scholarly journals Criminalised Interactions with Law Enforcement and Impacts on Health and Safety in the Context of Different Legislative Frameworks Governing Sex Work Globally

2021 ◽  
pp. 121-140
Author(s):  
Andrea Krüsi ◽  
Kate D’Adamo ◽  
Ariel Sernick
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Work Environments ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Health And Human Rights ◽  
Cis And Trans

AbstractThis chapter focuses on cis and trans sex workers’ experiences with law enforcement, and how various regimes of regulating sex work including full and partial criminalisation, legalisation, and decriminalisation shape the human rights and the work environments of sex workers globally including access to occupational health and safety, police protection, and legal recourse. Criminalisation and policing of sex work constitute forms of structural violence that perpetuate and exacerbate experiences of interpersonal violence and negative health outcomes among sex workers globally. Country spotlights from the global North and South provide examples of different regimes of regulation and draw attention to how laws and regulations interact with specific work environments in various settings to shape sex workers’ lived experiences of health, safety, and human rights. This chapter highlights how various approaches to criminalising and policing sex work undermine sex workers’ safety, health and human rights, including violence and poor health and concludes with an evidence-based call for the decriminalisation of sex work globally.

scholarly journals An ethnographic exploration of factors that drive policing of street-based female sex workers in a U.S. setting -  identifying opportunities for intervention.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine HA Footer ◽  
Bradley E. Silberzahn ◽  
Sahnah Lim ◽  
Steven Huettner ◽  
Victor A. Kumar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Health Determinant ◽  
Health And Human Rights ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Police Practices

Abstract Background: Building on a broader sociological discourse around policing approaches towards vulnerable populations, increasing public health and human rights evidence points to policing practices as a key health determinant, particularly among street-based sex workers. Despite the importance of policing as a structural health determinant, few studies have sought to understand the factors that underlie and shape harmful policing practices towards sex workers. This study therefore aimed to explore the drivers for policing attitudes and practices towards street-based cisgender female sex workers.Methods: Drawing on ethnographic methods, 280 hours of observations with police patrol and 10 stakeholder interviews with senior police leadership in Baltimore City, USA were carried out to better understand the drivers for policing strategies towards cisgender female sex workers. Analysis was data- and theory-driven, drawing on the concepts of police culture and complementary criminological and sociological literature that aided exploration of the influence of the ecological and structural environment on policing practices.Results: Ecological factors at the structural (e.g., criminalization), organizational (e.g., violent crime control), community and individual level (e.g., stigmatizing attitudes) emerged as key to shaping individual police practices and attitudes towards cisgender female sex workers in this setting. Findings indicate senior police support for increased alignment with public health and human rights goals. However, the study highlights that interventions need to move beyond individual officer training and address the broader structural and organizational setting in which harmful police practices towards sex work operate. Conclusions: A more in-depth understanding of the circumstances that drive law enforcement approaches to street-based sex work is critical to the collaborative design of interventions with police in different settings. In considering public health-police partnerships to address the rights and health of sex worker populations in the U.S. and elsewhere, this study supports existing calls for decriminalization of sex work, supported by institutional and policy reforms, neighborhood-level dialogues that shift the cultural landscape around sex work within both the police and larger community, and innovative individual-level police trainings.

scholarly journals Best Practices and Challenges to Sex Worker Community Empowerment and Mobilisation Strategies to Promote Health and Human Rights

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-206
Author(s):  
Cynthia Navarrete Gil ◽  
Manjula Ramaiah ◽  
Andrea Mantsios ◽  
Clare Barrington ◽  
Deanna Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Health And Human Rights ◽  
Sex Worker ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
Policy Environments

