Failures Of Justice State And Non State Violence Against Sex Workers And The Search For Safety And Redressdocx
=== Failures of justice – State and non-state violence against sex workers and the search for safety and redress ===
Failures of Justice:
State and Non-State Violence Against Sex Workers and
the Search for Safety and Redress
A Community-Based Research Project of the Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia
May, 2015
Copyright © 2015 Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network. All rights reserved.
The Sex Workers’ Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN)
is a network of 28 civil society organizations in 18 countries in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and Central Asia advocating for the human rights of female, male and transgender sex workers. SWAN member organizations work with or are led-by sex workers and sex worker leadership is an organizing principle of the network. SWAN was founded in 2006 and was officially registered as the SWAN Foundation in January of 2012.
SWAN
SZEJ Alapítvány
Bertalan Lajos u. 22. fsz.6.
Budapest
H-1111
Hungary
Phone: 36 1 787 6267, +36 70 509 5015.
Fax: +36 1 787 6267
www.swannet.org
[anonimizat]
This project was supported by the UNFPA, UNDP and the Open Society Foundation
This project was supported by the UNFPA, UNDP* and the Open Society Foundation. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of UNFPA, UNDP and the United Nations or any of its affiliated organizations.
* The UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub supported this research project in the following countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Ukraine
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introductory Note
Foreword
Introduction
Background and Methodology
International Law
State Laws and Policies Condoning Abuse
Lawful and Unlawful Repression
Seizure of Condoms and Safe Injecting Equipment
Extortion, Arrest and Detention
Forced HIV and STI Testing
Extortion, Arrest and Detention of Clients
Displacement and its Impacts
Dangerous Environment
Reduced Access to Services
Reduced Ability to Screen and Refuse Clients
Psychological Impacts: Hiding and Constant Fear
Economic Losses
Violence
Violence by State Actors: Police
Social, Racial and Gender Profiling for Repression and Violence
Violence by Non-State Actors
Obstacles to Reporting Violence by State Actors
Previous Experience: Police Violence, Extortion, Arrest and Detention
Deterrence: Police Actions
Police Collusion and the Cover of the Law
When Sex Workers Report Police Violence to Police
Retaliation: Police Actions
Police Collusion and the Cover of the Law
Police Inaction or Mistreatment
Obstacles to Reporting Non-State Violence
Previous Experience: Police Inaction or Mistreatment
Previous Experience: Police Violence, Extortion, Arrest and Detention
Inadequate Protection/Threat of Perpetrator Retaliation
Threats of Violence and/or Job Loss by Abusive Management or Abusive Spouses
Sexual Violence: Issues of Law, Evidence, Outing and Self-Incrimination
When Sex Workers Report Non-State Violence to the Police
Victim Found Guilty
Police Inaction or Mistreatment
Police Violence
Against All Odds: Ending Impunity
Dynamics between State and Non-State Violence
Mutual Reinforcement
Economic Security VS Physical Security: An Impossible Trade-Off
Child Custody Dynamics
Third Party Laws and Parallel “Justice” and “Protection”
Enabling Factors for Reporting
HIV Implications
Recommendations
Acknowledgements
Author and Principal Researcher: Anna-Louise Crago
Research Coordinator and Co-Researcher: Roxana Vasi
SWAN Director and Research Coordinator: Staša Plećaš
Sex Worker Co-Researchers and Advisory Team:
Irina Maslova (Club Silver Rose, Russia)
Natalia Zholnerova (Ameliya, Kazakhstan)
Roxana Vasi (SWAN)
Trajche Janushev (STAR-STAR, Macedonia)
Translation and Editing: Olga Zubkovskaya
Research teams:
AKSION PLUS, Albania: Genci Mucollari (coordinator), Eglantina Lula
PROI, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Belma Lepir-Cviko (coordinator), Sanela Vrabac, Marina Čaušević, Renata Dujmušić.
HESED, Bulgaria: Rayna Dimitrova (coordinator), Polina Slavcheva, Dragomir Padezhki.
SZEXE, Hungary: Ágnes Földi (coordinator), Henrietta Lakatos, István Kőbányai, Gizella Balogh. Additional thanks to Boglárka Fedorkó.
HOPS, Macedonia: Voskre Naumoska-Ilieva (coordinator), Cvetanka Kamceva, Eleonora Cicevska, Trajche Janushev.
Juventas, Montenegro: Tijana Žegura (coordinator), Martina Markoč, Marija Kovijanić, Radomir Stijepović.
