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UN Rapporteur Should Listen To, Not Disparage, Sex Workers
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On 21 June, a UN rapporteur launched a report at the Human Rights Council in Geneva recommending that all countries criminalize sex work. Outright International has worked in coalition with sex worker rights organizations for decades to advance our common interest in bodily autonomy and to ensure that governments take a hands-off approach to consensual adult sexual activity. Our partners in the global lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) rights movement include LGBTIQ sex workers. We take a rights- and evidence-based approach to sex work, defined as the adult consensual exchange of sexual services for money or goods. We oppose criminalization, advocate for the full inclusion of sex workers in society, and work through listening and taking the lead from sex worker advocates themselves.
UN agencies and institutions have often adopted a similar approach. The UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls issued a clarion call in December 2023 in support of “the full decriminalization of adult voluntary sex work from a human rights perspective, as it holds the greatest promise to address systemic discrimination and violence and impunity for violations of sex workers’ rights.” The Working Group observed that “it is high time for the discrimination, marginalization and stigmatization of sex workers to be addressed by human rights bodies so that their human rights are protected.” The UN has long cautioned against conflating adult voluntary sex work from trafficking in persons – a grave criminal offense. Nearly three decades ago, the UN’s 1995 Beijing Platform for Action singled out “forced prostitution,” distinct from sex work, as a form of violence against women. Three agencies – UNFPA, UNDP and UNAIDS – stated in 2018 that “Any conflation of voluntary adult sex work with trafficking in persons is an abuse of sex workers’ human rights, and generally increases the risk of HIV and violence for both sex workers and trafficked women and girls, by driving it to be further hidden ‘underground’.”
The erasure of sex worker voices
This widely supported rights-based approach was recently brushed aside by a UN official. In March 2024, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences (SRVAW), Reem Al-Salem, who has emerged as a vocal opponent of the rights of trans women, issued a call for submissions for a report on “the nexus between the global phenomenon of prostitution and violence against women and girls.”
Over 70 sex worker rights groups and allied feminist and human rights organizations around the world made submissions, which the Count Me In! Collective compiled. Their responses challenged the very premise of the Special Rapporteur’s call for submissions, including the conflation in her call for submissions of trafficking, which strips victims of their agency, with adult voluntary sex work, which is an exercise of agency. The U.S.-based Best Practices Policy Project pointed out that sex workers are their own strongest advocates, writing:
Anti sex work advocates attempt to speak over persons in the sex trades and assert that we are necessarily coerced. This position short circuits any discussion of consent. We maintain that sex workers are constrained by the choices afforded us in a patriarchal, sexist and deeply prejudiced society. This is no different from women or persons of the global majority that must labor under policies that seek to undermine their best interest… Any attempt to represent sex work as inherently dangerous or inherently exploitive ignores the global history of sex work as a vocation. Sex workers’ experiences are a reflection of social attitudes around sexuality and gender and cannot be remedied by the attempted erasure of sex worker voices.
Sex worker activists prepare for a protest outside the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in June to call for decriminalization and protest the publication of a report that negated their rights and lived experiences. Photo Credit: BPPP, 2024.
“End demand” puts sex workers at risk
The Special Rapporteur’s report, which flouts UN precedent by insistently conflating sex work with trafficking, recommends that all countries adopt what has been described as the “Nordic model” or the “end demand” model. This model criminalizes the buyers of sex in all contexts.
Outright International shares the concerns raised by sex worker groups, in their submissions to the Special Rapporteur and elsewhere, regarding the Nordic model. According to the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP): “Under the ‘Nordic model’, which purports to ‘only’ criminalise clients or third parties, the criminalisation of the purchase of sex leads to sex workers being subject to increased violence, stigma, exploitation, police repression, and reduced access to justice and services.” In France, NSWP found that after the passage of Nordic model policies in 2016, “Sex workers are now working in more remote areas to avoid police attention, which has increased their vulnerability to violence.” Similarly, Human Rights Watch’s rigorously evidence-based submission noted:
HRW research, as well as credible investigations and analysis from academics, health journals, anti-trafficking organizations, UN women’s rights bodies, and sex workers themselves, consistently find that criminalization of the demand or supply of sexual services makes sex workers more vulnerable to violence, including rape, assault, and murder, while having no demonstrable impact on the eradication of trafficking.
Human Rights Watch further noted that end demand models, because they typically ban “brothels,” force sex workers “to abandon basic safety strategies” such as working together in a shared location. And Best Practices Policy Project (BPPP) pointed out to Outright International that sex workers, including transgender women, are often caught up in the police sweeps enabled by this approach that aim to arrest supposed sex buyers.
In its submission, the International Commission of Jurists contested the Special Rapporteur’s claim that all “prostitution” should be illegal under international law, noting, with reference to the historical record of treaty drafting, that “While under international criminal law States are obliged to criminalize trafficking in persons, there is no such a corresponding obligation under any branch of contemporary international law with respect to the criminalization of ‘prostitution’ per se.”
The Special Rapporteur’s disregard for the positions and evidence raised in these submissions in her final report is cause for concern, as is her designation of states that have legalized some forms of sex work, usually based on human rights considerations, as – in her words – “pimp states.” The integrity of the international human rights system relies on fidelity to evidence, a keen and nuanced analysis of international law, and a willingness to listen to those who are most marginalized.
Sex worker rights are LGBTIQ rights
Sex worker rights are an LGBTIQ issue. Outright International recognizes that people of all genders and sexualities do sex work, including LGBTIQ people. We affirm their right to work, their bodily autonomy, and their agency to make decisions. We believe that laws and policies that put sex workers at risk, such as the Nordic model, may have a heightened impact on LGBTIQ communities, especially trans sex workers, who are increasingly vulnerabilized when law enforcement is given carte blanche to intervene in their daily activities. Outright International further observes that allowing law enforcement agencies to police consensual sex between adults has never augured well for our communities. We reject the notion that governments should criminalize adult, consensual sexual activity.
The best way to ensure that sex workers are protected against violence is through a human rights-based approach to sex work that recognizes bodily autonomy, acknowledges sex work as work, focuses on eradicating trafficking and forced labor, and centers the lived experiences of sex workers of all sexual orientations and genders.
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