture, but because its categories apprehend particular dimensions of the social relation of sex work, whose organisation and reproduction extend beyond its legal appearance.