A common debate point amongst Burning Sun discussions is that of the prostitution that took place within the scandal. A broadly accepted argument point is that prostitution counts as sexual assault or, at the very least, sexual exploitation. This is known as SWERF rhetoric.

SWERF is an acronym for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism and refers to feminists who object to the practice of commercialized sex. It does not require one to actively identify as a SWERF, or even to consider oneself fundamentally anti-sex work, in order to accidentally repeat SWERF rhetoric. SWERF values are often communicated in misleading ways, offering pipelines to SWERFdom by creating reasonable sounding arguments that progressively escalate.

The issue with SWERF rhetoric is that it does not value the voices of the women it claims to be attempting to honour. While SWERFs and those spouting its rhetoric claim to be in support of women, they devalue the actual voices of those who choose to engage in sex work. Not only that but they also devalue the voices of trafficking victims, who often speak in tandem with and agree on overlapping issues with sex workers.

The problem that arises with the claims that prostitution is equatable to sexual assault is one that attacks feminism at its core concepts. Feminism, at its core, revolves around the understanding and valuing of women’s autonomy, personhood, and right to gve or deny consent. When making the claim that sex work is equatable to sexual assault, what you’re doing is stripping sex workers of their autonomy, personhood, and right to give consent on their own terms.

Sex worker rights advocates have long objected to the tendency to collapse all forms of commercial sex into sexual violence. While advocates broadly acknowledge that trafficking, coercion, and exploitation exist within the sex industry, many argue that treating all sex work as inherently non-consensual obscures the distinction between consensual labor and abuse. As sex worker rights activist Carol Leigh, who is credited with popularizing the term “sex work,” argued, the language used to discuss prostitution matters because it shapes whether the people involved are viewed as workers with agency or merely as passive victims. From this perspective, describing every act of prostitution as sexual assault does not empower sex workers; it removes their ability to define their own experiences and replaces their voices with assumptions made on their behalf.

This distinction is particularly important because trafficking victims themselves often emphasize the difference between consensual sex work and exploitation. Advocacy organizations led by current and former sex workers have repeatedly argued that conflating the two can make it harder to identify genuine victims of coercion. If every commercial sexual encounter is automatically classified as violence, then the specific conditions that define trafficking—force, fraud, coercion, abuse of vulnerability, or the inability to meaningfully consent—become less visible rather than more. In attempting to elevate all sex workers into the category of victims, this rhetoric can inadvertently erase both the autonomy of consenting adults and the unique experiences of those who were genuinely trafficked.

This distinction matters when discussing Burning Sun because the scandal already contains documented allegations of sexual assault, drugging, and exploitation. Expanding the definition of sexual assault to include all prostitution risks muddying the boundaries between consensual and non-consensual acts, making it more difficult—not less—to accurately identify where abuse occurred and who was harmed.

There is also a broad issue of respect when it comes to victims as a whole. Not only is it a disrespect to trafficking victims to conflate their trauma with consensual work but it is also a disrespect to women everywhere to label someone as a victim without their consent. The prostitutes identified in the Burning Sun scandal were legitimate sex workers as willing employees of an adult entertainment establishment. Labeling them as victims erases their personhood, their autonomy, and their right to consent. To insist that a woman must be a victim despite her own understanding of her circumstances is not an act of empowerment—it is an act of paternalism and patronization.

More importantly, the question of whether prostitution occurred should not be confused with the separate question of whether the women involved were harmed. These are not interchangeable issues. A sex worker can experience assault, coercion, trafficking, wage theft, workplace abuse, or exploitation just as any other worker can experience crimes within their profession. However, those harms must be demonstrated through evidence rather than assumed solely because the individual engaged in sex work. To begin from the premise that prostitution itself constitutes victimization is to short-circuit the investigation entirely, replacing the question of what happened with an ideological conclusion about what must have happened.

The irony is that this framework often undermines efforts to identify genuine abuse. If all prostitution is defined as exploitation by default, then the term loses its analytical value. The focus shifts away from investigating specific acts of coercion, trafficking, violence, or assault and toward condemning the existence of sex work itself. In doing so, discussions cease to be about the experiences of actual women and instead become debates over an ideological position.

Sex work is work.

Sex workers and trafficking victims deserve the respect of being distinguished from each other.