Holbeck, an area of Leeds, has been declared Britain’s first legal red light zone in 2014. Otherwise illegal activities associated with sex work are now allowed during the night time. This step towards decriminalisation has been welcomed by sex workers and their advocates. BBC Three released a mini-series about Holbeck and its street prostitutes, called Sex, Drugs and Murder: Life in the Red Light Zone (2016-2017). This paper will investigate how media frames and their narrative constructions of subjects and spaces associated with sex work are complicit in forming the social imagination, policies and the construction of ‘ordered’ and ‘unordered’ spaces. The analysis will inspect the series’ representation of Holbeck and its street sex workers with regard to narrative conventions and a realist aesthetic style common to documentaries. It will be argued that Holbeck’s female sex workers are presented as ‘fallen’, degenerate victims. These notions of personal decay are narratively and aesthetically linked to the area where the women work. The district is portrayed as unordered and polluted as a result of the legalisation of sex work. The series is thus complicit in the reproduction of discourses which have informed stricter anti-sex work policies before. This paper further exemplifies how complicity can serve as a useful concept in the analysis of media frames and genre conventions.