Support and Development of Human Rights Foundation, Poland: Justyna Sobeyko (coordinator), Piotr Bejnarowicz.
Carusel, Romania: Ana Mohr (coordinator), Mihaela "Profesoara", Monica Dan, Andreea Mihai.
Sloboda Prava, Serbia: Mario Knežević (coordinator), Biserka Lekić, Aleksandar Hajdari, Elena Santovac.
Odysseus, Slovakia: Olivia Strelkova (coordinator), Iveta Chovancova, Miroslava Zilinska, Alexandra Podova.
Ameliya, Kazakhstan: Natalia (coordinator), Irina, Marina, Karlygash.
Tais Plus, Kyrgyzstan: Shahnaz Islamova (coordinator), Aida Asanbek kyzy, Arthur Sopkeev.
Club Silver Rose & Development of Civil Society, Russia: Anastasia Petrova (coordinator), Alexandra Kriuchkova, Tatiana Grishina, Yulia Gerasimova.
Red Umbrella Sexual Health and Human Rights Association, Turkey: Kemal Ördek (coordinator), Serra Can, Ferhat Yildiz, Öykü Sezer.
Lega-Life, Ukraine: Nataliia Isaieva (coordinator), Irina Khmelnytskaia, Elena Fiskova.
Introductory Note
I have experience working as a sex worker both “legally” and “illegally”. I have lived in a country in Eastern Europe where offering erotic and sexual services in exchange for money was punishable by prison. Later on, they have changed the law, so that now us sex workers are committing “only” a misdemeanor. Then I migrated to another country where sex work is legal, yet since sex workers were never consulted in the process of drafting the law, the regulations are so tight and faulty, that basic human rights and labour rights can become easily ignored. I have all this time considered myself “lucky” for working indoors – wherever I lived, outdoor sex workers were the most exposed to perpetrators and police using the law arbitrarily to harass and abuse, and/or turn a blind eye to violence committed by others. It’s not like there wouldn’t be police raids in indoor locations either, but I guess I am just really very “lucky”…
Recently, I got to know more about the experiences of other sex workers in countries from our region where sex work is decriminalized, yet the state and authorities invent other pretexts and use other laws to punish sex workers. You have the opportunity to find out more from this study: when it’s not anti-sex work laws, third party laws, anti-trafficking laws, it’s public order and “decency” laws, or laws against the spreading of STIs and HIV. Repression from the state and written legal systems go hand in hand with the unwritten law of “public” morality, and the ever-present stigma which, in so many cases prohibits sex workers from seeking justice from the same very unjust system which oppresses us. Woman, Roma/of colour, drug user, part of another oppressed ethnic minority, queer, trans, HIV positive, poor… – if you happen to be one of those or more (and most of us are), they would know how to take advantage of all our vulnerabilities and criminalize us.
In spite of all of this, sex workers resist and fight back. All sex workers are strong. But when we start to organize, it’s perceived as such a threat that again we are pushed down, accused of being pimps or traffickers or what not. At “best”, sex workers’ organizations are simply shunned, and always have to struggle with backlash, ridicule, stigma and lack of funds. Sex workers’ rights movement is among the least supported, and the least funded movements, and it’s been so rare I have witnessed support and solidarity from others.
I stand behind all the recommendations written at the end of this publication. And I hope for better days. Knowing sex workers and activists from the region, I am sure these days will arrive sometime soon.
R.
Foreword
This report is about sex work, violence and HIV in Eastern Europe and
Central Asia.
The report provides the results of an extensive community-led research in sixteen countries of the region. It shows the daily violence that sex workers experience from police and clients and documents how violence is associated with lower capacity for HIV risk reduction. It further examines whether and how sex workers may try to halt impunity of law enforcement and access to justice.
The figures speak for themselves. Forty percent of respondents in the survey have been arrested in the last twelve months, one in five experienced physical violence and one in seven experienced sexual violence by police. Twenty percent of respondents reported extortion.
The report tells us also how condoms are routinely used by police as “evidence of crime”, how syringes are confiscated or destroyed on a daily basis, and how street-based workers are displaced from their work location as a consequence of arrests, extortion and fines. It contributes with evidence from the region to the published literature documenting how poor policing practices are causally associated with a lower capacity for risk reduction, poor access to services and increased exposure to HIV.
It describes how the fear that someone’s drug use or sex work may be reported to police or to child welfare authorities, would discourage sex workers from seeking services, HIV testing and entering the care system.
