Abolition of Prostitution Collection 2025

Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Translated by Suzanne Martin Cheadle

NEW PREFACE

In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation that criminalized the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women to exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution – and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain – Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario: Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented as a characteristic of the woman. The men who buy sex are left out.

Drawing on Marxist and feminist analysis, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self is split from the body which makes it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body become sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is ideal.

Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called baby trade? 

This brilliant exposé is written with a razor sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.

MARCH 2025 | ISBN 9781922964205 | Paperback | 248 pages | 137 × 221 mm

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE STOP SURROGACY NOW COLLECTION

Cherry Smiley

Decolonizing feminism always prioritizes the collective liberation of Indigenous and other women and names patriarchy as the central component of women’s oppression.

In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory.

Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women.

Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology.

This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.

APRIL 2023 | ISBN 9781925950649 | Paperback | 257 pages

Rose Hunter

think of my body as a shell
that I could vacate, not as metaphor, or symbol
but as a real possibility

Body Shell Girl is a memoir in verse about the first two years of a decade that Rose Hunter spent in the sex industry in Canada. When Rose walked into a massage parlour in Toronto in 1997, she was looking for a temporary fix to pay rent and avoid having to go back to her home country of Australia.

Awkward, shy and looking for a place to belong, she found herself in a strange world she understood little about, other than here she could make more than rent. She planned to use her earnings to buy herself an education that would secure the career of her dreams.

Naively believing she could do only what was required of her, without trauma or side effects and leave the industry on her own terms, she was shattered by what unfolded.

This is her story. It is also a searing portrayal of this dehumanising industry in all its destructive power.

Trauma can destroy narrative or it can create a firestorm – in Body Shell Girl Rose Hunter has ploughed her memory and her ‘radioactive’ journals to take us not just inside the debilitating machinations of her time in the sex industry but right inside the experience itself. A highly visceral reading experience that left me body-shocked and reeling. In Body Shell Girl Hunter annihilates misogynist fantasy word by word, page by page.

—Sally Breen, author of The Casuals and Atomic City

Body Shell Girl is incredible. It is a captivating and honest account of a woman’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings in the sex trade. Communicated with authenticity, you feel as if Rose is an old friend by the end of the book: she gives a voice to sisters who are too often unheard.

—Cherry Smiley, from the Nlaka’pamux and Diné Nations, founder of Women’s Studies Online, Canada

MAY/JUNE 2022 | 9781925950502 | Paperback | 140 x 216 mm | 160 pp

Julie Bindel

This book examines one of the most contested issues facing feminists, human rights activists and governments around the globe – the international sex trade. For decades, the liberal left has been conflicted as to whether ‘sex worker’ activists or abolitionists hold the correct view, and debates are ongoing as to who holds the key to the solutions facing the women and girls involved.

Over the course of two years, Bindel conducted 250 interviews in almost 40 countries, cities and states, travelling around Europe, Asia, North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and countries in East Africa. Visiting legal brothels all around the world, Bindel got to know pimps, pornographers, survivors of the sex trade, and the women being sold by men classed as ‘business entrepreneurs’. Whilst meeting feminist abolitionists, pro-prostitution campaigners, police and government officials, and the men who pay for sex, Bindel uncovered the lies, mythology and criminal activity that shroud this global trade, and suggests a way forward for the women seeking to abolish the oldest oppression. Informed by the lived human experience of those interviewed, this book will be of great interest to feminists, students, criminal justice advocates, criminologists and human rights activists.

2017 | ISBN 9781925581232 | Paperback | 210 x 148 mm | 382 pp

Caroline Norma , Melinda Tankard Reist (eds)

For too long the global sex industry and its vested interests have dominated the prostitution debate repeating the same old line that sex work is just like any job. In large sections of the media, academia, public policy, Government and the law, the sex industry has had its way. Little is said of the damage, violation, suffering, and torment of prostitution on the body and the mind, nor of the deaths, suicides and murders that are routine in the sex industry.

Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade refutes the lies and debunks the myths spread by the industry through the lived experiences of women who have survived prostitution. These disturbing stories give voice to formerly prostituted women who explain why they entered the sex trade. They bravely and courageously recount their intimate experiences of harm and humiliation at the hands of sex buyers, pimps and traffickers and reveal their escape and emergence as survivors.

Edited by Caroline Norma and Melinda Tankard Reist, Prostitution Narratives documents the reality of prostitution revealing the cost to the lives of women and girls.

Prostitution Narratives: Stories of Survival in the Sex Trade will strengthen and support the global campaign to abolish prostitution, provide solidarity and solace to those who bear its scars and hopefully help women and girls exit this dehumanising industry.

2016 | ISBN 9781742199863 | Paperback | 140 x 220mm | 246 pages

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE RADFEM STARTER LIBRARY

Janice G. Raymond

A generation ago, most people did not know how ubiquitous and grave human trafficking was. Now many people agree that the $35.7 billion business is an appalling violation of human rights. But when confronted with prostitution, many people experience an odd disconnect because prostitution is shrouded in myths, among them the claims that “prostitution is inevitable,” and “prostitution is a job or service like any other.” In Not a Choice, Not a Job, Janice Raymond challenges both the myths and their perpetrators.

