By: Zee Xaymaca

Airbnb and French authorities have announced a collaboration to curtail the presence of sex workers in Paris ahead of the Olympics, a reflection of growing prohibitionism around sex work in France. 

Introduction

In the lead up to the Paris Olympics, Airbnb announced a partnership with French authorities to prevent the use of Airbnb properties for sex work. Details are light on the nature of this collaboration. Airbnb’s “Responsible Traveler’s Guide”, linked to in a May 3rd 2024 press release that has since been removed from the site, highlights that prostitution is an offense and encourages travelers to report “victims” to authorities. This policy is concerning because it urges further surveillance of persons suspected of engaging in sex work despite opposition to this approach from sex worker led human rights organizations. It is a harbinger of closer scrutiny in an environment where scrutiny leads to persecution of persons who are already vulnerable to the state. The announced collaboration between Airbnb and the French government is a result of increasingly prohibitionist policies toward prostitution. The rhetoric around this collaboration gives key insights into the pitfalls of France’s tacit conflation of sex work and human trafficking to justify repressive policies even when they attempt to differentiate between the two. This article explores the collaboration in the context of the French government’s doubling down on its mandate to eliminate sex work and shift perceptions of sex work to one that denies sex workers’ agency. The co-opting of human rights language, attempts to misrepresent sex workers’  needs and narratives, and the enlistment of private sector organizations like Airbnb are in alignment with prevailing prohibitionist and ‘rescue’ policies.

French Policy on sex work and human trafficking

Through the twentieth century, French policy on sex work has grown increasingly regulationary.  Regulation of workers by relegating them to designated brothels, gave way to outright criminalization of sex workers. In 1946, France passed Law No. 46-685, or the Marthe Richard law that led to the closure of 1400 brothels within months. This law also prohibited procurement and holding of sex workers’ records by authorities, but crucially, the Marthe Richard  law did not outlaw prostitution. It sought to hide it.  In the face of stricter regulations, sex workers maintained their autonomy through independent safety structures, by working in groups, forming collectives, and implementing screening procedures that depended on community to keep each other safe. Regulationist policies turned prohibitionist in 1960, when France ratified the Convention on the Suppression of Trafficking and the Exploitation of Prostitution. Between 1960 and 2016, local French governments implemented laws criminalizing ‘active’ and ‘passive’ solicitation, benefiting from sex work as a third party, and other aspects of the industry.

 In 2016, France formally adopted the Nordic Model, an “end demand” approach to sex work in an attempt to curtail prostitution and human trafficking for exploitation in sex trade.  The 2016 law  “aiming to strengthen the fight against the prostitution system and to support prostituted persons” is far reaching with implications for social services, professional training, immigration enforcement,  and criminal law. In 2016, the government instituted a fine for the purchase of sex, while removing the penalty to sex workers for  solicitation. 

The provisions of the 2016 law

In this law the French government authorized the creation of  prostitution exit programs to be run by local authorities, regional associations and government agencies including the National Police, Border Police the National Gendarmerie, and the Inter-ministerial Mission for the Protection of Women Against Violence and to Fight Human Trafficking (Mission interministérielle pour la protection des femmes contre les violences et la lutte contre la traite des êtres humains) or MIPROF. Government agencies like MIPROF provide training on how to identify and intervene in situations of trafficking, guide the application of policy on sex work and  trafficking and administer state sponsored “rescue” programs that target sex workers. These rescue programs mandate that “a pathway to exit from prostitution and to social inclusion and employability is proposed to each person who is a victim of prostitution, of pimping and of the trafficking in human beings for sexual exploitation”. Its provisions include a temporary residency program for migrant sex workers who declare to rescue organizations that they have left prostitution. This provision grants a six month stay that can be renewed up to a maximum of two years. While in an exit program, the overseeing body and the sponsoring association ensures that the person receiving assistance maintains their commitments, including the commitment to leave prostitution. 

This requirement that participants in this program must convince authorities that they have stopped sex work in order to access the law’s provisions is often unfeasible as there is a lag between stopping sex work and qualifying for assistance if one is determined eligible by the oversight body. The residency permit is available to a sex worker who is a “victim of the offences [of pimping,  prostitution or trafficking for sexual exploitation] who, having ceased the activity of prostitution, is engaged in the pathway to exit from prostitution”. Once renewals to  the six-month residency permit are exhausted after two years, there is no path to permanent residency or citizenship based on participation in diversion programs. The participant becomes at risk of deportation once more and finds themselves identified officially as having done sex work– a categorization that many sex workers wish to avoid.

