TextBrit Dawson
“I’m so chaotic because I’m so thrilled,” says Victoria, a former sex worker and the president of Belgium’s Sex Workers’ Union, UTSOPI, at the end of our call. We’ve just spent 40 minutes discussing the country’s monumental new law that gives sex workers the same rights as every other employee in Belgium: sick days, annual leave, maternity pay, pensions, health insurance, and unemployment benefits. The legislation is the first of its kind in the world. “I could talk for hours about it,” she adds.
Of course, Victoria – who worked as an escort for over a decade before quitting three years ago – hasn’t been “chaotic”. But she has been passionate, engaging and boldly candid. She’s spoken solidly for nearly an hour about the tangible effects this law will have on sex workers’ lives and work, and reflected on how different her own work might have been had this law been in place a decade ago. It’s a reasonable reaction to a radical and historic moment in sex work history. “I put my shoulders underneath the work that has to be done because [when I was escorting], we had to work in very unsafe conditions,” she continues. “But now we have the tools to fight exploitation.”
Although the law...
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