Dossier Anthropology in times of intolerance: challenges facing neoconservatism - Articles. Control creep and the multiple exclusions faced by women in low-autonomy sex industry sectors. We analyze the distinct manifestations of these exclusionary forces in all four sites to introduce criminal creep as theoretical shorthand for the global seepage of ideological, structural, and interpersonal exclusionary forces into social life, professional practice, and socio-legal procedures that marginalize women in the sex industry as victim-criminals in need of rehabilitation.
This article expands this existing literature by introducing control creep as theoretical shorthand for the unrelenting expansion of punitive socio-legal measures that marginalize women in low-autonomy sex industry sectors.
Our focus here is on what control creep does with respect to its problematic and complex effects on its targets, with particular respect to the driving forces and contexts underpinning the pervasive creep of criminalization and control measures.
Given this range of systemic and interpersonal modalities of control directed at the women, we contend that control creep generates a totalizing exclusionary force through which women from marginalized communities experience severe limitations on their socioeconomic opportunities. This, in turn, impels them into low-autonomy sex industry sectors where they face significant stigma that results in over-policing and compromised health and safety.
As worrisome is the fact that all four authors, engaged in street- and brothel-level research with sex workers and sex worker activist groups over the past two decades, have noted that police and legal activities surrounding control creep have made it increasingly difficult for sex workers to organize themselves and make their needs understood to policy makers.
