Responsible Prostitution and Gender

Nicolle Zeegers (University of Groningen) describes the legalization policy regime (The Netherlands) as well as the neo-abolitionist policy regime (England and Wales) with their common trait of not criminalizing selling and buying sex services as such. However, because of the problems they face in combating human trafficking, different strategies of responsibilization came into being and/or are considered, in order to solve these problems: The criminalization of clients and third parties (responsibilization by liability) but also the introduction of legislation and policies that increasingly attribute responsibility to sex workers and organizations providing services for sex workers. In this paper these strategies will be described and explained by using the theoretical framework of rule intermediaries. In addition their gender effects will be assessed.