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Following its review of the Sexual Offences Act (2003), the Home Office undertook a review of legislation on sex work. Policy will be shaped by responses to the consultation document, Paying the Price: a Consultation Paper on Prostitution. How the consultation conceives problems of sex work is therefore crucially important. Sex work service providers and rights campaigners are concerned that the consultation turns attention away from health issues and focuses instead on legislation to penalize both sex workers and their clients. Further, Paying the Price seeks solutions for sex work at the individual rather than structural level. Sex workers might be recommended to 'exiting programmes' and individual pimps and traffickers prosecuted, but there is no attempt to prevent sex worker abuse through human rights and employment laws. This article identifies the problems associated with a perspective that prioritizes punitive responses over public health strategies on sex work.

This paper reports the number of sex workers in Scotland and England who are in contact with specialist services for sex workers. Then, using methods and multipliers derived from the frequently quoted Kinnell study (1999) the paper provides various updated estimates of the wider population of sex workers. We point out the limits of our estimates and the methodological difficulties of estimating the size of this hidden population. The paper argues that many claims about sex work made by politicians and the media are misleading especially where they conflate sex work with trafficking and abuse.