AbstractSex workers face a number of health and human rights challenges including heightened risk for HIV infection and suboptimal care and treatment outcomes, institutional and interpersonal violence, labour rights violations, and financial insecurity. In response, sex worker-led groups have been formed and sustained across geographic settings to address these challenges and other needs. Over the last several decades, a growing body of literature has shown that community empowerment approaches among sex workers are associated with significant reductions in HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Yet legal and policy environments, as well as funding constraints, have often limited the reach, along with the impact and sustainability, of such approaches.In this chapter, we first review the literature on community empowerment and mobilisation strategies as a means to collectively address HIV, violence, and other health and human rights issues among sex workers. We then utilise two case studies, developed by the sex worker-led groups APROASE in Mexico and Ashodaya Samithi in India, to illustrate and contextualise community empowerment processes and challenges, including barriers to scale-up. By integrating the global literature with context-specific case studies, we distil lessons learned and recommendations related to community empowerment approaches among sex workers.

scholarly journals Policing of sex work in South Africa: The positive policing partnership approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 80-85
Author(s):  
Donna Maree Evans ◽  
Marlise L. Richter ◽  
Munyaradazi I. Katumba
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
South African ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Police Training ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
The South ◽  
Sex Worker

All aspects of sex work are criminalized in South Africa. Due to their marginalized position in society, sex workers are often the target of police violence and human rights violations, all of which have far-reaching implications for public health. Existing complaint mechanisms and police oversight structures rarely ensure accountability for sex worker human rights violations. In 2016, various sex work sector stakeholders and allied civil society members partnered in a collaborative project to document the operational policing challenges and record a contemporary evidence base of sex worker rights violations by law enforcement. The findings demonstrated that violation of sex worker human rights is systemic, pervasive, and entrenched. The project approach helped catalyze a move away from more traditionally adversarial approaches, withstakeholders from the South African sex work sector forming the Positive Policing Partnership (PPP) as an advocacy vehicle to drive positive, solution-focused engagement on the operational policing challenges. The PPP focuses on collaboration, innovative partnerships, and capacity building. Concurrently, the COC Netherlands Dignity, Diversity and Policing project has successfully embedded a rights-based police training curriculum in partnership with the South African Police Service (SAPS). These projects employ different strategies and frameworks to catalyze positive change and to support effective engagement between the sex work sector, law enforcement, and government. This article provides a snapshot of the formation, activities and progress of these projects to date, teamed with a summary of key strategies and learnings.

scholarly journals Overview and Evidence-Based Recommendations to Address Health and Human Rights Inequities Faced by Sex Workers

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Shira M. Goldenberg ◽  
Ruth Morgan Thomas ◽  
Anna Forbes ◽  
Stefan Baral
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Health And Human Rights ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
Social Inequities

AbstractThis volume uses community case studies and data from around the world to highlight the sustained health and social inequities that sex workers in all of their diversity experience in 2020. Guided by a balanced community–academic partnership, this volume aims to ensure that sex workers’ voices are amplified in describing both challenges and the ways forward. Collectively, the chapters describe an elevated burden of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, drug-related harms, violence and other human rights violations, and significant unmet sexual and reproductive health needs. They also demonstrate that sex workers are not passive recipients of such inequity, but rather actively resist and continue to mobilise to advocate for improved health, safety, and human rights conditions and policy changes. Evidence-based recommendations include sex work decriminalisation, ensuring accessible and sex worker-friendly services, removal of punitive policing and surveillance, community empowerment, and strengthening capacity for community engagement in research, policy, and programmes.

scholarly journals The Double-Edged Sword of Health and Safety: COVID-19 and the Policing and Exclusion of Migrant Asian Massage Workers in North America

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Elene Lam ◽  
Elena Shih ◽  
Katherine Chin ◽  
Kate Zen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Interpersonal Violence ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
The State ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
Sexual Services

Migrant Asian massage workers in North America first experienced the impacts of COVID-19 in the final weeks of January 2020, when business dropped drastically due to widespread xenophobic fears that the virus was concentrated in Chinese diasporic communities. The sustained economic devastation, which began at least 8 weeks prior to the first social distancing and shelter in place orders issued in the U.S. and Canada, has been further complicated by a history of aggressive policing of migrant massage workers in the wake of the war against human trafficking. Migrant Asian massage businesses are increasingly policed as locales of potential illicit sex work and human trafficking, as police and anti-trafficking initiatives target migrant Asian massage workers despite the fact that most do not provide sexual services. The scapegoating of migrant Asian massage workers and criminalization of sex work have led to devastating systemic and interpersonal violence, including numerous deportations, arrests, and deaths, most notably the recent murder of eight people at three Atlanta-based spas. The policing of sex workers has historically been mobilized along fears of sexually transmitted disease and infection, and more recently, within the past two decades, around a moral panic against sex trafficking. New racial anxieties around the coronavirus as an Asian disease have been mobilized by the state to further cement the justification of policing Asian migrant workers along the axes of health, migration, and sexual labor. These justifications also solidify discriminatory social welfare regimes that exclude Asian migrant massage workers from accessing services on the basis of the informality and illegality of their work mixed with their precarious citizenship status. This paper draws from ethnographic participant observation and survey data collected by two sex worker organizations that work primarily with massage workers in Toronto and New York City to examine the double-edged sword of policing during the pandemic in the name of anti-trafficking coupled with exclusionary policies regarding emergency relief and social welfare, and its effects on migrant Asian massage workers in North America. Although not all migrant Asian massage workers, including those surveyed in this paper, provide sexual services, they are conflated, targeted, and treated as such by the state and therefore face similar barriers of criminalization, discrimination, and exclusion. This paper recognizes that most migrant Asian massage workers do not identify as sex workers and does not intend to label them as such or reproduce the scapegoating rhetoric used by law enforcement. Rather, it seeks to analyze how exclusionary attitudes and policies towards sex workers are transferred onto migrant Asian massage workers as well whether or not they provide sexual services.

What Is the Relationship between Online Sex Workers and Cybersecurity?

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 762-766
Author(s):  
Stephanie Do ◽  
Dan Nathan-Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Work Safety ◽  
Labor Practices ◽  
Theory Application ◽  
Use Of The Internet ◽  
The Relationship

Although online sex work has become more accessible to people of all socio-economic statuses, labor practices and work safety have not improved since the widespread use of the internet. One way that we can help empower sex workers is to understand their motivations and experiences when using the internet. In a survey conducted by Sanders et al. (2017), the highest crime that 56.2% sex workers experienced was being threatened or harassed through texts, calls, and emails. Because there is no theory application to date on this marginalized group, three theories were proposed. This literature review highlights the need to explore why sex workers, as end-users, should be included in the user cybersecurity defense conversation, such as the cybercrimes that they face, their relationship with law enforcement, and what other factors affect their safety.

Recognising the Human Rights of Female Sex Workers in India: Moving from Prohibition to Decriminalisation and a Pro-work Model

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaya Sagade ◽  
Christine Forster
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Female Sex Workers ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Sex Trade ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
Women’S Human Rights ◽  
Work Model ◽  
Women's Human Rights

This article sets out a women’s human rights approach to the legal regulation of sex work developed through an analysis of feminist perspectives, international human rights standards—in particular, the approach of the Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 1979 (CEDAW)—and the voices of female sex workers within India. It categorises sex work into four legal models, namely, prohibition which criminalises all aspects of the sex trade, partial decriminalisation which criminalises only those who force women into sex work and those who trade in under-age sex workers, social control legalisation which decriminalises but regulates the sex trade with the aim of containing through (often punitive) restrictions, and finally pro-work which approaches sex work as valid employment by extending the legal and human rights of other workers to sex workers. The article places India’s current regulatory framework into the prohibition model and argues that the legal response to sex work that most closely accords with a women’s human rights approach is partial decriminalisation coupled with a pro-work model. Although the introduction of this model in India poses considerable challenges, it has the greatest capacity to first, reduce the crime and corruption that surrounds the sex trade; second, to enhance, promote and protect public health and third, provide appropriate legal and human rights protection to sex workers as international obligations require.

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