Sex work, Public Health and Pandemic!

Additionally, sex work was forced out of the shadows by illness and pandemic, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. People believed that God was punishing society for sex workers during the Black Death pandemic in the fourteenth century, so they burnt them alive in the belief that once the “sinners” were gone, God would leave the rest of society alone. Because sex workers were “carriers of infection” and a “threat to the healthy urban population” in 1836, Naples banned their movement. Depending on where they worked, women had varying treatment during the 1918 influenza pandemic. To avoid infecting other prisoners, Denver, Colorado, police stopped detaining escort ladies.

Sex workers have access to the Internet for labour, unlike pandemics from other eras. Of course, other jobless creatives feel the same way. To the detriment of those already active in the industry, a wave of new creators is breaking into the online sex job market. The pandemic has brought about other setbacks besides that one. A number of laws intended to stop internet sex trafficking were passed by Congress in 2018. Now that websites are accountable for any solicitations made on their pages, sex work is increasingly riskier for employees. It entirely shut down websites used for client screening. Escort girls today might not be able to complete a screening and work properly if it’s the only option they have before seeing a client in person. As a result, sex workers are concerned that the pandemic will only worsen working conditions. Resource constraint is nothing new to sex workers, not even amid a pandemic. Because “if no one else was going to make it, it was up to us,” sex workers started a grassroots hand sanitizer company, for instance. They were accustomed to losing the resources that other members of society depend on. Because of the unstable economic climate, sex workers always lack resources, which has a negative impact on their health and well-being.