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This article engages with the voices of women sex workers during the peak of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in New Zealand. The late-1980s saw the formation of the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective, a sex worker led organisation that contracted with the government to provide a community-based national response to HIV and AIDS. The article explores the challenges sex workers faced to sustain and implement the use of condoms in their daily professional and personal lives. These included pressure from clients to forego the use of condoms, the risk of carrying condoms amidst the threat of arrest, and the struggle to manage the use of condoms in their personal sex lives. The paper traces both the widespread support for safe sex and the fractures and tensions that emerged as many sex workers mobilised to establish a community-based response to one of the most devastating health crises of the late-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sex work is decriminalised in Aotearoa New Zealand and so brothels are deemed a 'businesses like any other' in the eyes of the law. We interviewed 14 brothel operators in this study to understand whether they were able to run their 'business like any other'. Similar to any other business owners, local authorities require brothel operators to run their businesses in accordance with the local district plan. Institutions such as banks and insurance companies, however, have policies which discriminate against brothel owners, and this presents a barrier to running their business like any other. Brothels continue to be seen as discreditable businesses in a decriminalised context and brothel operators internalise this stigma. More effort is needed to reduce stigma and discriminatory practices. The inclusion of the prevention of discrimination on the basis of occupation in New Zealand's Human Rights Act should be the first step. This could better allow brothel operators to run their business like any other in the 'mainstream' economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While New Zealand's Prostitution Reform Act has decriminalized sex work for citizens and permanent residents, migrants on temporary visas are still not permitted to work in the sex industry. In 2018, a series of news media texts documented complaints about migrant sex workers put forward by Lisa Lewis, a prominent sex worker. This article considers how the figure of the migrant sex worker was produced through comparison to contingently acceptable 'New Zealand working girls'. This was partly achieved through a discursive link between sex work and the alleged economic impact of Asian migrants to New Zealand, with the argument that migrant sex workers were impacting the earnings of domestic sex workers. Lewis' claims were subsequently publicly rejected by other domestic sex workers, who resisted attempts to position them within this discourse. This media event offers evidence of changes to the figure of the sex worker in public discourse post-decriminalization: first in the way that some sex workers may be offered conditional acceptance and recognition of their jobs, and secondly in that it displays active resistance to the stigmatization of prostitution by a group of sex workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the movement of sex workers between sectors of the sex industry in New Zealand's decriminalised environment and motivations for working in these different venues. We argue for contextual, risk environment approaches to understanding risks associated with the different sectors and how these risks might influence the movement of sex workers between sectors. By doing so we also address arguments made by policy makers in different countries, with different ways of regulating sex work, for the eradication of the street-based sector of the sex industry. The findings are drawn from a survey of 772 sex workers and in-depth qualitative interviews with 58 sex workers in New Zealand. Findings suggest there is a growing private sector but little change in the size of the street-based sector following decriminalisation. Street-based sex workers argue the need to maximise earnings and that this is only possible from the street environment. They are prepared to make the trade-off of more money for less safety, something which managed sex workers are not prepared to do. This article demonstrates the relativity of risk perceptions and concludes that attempts to eradicate the street-based sector of the sex industry through more stringent regulatory practices are unrealistic and will only serve to place this vulnerable segment of the sex worker population at greater risk. It argues that in addition to decriminalisation, other social and economic policies are required to address risk and develop more enabling environments within the diverse sectors of the sex industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]