Eastern Europe and Central Asia is the region of the world that has witnessed the largest increase in HIV prevalence over the last ten years and where the epidemic continues to expand. The number of people living with HIV now exceeds 1.4 million. The epidemic is concentrated in that it primarily affects vulnerable groups of the population. Access to HIV treatment remains particularly low in the region. Less than 50 % of people estimated to be infected with HIV know their serologic status and less than a third of the people who have been diagnosed with HIV access antiretroviral treatment. Epidemiological data on sex workers and on other vulnerable groups are scarce because of criminalization of these groups and lack of sentinel surveillance.
Throughout the region, sex workers, people who inject drugs and other vulnerable groups are either ‘illegal’ or face discriminatory legislation and policies. There are high levels of stigma and discrimination, poor access to prevention and care services and an understandable distrust of affected groups towards the public system.
Most support services directed to sex workers and people who inject drugs are provided by civil society and community groups who are doing remarkable work – often without adequate resources and in hostile environments. These services have been funded for years by the Global Fund. The Fund however, is now leaving the region, and no mechanisms are in place to allow for the NGO and community-based peer outreach to be funded from governmental budgets. The risk that many of the services will be discontinued and that discontinuation will result in further epidemic outbreaks of HIV, is real.
Discriminatory laws, regulations and policies, including those that give a sense of impunity to perpetrators of violence against sex workers – need to be traded for supportive and stigma-free environments that allow sex workers to access crucial health care services, including sexual and reproductive health services and HIV prevention, treatment and care. In other words, we need above all to ensure that human rights are at the forefront of everything we do.
Since 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other charters have enshrined some fundamental rights: The right to health and decent care. The right to freedom from discrimination. The rights to equality before the law, to privacy, to work and education. The right to share in the advances of science. These are universal rights. They are also sex workers’ rights. We cannot win the fight against AIDS without also winning the fight for these rights.
This report is a call for change.
Professor Michel Kazatchkine
United Nations’ Secretary General’s Special Envoy on HIV AIDS in Eastern
Europe and Central Asia
Introduction
Background and Methodology
In 2007, SWAN undertook a sex worker-led community based research project on police raids, detention and physical and sexual violence by police. Sex workers and allies interviewed 238 female, trans and male sex workers for what became as known as the “Arrest the Violence” report. At the time, in all countries except Poland and the Czech Republic, sex workers interviewed reported alarmingly high levels of physical or sexual violence from police officers. Forty one point seven percent (41.7%) (86/206) of sex workers reported having experienced physical violence by police in the past year and 36.5% (77/211) of sex workers reported having experienced sexual violence from police in the past year. In “Arrest the Violence,” sex workers spoke of how police violence and repression fuelled a climate of impunity for violence against them, by other police or by the population in general.
In 2015, we decided to follow up on that research and to look more in-depth at what lay behind some of its findings. What are the specific ways in which police practices alter working conditions with regards to health and safety? What happens when sex workers get displaced by policing? Do sex workers ever attempt to halt the cycle of impunity by reporting violence? What happens when they do? What blocks redress and access to justice and what facilitates it? What dynamics can exist between violence by state and non-state actors?
We extended the research to 16 countries and a total of 320 semi-structured interviews with women (trans and cis), transgender and male sex workers. We also did more in-depth qualitative interviews with 9 sex workers who had reported violence or abuse in Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Serbia to learn from their experiences.
This research has been made possible through the combined efforts of a very large team working across thousands of kilometers. That team includes a sex worker advisory group who reviewed and gave input into the research questions, the results, the analysis and the conclusions. It also includes country team leaders who coordinated in-person interviewing on a local level and often, translation of both the questionnaire and interviews from local languages. Country research teams were trained in advance by the SWAN Secretariat on research ethics and safety considerations.
This research project is a qualitative one. While overall, the numbers of sex workers interviewed are large, each country sample is generally of no more than 20 sex workers. Our samples may be biased towards sex workers in more difficult situations due to the fact they were generally being reached through individuals associated with organizations that provide services and assistance. Furthermore, there is a wide variation in our samples. Some include a majority of trans women and male sex workers (Turkey, Serbia), others include only cis women sex workers (Hungary, Kazakhstan, Ukraine). Some include only indoor workers (Russia, Kazakhstan) while others include predominantly street workers (Serbia, Slovakia, Montenegro, Ukraine, Romania). Some include a sizable sample of sex workers who use injecting drugs (Albania, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania, Slovakia) while others include none at all (Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Serbia, Turkey). This variation makes it impossible to use our country samples to generalize phenomena to all sex workers in a given city or country or to compare countries statistically. We nonetheless include the quantitative data as a point of information to be read along with the large body of qualitative data we have collected.
