An “economic policy scrutiny committee” convened by the Northern Territory’s parliament last week commended to MPs a bill to deregulate the sex industry. Outcall escort agencies can already operate with licenses in the Territory, but the proposed law will lift all legal restriction on all prostitution businesses. It will allow large-scale brothels to develop in Darwin catering to Asian casino tourism and the mining industry. Businessmen will be able to run these ventures free of interference: police checks on prostitution venues are banned under the bill’s provision that, “a police officer, who may exercise powers and functions as an authorised officer under the Public Health and Environmental Health Act 2011, may not exercise those powers and functions in relation to sex work.”

The bill effectively helps entrepreneurs cash in on men’s desire to have body-punishing, heedless sex with women they don’t know or care about.

In the strangest of political scenarios, feminists (of a liberal stripe) are lining up alongside pimps to cheer the bill’s progress through the Northern Territory’s parliament. YWCA Australia — which describes itself as a “strong, unified, national feminist organisation working to achieve gender equality” — argues that deregulating the commercial activities of pimps will “create a more transparent industry where exploitation, abuse and other illegal activities are more easily distinguished.”

But the YWCA nowhere explains how this will be achieved in the absence of police oversight, let alone what penalty there would be for pimps who fail to register their businesses with local government. The bill provides no mechanism for tracking the development of brothels or their monitoring. Recklessly, moreover, the YWCA throws caution to the wind and urges “all members of the Northern Territory Parliament to support this Bill without amendments” in the vague hope that local councils will find a way to look after the single mothers and homeless women who invariably end up the industry’s victims.

A syndicate of three Northern Territory women’s legal services is also cheering on the bill, on the basis of their “experience of and expertise in assisting … Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, and women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.” But this experience and expertise apparently doesn’t extend to knowledge of the degradation and brutal indignity that prostitution inflicts on “long-grass” Aboriginal women and girls who are homeless, and sometimes addicted to alcohol and drugs.

These women are vulnerable to the worst abuses of racism perpetrated as sexual violence in the Territory, where they are found in greater number than any other Australian state. The women’s legal services say nothing about them in a joint submission to the Northern Territory’s parliament. Instead, they worry about pimps — specifically, pimps encountering problems of “procedural fairness” and unfairly levied charges, in any future drafting of regulations to accompany the proposed legislation. Rather than outrage on behalf of Aboriginal women who will be left vulnerable to sexual exploitation through sex industry deregulation, the legal services express strident opposition to the prospect of pimps being required to hold “suitability certificates.”

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Predictably, lobby groups organising under a banner of “sex worker rights” also support the bill’s deregulation of the sex industry on the ruse that any restriction of the activities of pimps and sex industry customers “stigmatises” people in prostitution and so makes their lives harder. Rhetorically, these groups campaign for the “rights” of people in prostitution, but, inexplicably, they support provisions in the Northern Territory’s bill that instruct Australian courts to uphold plaintiffs’ “right to rescind or cancel, or to recover damages for, a contract for sex work that is not performed.” In other words, the bill enshrines the right of sex industry customers to bring civil claims against women in prostitution who haven’t delivered sexual value for money.

While “sex worker rights” groups see the bill as equally enshrining the ability of prostituted women to “access legal redress in cases when the contract/s for services are breached,” it’s difficult to imagine prostituted women having the resources to sue customers for non-payment, let alone the courts hearing such claims. Rather,the provision is more likely to be used by brothel bosses as a threat against women to acquiesce to sex acts demanded by customers. Women will be threatened with legal action for not submitting to everything a customer has paid for, and that the boss will profit from.

The bill contains multiple clauses enshrining the right of women to “refuse service” and to resist “specified performance” of duties in relation to sex acts paid for in advance by customers. It even directs brothel bosses to compensate customers for services not satisfactorily rendered, rather than the women bought for sex. But these clauses are simply window-dressing that makes the bill look concerned for the rights of women. In truth, nowhere in the world are women in prostitution held liable for “specified performance,” or legally obstructed in “refusing service.” These practices are those of the licensing regime of pre-war Japan; they haven’t been backed by modern legal institutions for a hundred years. The Northern Territory parliament covers its bill in clover with these provisions, which, in reality, do nothing additional to protect the rights of women in prostitution who are actually most robbed of rights by their inability to refuse entry to the sex industry altogether.

