Introduction

Sex workers’ rights activists began organising themselves into collectives to advocate for their rights from the early 1970s. COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) was the first sex workers’ rights organisation to emerge in 1973 (Jenness, 1993). Based in San Francisco, COYOTE has aimed to decriminalise sex work, challenge negative attitudes towards sex work and argue for health and safety. Other sex workers’ rights organisations have since been established worldwide. They have had a variable influence on law reform but most, if not all, advocate for full decriminalisation of sex work. This chapter is written by members of one sex workers’ rights group, New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective (NZPC), which did have success in changing law. Much of this chapter comes from information held in the NZPC archives and its institutional memory.

In this chapter, we first discuss the formation of NZPC. The establishment of NZPC gave sex workers a collective voice as advocates for law reform on behalf of sex workers and provided them with a legitimacy that had been absent until that time (Lichtenstein, 1999; West, 2000). We have played an active role in educating the public and the media about issues affecting sex workers and we were strong lobbyists for decriminalisation. In the sections that follow, we outline the main issues facing sex workers prior to law reform, before talking about the rationale behind the Prostitution Reform Bill to decriminalise sex work, which was drafted by and for sex workers. This Bill was debated in Parliament and several amendments were made, some of which we were able to live with, but others of which are highly controversial – and have kept us lobbying with the aim of more closely achieving full decriminalisation. This will be discussed prior to exploring some implementation issues with the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), the most troublesome being the implementation of bylaws by territorial authorities. There has been a noticeable change in sex workers’ access to justice since decriminalisation and we examine some examples of this before looking at NZPC's hopes for the future of sex work in New Zealand.