Media coverage of our work, both locally and abroad, has been positive ever since the Red Van rolled into Copenhagen. Other organisations working with sex workers in Copenhagen have had less to say. This isn’t so surprising if you look at Denmark’s legal framework around sex work. Even though buying and selling sex were decriminalised in 1999, sex work wasn’t recognised as a profession. This has helped maintain the stigma around sex work in Danish society, even within organisations working with sex workers: sex workers are tolerated, perhaps, but they are considered beneath other wage-earning citizens in society.
Furthermore, sex work became subject to something called the procurement law, which means that it’s illegal to profit off of sex work as a third party. Politicians use this law to virtue signal that they’re trying to stamp out pimping or sex trafficking, but in practice it has served to hem in the actions of both sex workers and those providing harm reduction services. For example, some sex workers have struggled to rent apartments because landlords fear they could be charged with profiting off of sex work as a third party, while others have been turned down by financial and legal advisors for similar reasons.
This murky mix of legal grey areas and a history of social stigma directly affects which kinds of organisations get funding to work with sex workers in Copenhagen. The reality is that the majority of sex worker-oriented organisations in our city take a fundamentally anti-sex work, anti-trafficking stance because that is what the government approves of and financially supports. The Red Van refuses to endorse those narratives as they run contrary to our mission of harm reduction. To us, this doesn’t seem that radical, but the isolation we felt from others in our community for many years proved otherwise.
