MOST would argue the inside of a bikie club house isn’t the most appropriate place for a pair of twenty-year-old girls. But, this is exactly the location Bonnie found herself when she first started working for a Perth brothel, nine years ago.

“This brothel [was] probably the most notorious brothel in Australia for putting young women in dangerous situations,” she says, with a gentle lilt in her voice.

Scantily clad and flaunting a pair of heels, the girls’ booking was for five men - Cocaine fuelled bodies, inked from head to toe – notorious for roughness, drunkenness, and obnoxiousness, with a lust for drugs, guns, and violent displays of their masculinity.

Scantily clad and flaunting a pair of heels, the girls’ booking was for five men. Cocaine fuelled bodies - inked from head to toe – notorious for roughness, drunkenness, and obnoxiousness, with a lust for drugs, guns, and violent displays of their masculinity.

Speaking with me now, she’s in a much safer space – but it’s been a risky ride.

“At the time I didn’t realise the gravity of how dangerous that was,” says Bonnie.

“But, to send two young girls to a bikie clubhouse where there are weapons and all this kind of thing… it was such a near miss”.

When it had come time for the girls to leave and collect their payment, the men showed their true colours.

“They became so aggressive [and were] threatening us” Bonnie says. 

“They were like, ‘well you can’t f*cking leave, we’re not paying you’.

“We were stuck there,” she says.

“One thing led to another, and I basically just had to take my shoes off and run down the driveway and hide in the middle of the night waiting for the driver to come pick me up.”

…

Public discourse has been strongly centred around improving workplace safety for women and reducing the systemic legal barriers making it difficult for survivors to attain justice.

At the 2021 National Women’s Safety Summit, Prime Minister at the time, Scott Morrison, pledged his ‘responsibility’ toward a safer future for Australian women.

“As Prime Minister, I have a responsibility,” he said.

“We have to talk about the way some men think they own women. About the way some women are subject to disrespect, coercion and violence… We have to do better.”

Is the safety of women in the sex industry included in this responsibility?

“Being slapped, choked, called names… having sex out of obligation because a Madame or manager has pressured you into doing so, can be traumatising. 

Any mention of sex workers seems to be missing from the discussion, despite the industry being dominated by women, and 80 per cent of workers reportedly having been sexually assaulted at work. In WA, a 2017 Law and Sex Worker Health survey (LASH study) found a quarter of respondents had been assaulted by a client, just in the 12 months prior.

When the algorithm isn’t blocking her account, Bonnie uses her Instagram page to raise awareness of violence in the industry. In one of her posts she writes, “the thing about sexual violence in the sex industry is that a lot of people, including sex workers, think that it’s just part of the job.” 

“Being slapped, choked, called names… having sex out of obligation because a Madame or manager has pressured you into doing so, can be traumatising. 

“I’ve smiled through these experiences hundreds – maybe thousands – of times because… I just thought it was something I had to tolerate.”

Sex work isn’t an inherently dangerous job. Bonnie is open about the beautiful experiences and human connections she’s made since working in the industry. Her fondest moment is when her services were booked by man and his terminally ill wife, and wanted to experience a threesome before she died. Bonnie speaks adoringly about the honour it was to be able to be included in, and bear-witness to, an experience of such devoted love. Instead, it is those clients who do not respect sex workers, and feel they can take advantage of a woman working in a legal grey area, that makes it dangerous.

…

Just like in any workplace, workers are safest when respected and granted protection by law, which entitles them to a fair, regulated, workplace. However, in Western Australia, political decision-makers have negated their responsibility to laws that protect women in the sex industry and have instead created a liminal legal space where predators thrive off the obscurity of the law.

“The law is really discriminatory,” says Lena Van Hale, the manager of Magenta, Perth’s peak sex worker outreach organisation, which provides over 3,000 consultations a year.  

Even though sex work is legal in Western Australia, Val Hale explains that it’s near impossible to work without violating one of the criminal codes gripping the industry. A quarter of sex workers find work in brothels, which are technically illegal premises, but more than half work privately for themselves.

In a recent 2021 Australian study about sex work, stigma, and the criminal legal system, one sex worker said, “I wouldn’t call the cops if I was being bashed to death”.

Police turn a blind eye to the brothels, so they rarely get shut down, but Van Hale says she’s constantly hearing reports of sex workers being evicted by landlords, for working from home.

“In order to run that type of business you have to be registered with the local council, but… there’s no category for local councils that a sex worker workplace can exist under.”

