Universities need to wise up to when students are doing work that’s dodgy, unfair, or risky. That could be in pubs, shops, or other casual jobs – and it could be in sex work. The myth of student sex work is that it’s only done by 19-year-old students who want a sugar daddy to buy them fancy stuff – not a parent-student who’s taking a well-paid and flexible job in between juggling studying, housework, and looking after the kids. Not that I’m judging either way – I’ve seen both – but sex workers and their reasons for doing it are different (in fact, the English Collective of Prostitutes found in 2019 that most sex workers are mums).
Sex work is different, too. Sugarbabying (usually a sexual relationship with – often much older – person in exchange for money and/or gifts) and escorting (in-person paid sex) are common. The recent cost of living survey by Canterbury Christ Church SU found that of the (few) students who had done sex work, sending used clothes was the most common type of sex work done by their students, followed by intimate photos and OnlyFans. 58.3 per cent of the students who had done sex work in the past year said it was for money reasons – with a fair bit of these saying it was specifically to pay their way through uni. Whether we like it or not – students are getting paid for a kind of work to get through the cost of living crisis, And that’s work.
Do you remember what happened back in November 2021 at the University of Durham Students’ Union? They got a lot of flak for teaching their staff about student sex work. Some people even said they didn’t care about other kinds of work (that’s not true, by the way, they did).
They did the training because they wanted their staff to know the facts and the myths about sex work. That way, they could help student sex workers in different ways. Maybe they need some money, maybe they want to quit, or maybe they just want to feel supported. It’s important that student sex workers – and trust me, they are out there – feel that their institution is on their side.
Life is getting harder, right? More and more students have to work part-time, and some of them even do sex work. I’m worried about how many of them don’t know how to stay safe, because their universities don’t tell them anything. Maybe the universities are scared of what the media or the politicians will say if they do.
There was this student sex worker I met when I worked at a students’ union. She had a nasty client who knew about this thing called “morality clause” – it’s when the university can kick you out if you don’t behave the way they want, and they have used it against student sex workers. He was blackmailing her with that. She didn’t know that her university didn’t have one until three months later. If her university had shown her some support (I mean, support for sex workers, not for sex work), this wouldn’t have happened.
Some people always say bad things about sex work. They say it’s different from other work because it’s humiliating – but that’s just their opinion, and it says more about them than about sex work. Besides, from the students we talked to, it seems that humiliation is not something that only happens in sex work.
If we don’t tell students how to be safe, they will look for it somewhere else – and they might get the wrong information. I googled “escort” and checked out The Student Room. I saw some scary, wrong, and risky answers from students to students who wanted to be escorts. And nobody said anything about the laws or the problems that come with the work that students really need to know – like if two or more sex workers share a house or live together, that’s an illegal brothel and they can go to jail for seven years.