Regional updates: Europe

Rose Aliance, the Swedish sex worker organisation has written a letter of support to Amnesty International. Amnesty is under intense pressure from anti-sex work campaigners for their proposals to support the call for the decriminalisation of sex work. Rose Alliance is a young organisation founded in 2009. Historically, sex workers in Sweden have found it very difficult to organise for their rights. Sex workers tell of how challenging it is to speak out about their rights as sex workers in a country that only recognises the right not to sell sex. Since the beginning of Sweden's sex worker rights movement’s in the mid-70s, the narrative on sex work has gone from bad to worse. First sex workers were described as, 'social outcasts with a history of abuse, then emotionally damaged who were unfit to be parents, passive bystanders who had bad things happening to them.'

Across the Central and Eastern European region, several workshops have been held within the last month, focusing on STI prevention, human rights and sex worker activism, and highlighting the need for sex worker involvement in programmes and projects established on their behalf.

Despite the recent failure of a previous attempt, a new campaign has launched in Scotland that hopes to criminalise the purchase of commercial sexual services. The “End Prostitution Now” campaign wants to put pressure on the Scottish Government to end demand, which they describe as the "root cause" of the country's "commercial sexual exploitation". They plan to utilise social media campaigns and to urge people to write to their representatives to ask them to support the proposal.

In the UK, a new programme has begun offering sex workers retraining for different forms of employment. Run by the HIV and sexual health charity, Terrence Higgins Trust, the Sex Workers and New Ambitions Project (SNAP) offers “support and training to achieve your employment goals alongside or outside of sex working”. Participants receive one-to-one mentoring, professional skills coaching, CV and job search advice and, if they want, support into volunteering and work experience.