Paper details

Paper authors	Megan Denise Smith
In panel on	Transactional Sex in Humanitarian Contexts
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Humanitarians often frame transactional sex or sex work through reductive lenses that conceptualise the sex worker as without agency and “forced to cope” because of the larger crisis. Using the humanitarian refugee response in Bangladesh and Lebanon as case studies, this paper will establish how humanitarians construct the “transactional sex worker” through assessments and programming as a subject in need of saving and reform and then explore how humanitarians fail to be accountable to transactional sex workers as a result – especially LGBTI people and women. This paper situates itself within growing body of feminist and post-colonial empirical research critiquing current approaches in the humanitarian sector such as the conflation between sex trafficking and sex work. It highlights agency within transactional sex and emphasises how humanitarian service delivery needs to reform itself in ways that can empower transactional sex workers in their decisions in lieu of current rescue narratives. Sex, either partially or completely motivated by economic exchange, is complex and requires a more nuanced understanding than is currently employed by humanitarians to better capture the diverse needs and lived realities of those engaged in transactional sex or who consider themselves sex workers.

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