‘If they can have her, why can’t we?’

Source
Amnesty International
Year
2019

Amnesty International has released a new report highlighting the routine use of rape, violence and torture by police to punish women sex workers in the Dominican Republic. The report - ‘If they can have her, why can’t we?’ - uses testimony from 46 Dominican cisgender and transgender women sex workers, and reports them suffering various forms of violence at the hands of police. Amnesty attributes this partly to the criminalisation of sex work, saying "the criminalized status of sex workers combined with profound machismo, fuels arbitrary detentions by police and enables these grave human rights violations, with impunity". 

Read more here and on the Amnesty International website. You can download the full 52 page report above. It is available in English.