In most countries, sex workers are subject to exploitative and often unsafe working conditions, and do not benefit from the same labour regulations and protections as other workers.
Community Guides are the result of desk research and a global e-consultation, and aim to provide simple summaries of NSWP’s Smart Guides, further detail and references can be found in the accompanying Smart Guides.
In most countries, sex workers are subject to exploitative and often unsafe working conditions, and don’t benefit from the same labour regulations and protections as other workers. This smart guide sets out how sex work fits within international labour standards, and in particular the Decent Work Agenda. It is intended as a tool for sex workers’ rights organisations to use when campaigning for labour rights as fundamental to sex workers’ rights in their respective countries.
Contents include:
New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work at a national level, alongside statelevel legislation in New South Wales (NSW) and the Northern Territory (NT) in Australia. This Guide provides an overview those three systems, and the key advocacy actions that were pivotal to achieving law reform, as a tool that sex workers and allies can use to advocate for a rights-affirming approach to sex work.
This Smart Guide provides an overview of existing sex work legal models and details the processes that have been used to develop legislative models that respect and protect sex workers’ human and labour rights. It aims to provide sex workers’ rights organisations with ideas and strategies that they can adapt to their own legal framework and context, to use in their advocacy and campaigning in their own countries.
Produced by NSWP and International Women’s Right Actions Watch Asia Pacific, this series of infographics, compiled in PDF format, aims to raise public awareness about the deeply negative impact of ‘End Demand’ laws on the human rights of sex workers, and to encourage collective action to demand State accountability for violations of sex workers’ rights.
This resource is available in English.
Este documento é uma versão traduzida autorizada e não-oficial do documento Community Guide: Shrinking Spaces and Silencing Voices produzido pela Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP). A tradução é de responsabilidade da Agência Piaget para o Desenvolvimento no âmbito do projeto POWER - Promote Sex Workers’ Rights, a qual assume a responsabilidade pelo conteúdo aqui produzido.
Você pode baixar este Guia da comunidade acima.
This resource is a Community Guide to the Briefing Paper: Sex Workers’ Lack of Access to Justice. It provides an overview of the full Briefing Paper, and provides key recommendations for policy makers and service providers.
You can download this 5-page Community Guide above. It is now available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese.
Sex workers around the world face a wide range of barriers to accessing justice, both as victims of crime and when charged with crimes. Since sex work is widely criminalised, most sex workers are denied access to the benefits and rights afforded to other workers under labour laws and face the risk of criminalisation, detention, deportation and legal sanction.
This Smart Person’s Guide is a tool to support sex workers and their allies in advocating for the recognition of sex workers’ expertise. Sex workers’ have an indispensable knowledge of, and experience with the structural, legal, institutional, socio-economic and cultural barriers which impede their human and labour rights. Evidence shows that meaningful involvement of sex workers is critical to success in tackling inequality and inequity.
You can download this 30-page Smart Guide above. It is available in English, Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish.
This resource is a Community Guide to the Briefing Paper: Shrinking Spaces and Silencing Voices. It provides an overview of the full Briefing Paper, and provides key recommendations for policy makers and service providers.
You can download this 5-page Community Guide above. It is now available in English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese.
Funding for sex worker-led organisations is shrinking, as has the space for the voices of sex workers, resulting in sex workers having less influence in programmes, policies and other decisions that affect their lives. Civil society organisations and other stakeholders now feel they have the right to funding and advocacy platforms, either because they work with sex workers and are therefore ‘experts’ who can speak for sex workers, or they wish to exclude sex workers’ voices entirely because they refuse to recognise sex workers’ rights as human rights.
The Global Alliance Against the Trafficking in Women's anthology 'Collateral Damage' reviews the experience of eight specific countries (Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Brazil, India, Nigeria, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The report attempts to assess what the impact of anti-trafficking measures have been for a variety of people living and working there, or migrating into or out of these
Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center - Shadow CEDAW report submitted to the 39th Session of CEDAW in 2007.
You can download this 13 page PDF report above.
This resource is in English.
Date: June 25
UNAIDS PCB met in Geneva on June 25, 2007 and the APNSW spearheaded efforts with NGOs to demonstrate the ways that the proposed UNAIDS Guidance on Sex Work violated UN human rights documents.
Date: June 07, 2007
Varsha Kale (President - WPI) writes:
Labour standards and occupational health and safety have been the rights of Canadian Workers for over 100 years. The sex industry and its workers have however never enjoyed the privileges of being acknowledged for providing a safe work space or been able to complain about dangerous conditions. This has forced the system at large to impose what it believes is right for sex industry workers with disastrous results for decades in the BC/Yukon region. The need for a community based process through which the sex industry can govern itself and have input to its future and stability has never been more urgent.
The BC Coalition of Experiential Women was funded to explore working conditions of off street municipally licensed massage parlors and escort agencies. A series of three focus groups were conducted with individuals employed in these venues as well as those who work primarily on street. This report presents the findings of these interviews.
“The Challenge of Change,” the December 2006 report of the House of Commons Subcommittee on Solicitation Laws, was aptly named — the Subcommittee failed to meet the challenge of recommending legislative changes that are urgently needed to protect and fulfil the health, safety and human rights of adult sex workers in Canada.This paper critiques the Subcommittee’s report in detail. It also summarises the Legal Network’s analysis of the criminal law’s impact on sex workers and calls on federal politicians to show real leadership by standing up for the human rights of sex workers in Canada.
This resource looks at Raymond's 'ten reasons' and discusses why each reason is poorly thought out, or missing crucial information.
You can download this seven page PDF resource above.
This resource is in English.
This letter was sent to Peter Piot to raise concerns about the language and focus of the 2007 UNAIDS Guidance Note: HIV and Sex Work. In particular, it raises concerns about the emphasis on reducing commercial sex rather than HIV, and: