In 2003 New Zealand passed the Prostitution Reform Act, decriminalising sex work and
associated activities. This thesis examines news media representations of sex work and
workers from 2010 to 2016 to determine how these texts construct sex work in a postdecriminalisation
environment. The key questions this thesis considers are: which sex
workers are presented by journalists as acceptable, and what conditions are attached to
that acceptability? Using media studies frameworks to analyse the texts, this thesis
demonstrates that in a decrimininalised environment the media plays a regulatory role, with
the power to dictate what modes of sex work are acceptable largely shifting away from the
courts. In the absence of a debate about the il/legality of sex work, a different kind of
binaristic construction emerges, frequently related to public visibility or invisibility.
This thesis uses discourse analysis techniques to examine texts relating to three key media
events: the repeated attempts legally restrict where street sex workers could work in South
Auckland, texts about migrant sex workers around the time of the Rugby World Cup, and
texts about independent or agency-based sex workers. My methodology involved examining
the texts to establish who was situated as an expert through discourse representation, what
words were used to describe sex workers and their jobs, and then discerning what
narratives recurred in the texts about each event.