Raymond demonstrates that prostitution is not sex but sexual exploitation, and that legalizing and decriminalizing the system of prostitution—as opposed to the prostituted women—promotes sex trafficking, expands the sex industry, and invites organized crime. Specifically, Raymond exposes how legalized prostitution in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and Nevada worsens crime and endangers women. In contrast, she reveals, when governments work to prevent the demand for prostitution by prosecuting pimps, brothels, and prostitution users—as in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland—trafficking does not increase, women are better protected, and fewer men buy sex. Raymond expands the boundaries of scholarship in women’s studies, making this book indispensable to human rights advocates around the world.

2013 | ISBN 9781742198682 | Paperback | 230 x 150 mm | 249 pp

Rachel Moran

When you are fifteen years old and destitute, too unskilled to work and too young to claim unemployment benefit, your body is all you have left to sell.

Rachel Moran grew up in severe poverty and a painfully troubled family. Taken into state care at fourteen, she became homeless and was in prostitution by the age of fifteen. For the next seven years Rachel lived life as a prostituted woman, isolated, drug-addicted, alienated.

Rachel Moran’s experience was one of violence, loneliness, and relentless exploitation and abuse. Her story reveals the emotional cost of selling your body night after night in order to survive – loss of innocence, loss of self-worth and a loss of connection from mainstream society that makes it all the more difficult to escape the prostitution world.

At the age of 22 she managed, with remarkable strength, to liberate herself from that life. She went to university, gained a degree and forged a new life, but she always promised that one day she would complete this book. This is Rachel Moran’s story, written in her own words and in her own name.

2013 | ISBN 9781742198620 | Paperback | 156 x 235 mm | 296 pages

Sheila Jeffreys

There are (at least) two competing views on prostitution: Prostitution as a legitimate and acceptable form of employment, freely chosen by women; And men’s use of prostitution as a form of degrading the women and causing grave psychological damage.

In The Idea of Prostitution, Sheila Jeffreys explodes the distinction between forced and free prostitution, and documents the expanding international traffic in women. She examines the claims of the prostitutes’ rights movement and the sex industry, while supporting prostituted women. Her argument is threefold: the sex of prostitution is not just sex; the work of prostitution is not ordinary work; and prostitution is a choice not for the prostituted women, but for the men who abuse them.

2008 | ISBN 9781876756673 | Paperback | 217 x 140 mm | 394 pp

Mary Lucille Sullivan

Can a prostitute be raped? Are pregnancy and STIs an Occupational Health and Safety issue? What sort of society buys and sells women and children for sex? Does legalisation solve the dangers of sex work? Sex worker advocates have argued for many years that legalising prostitution is the way to make the industry safer both for workers and clients. In 1984, the State of Victoria did just that. Making Sex Work shows with great clarity that the legalisation of prostitution backfires. It further hurts prostituted people and encourages illegal sex industry activities that grow at three times the rate of the legal industry. In this book, Mary Lucille Sullivan looks at the evidence of Victoria’s experience, and asks whether the concept of sex work as ‘a job like any other’ matches the reality.

Discussing the practicalities of brothels as regular businesses, the author unearths astounding facts about both the legal and illegal sectors. Covering issues such as violence, organised crime, women’s health, and mainstream businesses’ involvement in the sex trade, Making Sex Work is a compelling read. This book gives an insight into the sex industry, and into a society where women and children have become just another consumer item. If you’ve ever thought of prostitution as simply a choice some women make, read this book and then ask yourself: Could you do this job? How would you feel if your friend, sister, or daughter chose this career?

Mary Lucille Sullivan is the author of What Happens When Prostitution Becomes Work: An update on legalised prostitution in Australia (2006). She has written two other books on social justice issues, An Australian Pilgrimage: Muslims in Australia from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (1993) and Colony to Community (1997). Mary Lucille Sullivan has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Melbourne. She has toured the US, Britain and Norway discussing the impact of legalised prostitution.

2007 | ISBN 9781876756604 | Paperback | 217 x 140 mm | 413 pp

Christine Stark

Rebecca Whisnant

A 1985 Canadian report on the sex industry in that country reported that women in prostitution suffer a mortality-rate forty times the national average. –Sheila Jeffreys

As an activist, I explain that I’m not against sex and nudity but that women do more than just have sex … whether it’s Vogue, or pornography or beer ads – the message is that women get power through our sexuality and this is how women excel. –Ann Simonton

Fundamentally, the baseline for human governance – now and in the future – must be whether any society takes seriously what happens when someone is harmed so that someone else can have ‘sex’. –John Stoltenberg

This international anthology brings together research, heartbreaking personal stories from survivors of the sex industry, and theory from over thirty women and men – activists, survivors, academics and journalists. Not For Sale is groundbreaking in its breadth, analysis and honesty.

2004 | ISBN 9781876756499 | Paperback | 228 x 152 mm | 480 pp