There's not a significant campaign from victims of sexual assault to legalise sexual assault, where as there is for sex workers.
There's significant problems with sex work and how it is regulated in this country (and it sounds even worse in NI by your description) but to casually bundle it in with crimes like physical assault and rape is extremely disrespectful to sex workers and their efforts to make the profession safer.
True in a progressive utopia, I would fully support legislative change around sex work in general, as with drugs the solution is in governance as opposed to criminalisation, in my view.
However until that is the case the actual reality of sex work in the UK is one that is dominated by trafficking (non consensual) deceit and abuse, up to and including quite horrific abuses, imprisonment, physical/sexual abuse, financial control etc. - again please read the data.
The vast majority of sex workers are not willing participants in the current model - those that are and any other interested party can and should campaign for a better situation but as it stands that is not the norm.
Physical assault and rape are completely prevalent
within sex work, so unfortunately they sit quite naturally in that realm, despite obvious and massive differences to when they occur domestically.
I wouldn’t naturally couch them together but in the context of criminal/bad things footballers engage in they are all relevant, if not equal.