Regional updates: Europe

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.

Turkish advocates have been calling for recognition of a spate of violence against trans women in the country. Over the space of two weeks, seven trans women were violently attacked in different cities around Turkey. On the 2nd of May four trans women were reported to have been attacked, including a trans sex worker named Gülşen who was stabbed in her home in Şişli by two men with a knife and skewer. Reports say that the men were known to her as previous clients.