Many Thai women become sex workers not because they are poor, but in order to escape poverty. In doing so they have become providers and heads of households, and they deserve respect for that accomplishment. Español
Sex workers in eastern Europe and central Asia resist their social exclusion and repression in many ways, but the political climate has so far prevented broad-based organising.
Sex workers in Italy banned together against abolitionist projects and managed to force support mechanisms for 'trafficking victims' into anti-trafficking legislation.
A proposed law in Germany pretends to help prostitutes by registering them, but it will only increase sex workers’ precariousness and vulnerability. Respect and peer knowledge would go much farther.
The French state ostensibly sees sex workers as victims, but its combined legal framework positions them first and foremost as offenders, especially when they are migrants.
State entrapment, extortion, imprisonment and slander sharpen the consciousness of sex workers who denounce anti-prostitution, anti-pimping and anti-trafficking policies invariably used to repress women and undermine feminist liberation struggles.
Chinese sex workers in Paris demand respect from those who had no right to take it away in the first place.
The sex workers’ movement demands full decriminalisation of sex work, but this will only help sex workers already permitted to work unless migrants are also provided with labour and residence rights.
Austerity has increased poverty, particularly for women, while the rise of the far right has exacerbated hostilities against migrants and LGBT people, catching sex workers in a web of intersectional vulnerability.
Across the world sex workers organise to resist abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. For two weeks we will air their voices. Let us listen.
Working children’s organisations have had limited success in challenging dominant abolitionist perspectives on child labour. Working children’s realities and conceptions of rights need to be taken more seriously in international debates.
Europe’s leaders are committed to ‘stemming the tide of migration’. They say they are protecting ‘the vulnerable’, yet history shows that the policies proposed will only increase migrant vulnerability.
