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.
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.
A new database, devised by feminists from around the world, has been developed to track COVID-19 responses and uplift the collective action of feminists globally.
Created by organisations and activists, working across global movements centered on human rights, sustainable development, and economic and social justice, their website outlines key principles for a just and resilient recovery from the ongoing global pandemic.
The key principles are:
The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis unlike any other. The virus, which has spread across the world in just a few months, has affected the lives of millions of people and has profoundly changed the ways we live and work. For sex workers, this is a bad situation that has been made worse with restricted access to emergency funds and essential healthcare and an increase in raids, surveillance, and stigma.
Last week, the Uganda Key Populations Consortium (UKPC) and other civil society organisations released a statement strongly denouncing raids, arrests, extortion, and violent attacks targeting sex workers, barmaids and other vulnerable communities by police, Local Defense Units (LDUs), and Resident District Commissioners (RDCs) during the response to the spread of COVID-19.
The United States this week announced that they had passed 1.2 million recorded COVID-19 cases, and nearly 70,000 deaths. Despite these somber milestones, the country has been divided between those eager to get back to ‘business as usual’ and those who wish the lockdown to remain in effect. Left out of this debate are the sex workers who have had no choice but to continue working due to their exclusion from any government relief package.
