There are a few dates in the calendar that sex workers mark. The day to end violence on 17 December is often a sombre affair, when we honour the sex workers who were murdered over the last year. But International Whores Day, on 2 June, is when we come together to celebrate survival and resistance.
This year, we, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP), took our celebrations – and our protests – to Downing Street to demand the abolition of “prostitute’s cautions”. Eighty organisations, including Amnesty International UK and Liberty, signed an open letter to the home secretary supporting this action.
Prostitute’s cautions stem from the Street Offences Act 1959. Police are supposed to issue one when they have “reasonable cause” to believe that someone is loitering or soliciting. In practice, these can be given without warning and on the faintest of pretexts. I attended one court proceeding where the only evidence presented was that the woman was “standing on a street corner looking in the direction of several men.” Once, the ECP successfully had a caution removed from a woman’s record because the police did not even bother to record what evidence they had based it on.