“That means local councils and landlords can evict you without notice for operating an unregistered workplace.”

Workers often travel to their client’s location, but this poses the risk of ending up in unknown and dangerous situations, like Bonnie in the bikie clubhouse.

Regardless of how a sex worker chooses to work, it’s likely they’re breaking a law or operating in a way in which they don’t have full control over the environment they’re working in. It follows then, that sex workers rarely report experiences of violence or assault, because they’re afraid of incriminating themselves.

In fact, of all the LASH study respondents who’d had a personal encounter with police, almost half said they’d been threatened with arrest.

In a recent 2021 Australian study about sex work, stigma, and the criminal legal system, one sex worker said, “I wouldn’t call the cops if I was being bashed to death”.

As enforcers of the law, it seems police have withdrawn themselves from the responsibility to protect women in the sex industry.

One of the major findings from the LASH study was “policing activity [does] not seem to correlate with the law very closely.”

Despite strict laws, police tend to turn a blind eye to the industry entirely, unless it’s to do with soliciting sex on the street, the study found. 

Bonnie says this adds to the potential danger for sex workers.

For all the times the police turn a blind eye to the existence of the industry as a whole, Bonnie says the police also turn a blind eye to instances of violence occurring within it.

She echoes the sentiment of countless research papers, finding this semi-criminalised system only gives power to perpetrators of sexual violence.

“If you are operating in a place where part of your work is criminalised, and you go to the police, the sex worker will be treated as a criminal, rather than the person who attacked her,” explains Bonnie.

“It’s a real victim blaming approach, rather than looking at the men who choose to attack sex workers.”

She says, “clients know there are these kinds of legal barriers preventing sex workers to go forward about these attacks and they can really capitalise on that.”

…

Since that night at the clubhouse, Bonnie has spent the last nine-years working her way up to the top tiers of the sex industry. She’s won adult industry awards, commands clients who fly her around the world, made millions, and nearly spent it all.  

Today, “Netflix and Chill” with Bonnie, will set you back AUD$2,200.

She’s graduated from a psychology degree, on the way to completing her Masters, and works as a sexologist supporting people with disabilities to have consensual, healthy and pleasure-filled sexual experiences.

She’s thriving, but having started as a 20-year-old, coerced into sex work by a former-boyfriend, she has an intricate grasp on both the risks, and possibilities of the industry.

In 2018 she started The Companion Collective – an escort consultancy firm, offering strict client screening, sex work education and mentorship for female sex workers, to help keep other women safe in the industry.

“My dream is for all women to thrive, so I founded The Companion Collective to facilitate this vision,”

Each woman is provided with safety training, professional photographs for their online portfolio and a safe location to take bookings.

 “Nearly a decade later… [the industry] still hasn’t changed,” Bonnie says.

“I have a girl starting this week who’s been at [name of brothel emitted for safety]… she says she feels unsafe there because bikies run the place”.

“She got forced into a booking with one of them, and he held her face down and took photos of her without consent.”

The Companion Collective is not an escort agency. What differentiates the two is that Bonnie doesn’t take a percentage of the girls’ earnings – she charges a flat fee for her services.

“When a percentage is taken, this means the manager is paid more when the escort earns more money, even though the manager has not done any extra work.”

She said this often leads to exploitation, as managers push escorts to provide more extreme services, to profit more off her earnings.

“My dream is for all women to thrive, so I founded The Companion Collective to facilitate this vision,” she writes on the business homepage.

While most Australian politicians would agree they also want all women to thrive, it’s hasn’t been clear whether sex workers truly are included in that sentiment.

She says, “if you are going to stand up against violence against women, you have to stand up against violence against all women, not just the ones you agree with.

“There will always be more former clients in parliament than there are sex workers,” says former sex worker, now Reason Party Leader, Fiona Patten.

She says, if those leaders – and potentially former clients – are serious about building a future where perpetrators are held accountable, then perpetrators need to be held accountable in every workplace.

Patten was the Appointed Chair of a review into the decriminalisation of sex work in Victoria. Her recommendations from that review are directed the changes to the legislation, reflecting a decriminalised model. She says its time WA does the same.

“WA’s legislation is over 20 years old and hasn’t been reviewed, and it really should be – the industry has changed, the world has changed, and it would very much warrant a review.”

She says, “if you are going to stand up against violence against women, you have to stand up against violence against all women, not just the ones you agree with.

“If there are seemingly exceptions in our legislation, then the legislation is ineffective.”