“Anti-prostitution feminists and even policymakers often ask sex workers whether we would have sex with our clients if we weren’t being paid. Work is thus constantly being re-inscribed as something so personally fulfilling you would pursue it for free. Indeed, this understanding is in some ways embedded in anti-prostitution advocacy through the prevalence of unpaid internships in such organisations. Equality Now, a major, multimillion-dollar anti-prostitution organisation, instructs applicants that their eight-to-ten week internships will be unpaid (adding that ‘no arrangements can be made for housing’). Such posts are common: Ruhama advertises numerous volunteer roles that could easily be paid jobs. In 2017, a UK anti-slavery charity came under fire in the national press for advertising unpaid internships. In 2013, Turn Off the Red Light, an Irish anti-prostitution NGO consortium, advertised for an intern who would not be paid the minimum wage. The result of these unpaid and underpaid internships is that the women who are most able to build careers in the women’s sector – campaigning and setting policy agendas around prostitution – are women who can afford to do unpaid full-time work in New York and London. In this context, it is hardly a surprise that the anti-prostitution movement as a whole has a somewhat abstracted view of the relationship between work and money.”
