Global changes in migration, health, employment, and public policy are having a major impact on the sex industry. As editors of this themed issue on sex work have put together papers to document some of these changes, revisit the epidemiological and social understanding of the role of sex work in relation to sexually transmitted infections, and assess interventions that can reduce the burden of disease and of stigma on participants in the industry.
Major drivers of change in the sex industry are economic, demographic, ideological, and technological. Globalisation is the umbrella term used to express many of these changes, which include increased economic interdependence of different countries through trade, the extension of the world market to areas of the world previously isolated, increased movement of people and of capital, and the rapid spread of new technologies and media across wide sections of the globe.
Each of these aspects has had an impact on the sex industry. Some individuals, mainly women, are coerced into migrating for sex work or other forms of informal or unregulated labour. It is difficult to quantify the actual numbers of people selling sex but there are many reports of a widespread increase in numbers of sex workers. This greater potential supply of sex workers seems to be matched by increased demand in many parts of the world.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the proportion of men who reported paying for sex doubled in the decade from to These demographic changes link to other economic factors, the most important being poverty and inequality. Women earn less than men, foreigners earn less than locals, young workers earn less than older people. These inequalities mean that some people are in much greater, often desperate, need of money while others have growing disposable incomes.
In many western countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom such unequal distribution of wealth has led to an increase in many personal services, including domestic work, child care, etc, where one individual earns enough to employ another person. There are many ideological influences on the sex industry and these vary by country and culture, but the growth of sex as a commodity is reflected in the increased use of sexual images in advertising, the rapid growth of the adult entertainment industry, virtual and real, and the widespread availability of pornography on the internet.
