Out on the streets and out of control? drug-using sex workers and the prostitution strategy

This chapter critically considers the assumptions underlying policy proposals for sex-working drug users and drug-using sex workers in New Labour's prostitution strategy. In critiquing these underlying assumptions this discussion suggests that the strategy proposed in A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy (Home Office, 2006) (hereafter referred to as ‘the strategy’) reduces involvement in street sex work to a problem of drug use (Melrose, 2007) and at the same time misconceives problems of drug addiction. I argue that the punitive framework that has increasingly characterised policy towards problem drug users (Buchanan, 2004) has been imported into ‘the prostitution debate’ and now also frames policy responses to street sex workers (Scoular et al, 2007). Its potential to tackle the very real social problems experienced by those involved in street sex work is therefore severely compromised.