The law requires that a sex worker  renounce their agency to meet state requirements for housing, welfare, temporarily regularized immigration status while participating in the exit program, and some legal protection. Ultimately, the person in question must leave their work to be dependent on the whims of local government, a concerning proposition considering France’s recent immigration bill. In 2023, the French far right championed a restrictive immigration law that attempted to revoke the policy of automatic citizenship for persons born on French soil to foreign parents, make it easier to deport migrants, restrict family reunification and migrants’ access to welfare.  Thirty two provisions were struck down by the French Constitutional Council on procedural grounds. These censured articles were not struck down because these provisions were unconstitutional and so they can be reintroduced as part of other legislation. Only three articles were censured on constitutional grounds. Fifty-one articles of the immigration bill were passed by the National Assembly in January 2024 despite robust public opposition to the law. In this political climate, it is difficult to attain a sense of safety in identifying oneself as a migrant sex worker to a government that has already made it clear that belonging to either of those categories is less than desirable. 

Airbnb’s policy on sex work and human trafficking

Airbnb holds a long-standing anti-sex work policy. Currently  Airbnb explicitly forbids In-call sex work and procuring the services of a sex worker while using their service. Airbnb will de-register suspected sex workers and their close associates, regardless of whether they use the platform to facilitate their work. In their Illegal and Prohibited Activities section the short term rental platform does differentiate between human trafficking and sex work (forbidding both), only to resort to subtly conflating the two in another statement entitled How to help stop human trafficking when describing signs of “sex trafficking” that would alert concerned persons to involve law enforcement. These signs include

•     Listing address is referenced in online ads for commercial sex

•     Reports of frequent unauthorized guests at varying hours.

•     Excessive amounts of sex paraphernalia in listing

•     Presence of commercial hardware set up for a video/photo shoot

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3275

These conditions do not necessarily indicate “sex trafficking” but may be met by persons using their rental for sex work, for which Airbnb suggests reporting the person to local human trafficking hotlines. A tacit blurring of the difference between sex work and human trafficking is key to justifying targeting sex workers under the guise of trafficking prevention. Though Airbnb differentiates between human trafficking and sex work, their approach to the two phenomena is essentially the same. Such policies rely on Airbnb’s extensive guest data collection, including financial information, biometrics, legal records, and device tracking information. The information Airbnb collects puts guests at risk of unduly invasive profiling and arbitrary suspension from the platform, posing privacy and discrimination concerns for sex workers and non-sex workers alike. 

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As a US based company, Airbnb is partial to the US’ preoccupation with criminalization of sex work and conflating it with trafficking. The US’ stance is exemplified by SESTA/FOSTA, a law that claims to have set out to curtail the online facilitation and promotion of “unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims.” but in practice expanded the mandate for online platforms to surveil their users or face liability for “Promotion of prostitution and reckless disregard of sex trafficking”. The conflation of sex work and sex trafficking is a cornerstone of  the bill which ultimately became law in 2018.

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While spokespersons deny that it is being used to target sex workers, Airbnb has acquired Trooly, a tech startup that predicts the platform’s users’ trustworthiness by scanning their online presence for ‘background checks’. This startup, was marketed to “peer to peer marketplaces financial institutions, marketers and recruiters.”  Financial institutions have also been notoriously hostile and exclusionary toward sex workers. Unsurprisingly, persons involved in sex work and pornography fall into Trooly’s untrustworthy category, giving credence to reports of Airbnb account suspension for simply being associated with sex work. 

What is known about the Airbnb-France collaboration

Airbnb, like its project partners,  is careful to frame its approach to sex work in human rights terms by using the term “trafficking”. They highlight that “people of color, migrants and people who identify as LGBTQ+ are more likely to be exploited… and face trafficking” as a result of “current and historic discrimination and inequity”. This framing is, on the face, unobjectionable, if not for the fact that trafficking and sex work are later conflated and that the authorities are implicated in the perpetuation of the current and historic discrimination that makes human trafficking so insidious. For instance, reports by France 24’s News Wire highlight the concerns of sex workers and the NGOs that work with them over changes in police behavior, trending toward the targeting of migrant sex workers in certain parts of Paris through identification controls. These increased controls have led to sex workers being harassed, having their photos taken without their consent, having their documents destroyed, and therefore taking greater safety risks to avoid interactions with police. 

