There are two types of sex-worker—how can we protect both?

Two years after the bill was first proposed, French legislators have finally passed a law making it legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it. It replaces an older law under which prostitution was allowed but soliciting was not—the current situation in the UK.

The bill was lauded in some parts of the international media when it was first put forward for its attempt to protect sex workers themselves from criminalization. The onus was shifted onto the client. Similar laws have been passed in several other European countries. In recent years the gender-progressives Norway and Iceland have followed in the footsteps of Sweden, which introduced the model in 1999.

Since then, there has been much excitement about this model among some commentators and activists, along with attempts to export it abroad. Some see it as an improvement on the situation in most European countries, where prostitution is legal but related activities—soliciting, but also living off the earnings—are criminal offences, as it is often the sex workers who suffer from these regulations. It is also seen by some as a better option than total legalisation. This appears to have led to an increase in trafficking and a decrease in the welfare of prostitutes in some of the countries where it has been adopted, including the Netherlands, by increasing demand and allowing pimping and brothel-keeping (means of controlling sex workers) to flourish. The European Parliament has backed the Swedish model, and a version has been adopted in Northern Ireland (although the UK-wide laws still apply).

But Strass, a French sex workers' union, has been avid in its opposition to the law, protesting outside the legislature this week as MPs went to cast their vote. They call the law “repressive,” saying it will increase stigma and make workers more vulnerable by requiring more secrecy in response to customers' demands. Some argue that it will drive more respectable customers away, reducing their choice of who to work with, and push the soliciting of business away from the streets and onto the internet, where it is harder to police.

There have been major disputes among human and women's rights groups over the last few years about the right approach to legislating for sex work. Amnesty International won itself many enemies last year by calling for decriminalisation of the trade (note an important distinction between legalisation and decriminalisation, explained here), prompting a vicious backlash from some activists.

At least part of the reason the debate becomes so sticky is that there exists two very different groups of sex worker. There are those who have freely entered the profession; a career choice like any other. Some have published their accounts of life in the sex industry as an attempt to tackle negative perceptions and argue their case that the work can be enjoyable and even fulfilling. Diary of a London Call Girl, whose author Brooke Magnanti was revealed to be a British PhD student and research scientist, is probably the most famous example. Others include American journalist Melissa Gira Grant, a former student of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts and author of Playing the Whore. These women are western and educated. Their experience of the sex industry is a world of choice, where they could earn hundreds of pounds an hour for work they could largely control, and could eventually opt out of when it no longer suited them.

But there is group of sex workers for whom the experience is entirely different. These are the ones for whom it is not a choice—the ones who have been trafficked, coerced or simply bullied into entering the industry in order to make money for other people; or who do not have the right to work in the countries where they live and so must turn to industries where nobody's checking their papers. For the same reason, it is difficult for these workers to report abuse or seek protection. More than 90 per cent of prostitutes in London are migrants, many from China, and a similar figure applies to France. The 2013 Channel 4 documentary Sex: My British Job, in which a Taiwanese reporter goes undercover in some of London's brothels, provides a valuable insight into the situation.

The legislative challenge, then, is to protect one group without damaging the lives or work of the other. Activists are right to complain that the voices of sex workers have been left out of the debate for too long; and it is through the writings of the women mentioned above, and the activities of workers to organise themselves into unions, that their views have increasingly been brought in. For obvious reasons, though, the women who speak up tend to belong to the first group. Members of the second cannot easily speak for themselves (although some who have managed to leave the industry have done—see this recent account from a woman trafficked to the US) and must be represented by NGOs speaking on their behalf. These NGOs are then exposed to accusations of advocating on an issue of which they have no personal experience.

Advocates of prohibiting sex work generally argue that it is a kind of violence, that it's unsafe, that it amounts to the buying and selling of women, and that it enables exploitation on a scale rarely witnessed in other industries. Opponents argue that women have the right to use their bodies as they wish and that attempts to ban prostitution are fundamentally moralistic and endanger sex workers by pushing the industry underground. They also argue that trafficking and exploitation are major problems in other industries—for example, in domestic work—for which nobody has proposed banning as a solution.

Many of these complaints are legitimate. There can be no doubt that even well-intentioned debates about the subject become tied up with moralising, a concern that there is simply something wrong or unseemly about sex work. It is true, too, that people who otherwise expend little energy on the protection of women's rights can care about it very much when it suits (the banning of the burka; opposition to immigration; and George Bush's sudden burning concern for the women of Afghanistan). There is a danger of feminism being used as a fig leaf for tackling something that is opposed for other reasons.

But the controversy over sex work legislation has at least shifted to a point where the debate is really between decriminalising or legalising it, or banning only the buying but not the selling of sex (though, of course, legislation has been slow to catch up). Without a process of trial and error it is difficult to know which approaches will work best; but it is increasingly difficult to justify the criminalising of sex workers themselves, who have borne the burden of legislation ever since the 19^th century. That is, at least, a step forward in the debate over how to protect as well as allow.