ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that by singling prostitution out for special attention, radical feminists accept culturally specific processes that separate work from relationships of intimacy. But they miss out the more complex and potentially challenging relationship that sex work has to gender hierarchy. Prostitution is an act that cannot be identified as singularly a market transaction or the realisation of private desire. The criminalisation of the purchase of sex was introduced into Northern Irish law through section 15 of the Human Trafficking and Exploitation Act 2015. A series of reviews of prostitution took place in the early part of the twenty-first century. While the remit of the review originally extended to prostitution, it was subsequently decided that bar the introduction of a new anti-sex-trafficking offence and redefining of some soliciting offences as non-gender specific in the Sexual Offences Act 2003, this issue required further, and distinct, consideration.