Sex workers in Paris’ Bellville neighborhood have decried  the targeting of sex workers that has been commonplace even before the Olympics became a consideration. Workers in Bellville still report police harassment in the forms of excessive controls, an indication of surveillance that has many concerned with its purpose. Initiatives like the Airbnb-France collaboration is based on the misconception that sporting events are a significant draw for non-local sex workers and “trafficking networks”. This misconception has been thoroughly debunked but remains nevertheless politically expedient for anti sex work groups, despite the fact that Clément Eulry, director of Airbnb France and Belgium admits that “reports [of human trafficking] remain very rare on the platform”.

Big Picture: The effect of the French government’s crackdown on sex workers

The anti-sex work movement and conservatives have set their sights on eroding any gains in sex workers right to work. One potent tool for doing so is shaping public opinion which the French government has made part of its mandate by ensuring that secondary school students are taught about the “Information on the reality of prostitution and the dangers of the commercialisation of the body”. The result is a spreading belief in the prohibitionist talking point that sex workers are not free. Their prohibitionist programs are painted as an alternative to the potential harms of the sex trades as they exist under criminalization, overlooking sex workers’ assertion that a major harm is the criminalization of sex work and sex workers’ lives. The 2016 law is not simply a criminalization of sex buyers but an attempt to make sex work increasingly difficult to do safely.  Christine, a French sex worker and long time sex worker’s rights activist, points out that under the 2016 anti-prostitution law “When they began speaking about the law, they spoke like clients are sexual criminals. We saw good clients less and less. The good clients were really anxious”. When asked how sex workers adapted to the 2016 law, she responded “they lowered the price”. 

Combining corporate and government resources ought to be concerning as both entities have a vested interest in collecting information about those deemed ‘problematic’. The French government’s support for the anti-trafficking initiative with Airbnb will facilitate the sharing of private information about Airbnb customers. A cursory search of “sex work on Airbnb” gives a trove of results where persons speculate about their guests’ activities and how to erase the presence of sex workers from the platform. Ostensibly, the partnership aims to make that erasure more likely. 

Today, migrant sex workers fear the increased  crackdowns ahead of the Paris Olympics. Tellingly, this crackdown also targets unhoused persons, drug users, and migrants who do not engage in sex work. The Other Side of The Medal, a collective of organizations aiming to bring light to the human rights implications of major sport events, chastised the French and local Parisian government’s attempt to cover up the strain on publicly available resources like housing by expelling those rounded up in raids and checks to areas outside of Paris.

Current policies do not maximize effectiveness at curtailing human trafficking, which Airbnb France’s director agrees is rare on the platform. This partnership promises to address the nonexistent phenomena of an influx of sex workers during sporting events, but in fact, will continue after the Olympics and is billed as a long term collaboration.  In reality, it is yet another way that the government and private sector actors seek to restrict the autonomy of those who do not conform to prevailing standards of social desirability. 

Christine points out that the 2016 anti prostitution law, as written, “was immigration control”. In our conversation she explained  “It’s a way to clean the street… The spirit of the law was that sex workers are victims, they are poor girls. Before they were guilty. With the law they are not guilty anymore. You are a victim and we have to protect you”.  Persons in exit programs are given 300 EUR per month, while unemployed French citizens receive 425 EUR per month in government benefits, making it unlikely that French citizens would opt for the offer of financial assistance under an exit program. Christine adds that to qualify for the exit program a person must overcome several unwritten barriers. “You have to say you are a sex worker, it will be on your papers and they don’t want more migrants in France”.

 Among the barriers is the fact that not every city has created the mandated commission to oversee exit from sex work. These commissions are tasked with administering the temporary residency permit, granting of which depends on the participant convincing oversight associations that they have not engaged in sex work during the program. “There are not many places and you have to be a good candidate. It’s a lot of work. You have to go to the commission, the police… You have to show that okay I did sex work but I’m so shameful”, Christine explains. Migrant sex workers, who often work on the street, are made particularly vulnerable by the provisions of the anti-prostitution law and immigration reform. 

The French government seems to assume that sex work can be eliminated, despite all evidence to the contrary.  Failing that, they have opted for erasure. Human rights defenders have been raising the alarm about how French cities handle the presence of sex worker populations. The government must craft their justifications and approaches to hide the harm that is being perpetuated by “end demand” policies. Christine asserts  “It’s important to say we are not slaves. We are doing sex work for our reasons” in an echo of the sentiments expressed by sex workers the world over. With the conflation of trafficking and sex work, the disingenuous presentation of their “end demand” program, and their intended long term collaboration with the private sector to advance their mandate, the French government attempts to upend systems sex workers put in place to keep themselves safe without offering a meaningful and realistic response to the dangers created by policy.