The sight of feminist organisations supporting legislative efforts to strengthen entitlements enjoyed by pimps and sex industry customers is mystifying, at best. At worst, Aboriginal women and girls are being sold out by organisations funded and staffed to represent their human rights in the Northern Territory. On top of poverty, homelessness, alcohol industry marketing and domestic violence, these women do not need to additionally face the threat of legally empowered pimps.

Liberal feminists rallying in support of the rights of sex industry entrepreneurs to run their sexually violent businesses unimpeded in the Territory is a scenario with racist overtones in the #MeToo era. Northern Territory MPs, whose constituents are more likely to be Aboriginal than the elected officials of any other Australian state, are being fooled by NGOs brandishing progressive credentials and selling them the lie that prostitution is work rather than consumer-purchased sexual violence.

Feminists sell this lie because it’s convenient to imagine prostitution victims as hardworking women trying to put food on the table like any other female hospitality or aged-care worker. Keeping women in the sex industry in the category of “worker” keeps them out of the category of sex-crime victim. For feminists advocating on behalf of domestic violence and rape victims, excising “sex workers” from the victim category usefully limits their task to one of tackling excesses of male violence rather than male sexuality tout court.

But if servicing male sexuality — as the women reduced to “prostitutes” exist to do — is understood to be female slavery rather than work, feminists must pursue much more challenging political claims. Rather than curbing excesses of male violence like rape and domestic violence, they must work to curb male sexual fun and entertainment. In a world where the male orgasm is sacrosanct, this is a dangerously heretical path — and one feminists see as putting at risk gains achieved on behalf of who they see as “real” victims.

So, feminists are all ears when “sex worker rights” organisations tell them women in prostitution would be proud workers with dignity, if only their bosses and customers weren’t “stigmatised” by abolitionist efforts to eradicate Australia’s sex industry. Neoliberal beliefs about work rather than welfare as a path to human dignity ensure quick uptake of this “sex worker rights” message. Tacking the label “work” onto even the most extreme forms of sexual behaviour and inhuman relations satisfies neoliberally minded feminists that no harm to women is being done.

The suggestion that women in the sex industry might be afforded pathways out falls on deaf ears, for the momentous effort and commitment such an action plan would entail in a neoliberal country where the political will to adequately fund even child protection services is often lacking. For liberal feminists, the “sex worker rights” message is a welcome respite from responsibility and obligation to take up the cause of sex-crime victims who attract weaker levels of social sympathy than young victims of online dating rape.

To declare prostitution to be female sexual slavery is to lose any credibility and sympathy a feminist organisation might have enjoyed in Australian patriarchal society. Rather than getting women onto corporate boards or male champions-of-change into “implicit bias” training, it requires peeling back the liberal veneer of Australia society in which a tiny group of women feasts at the same table as men. Under this surface-level arrangement of gender civility is the population of women impoverished, beaten in households and sexually abused as children who ended up in the sex industry, sometimes for decades of their lives. When feminist organisations decide to act in political solidarity with this larger population of women and girls, they forgo the social civility that sees them funded by government and rewarded by philanthropists.

It’s easy for feminist organisations like the YWCA that enjoy token privileges of liberal society to forget that women’s status is only as high as that of our worst-off sisters. As long as we live in a society that allows women to be on sexual sale, none of us really enjoys civil standing, even if government does occasionally bestow us with funding and recognition. In the Northern Territory, with its majority Aboriginal population, this difference between citizenship and non-human standing, which goes to the heart of the problem of prostitution, has deep historical resonance that feminist organisations ignore at their peril.

Caroline Norma is a senior research fellow at RMIT University, co-editor of Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade and a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Australia.