Topic B The Rights of Commercial Sex Workers. Topic Overview The concept of commercial sex workers fighting for their human rights is foreign to most people. Sex workers have lived on the limits of society throughout human history, even being ostracized in most cultures. Despite the pervasiveness of their work though, sex workers are still seen as something less than human, in both cultural and societal perspectives. But the fact remains that sex workers are individuals, and deserve the same rights and quality of life as everyone else. Although many people fight for the basic human rights of sex workers, it is often without any real analysis of what these rights might look like.
Human rights include the political rights, social and cultural rights, the right to food, the right to work and the right to receive an education. For sex workers, this means that some of the more notable restricted rights are the right to be free from harm, to have access to health care, housing and the right to seek safe employment that pays a living wage. The strategy of most of the interested public concerning the complex issue of sex workers rights is to impose laws and policies within the sex industry that would protect the workers rights. But for some, the mere existence of sex work is inherently harmful and a violation of basic human rights.
The standpoint these people take is that the act of trading sex for money is an infringement of a persons dignity and therefore, is in itself an act of violence. Those who hold this viewpoint want sex work to be criminalized as, they believe that its as much as an offense as murder is, as it removes from people their basic human rights.Most sex workers, however, do not believe it to be in violation of their rights to criminalize sex work, and instead demand that their rights be protected instead. They advocate for efforts to combat…