In this text we use the term “transgender” to mean someone whose gender does not match the gender they were assigned at birth and “cisgender” to mean someone whose gender does match the gender they were assigned at birth. So for example women sex workers can be separated into transgender women and cisgender women. Or for short, trans women and cis women.
When using the term “third party”, we refer to individuals (other than the sex worker and the client) involved as intermediaries in an agreement or transaction. They can assume the role of managers, middle-persons, agents, promoters, brothel keepers, sauna owners, drivers, security persons, and others. In Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, third parties are most of the time referred to as “pimp” (a derogatory and often racialized term), and criminalized – which in turn affects the working conditions of sex workers. Throughout the text, we will use the terms: “third party” and “manager”, while “controller” will indicate a violent or exploitative person.
Research was undertaken in the following locations:
Tirana, Albania
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Sofia, Bulgaria
Budapest, Hungary
Taldykorgan and Ushtobe, Kazakhstan
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Podgorica and Bar, Montenegro
Skopje, Macedonia
Poland
Bucharest, Romania
Barnaul, Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Belgrade, Serbia
Bratislava, Slovakia
Ankara, İstanbul and Diyarbakır,Turkey
Kirovograd, Ukraine
International Law
In the countries, where this research took place, physical and sexual assault are crimes under domestic laws. When physical or sexual violence is perpetrated by state-actors such as police, these acts also become violations of international law.
Regardless of the legal, policy or ideological framework for sex work in a given context, violence against sex workers, whether by state or non-state actors, violates sex workers’ human rights under international law. Sex workers’ violated human rights include the rights to security of person and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, guaranteed under articles 9 and 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Many acts of physical abuse, sexual violence, and psychological abuse committed by police and documented in this report amount to cruel and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. These acts are prohibited by international law, including the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Convention against Torture) and article 7 of the ICCPR.
Furthermore many acts of violence documented in this report rise to the level of
torture, as defined in article 1 of the Convention against Torture. This is the case for acts committed by police acting in their official capacity, with the aim of coercing, intimidating or punishing sex workers or as part of a pattern of discrimination against sex workers, because of their status as sex workers. Police threats of violence also amount to psychological torture, likewise prohibited under the ICCPR and the Convention against Torture.
Police’s failure to investigate violence against sex workers contravene sex workers’ human rights to equality and non-discrimination, liberty and security of person and freedom from unlawful interference. Many other acts documented in this report also constitute violations of sex workers’ human rights. Below, we list these and the human rights that they violate citing the legal analysis of Sandra Ka Hon Chu of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network in Decker, M. et al “Human rights violations against sex workers: burden and effect on HIV”. The Lancet London, 2014.
State Laws and Policies Condoning Abuse
Laws and by-laws that criminalize or penalize sex work enable the commission of human rights violations against sex workers on a very large scale by providing cover and license for police to control and punish sex workers. This is not only the case with laws or by-laws criminalizing or penalizing the selling of sex, but as this research shows, also applies to third-party laws that criminalize brothel owners, managers and individuals who earn money from others’ sex work. Even when lawfully enacted, laws that criminalize or penalize sex work have the effect of creating an antagonistic relationship to authorities that limits sex workers’ ability to report abuse without compromising their safety and their economic security.
In countries where the laws do not explicitly criminalize or penalize the selling of sex, the systematic targeting of sex workers, and sometimes their clients, for repression using other laws, such as public order laws, are not simply issues of police practice. Rather, they are reflective of state policies that allow, or more frequently, order or reward the repression of sex workers such as when a campaign to “clean” sex workers out of public space takes place such as the “Operation Clean Highways” in Poland.
Regardless of whether it is lawfully or unlawfully enacted, this research finds that police repression of sex workers and their clients displaces sex workers to more dangerous working environments and impedes their ability to safeguard their safety and health.
The acts of violence against sex workers by police documented in this research cannot be dismissed as the acts of rogue officers. They are in fact manifestations of state policies that tolerate, and in some cases even encourage, violence against sex workers. Indeed, a consistent pattern of state failure to punish or otherwise hold accountable either police or non-state actors who perpetrate violence against sex workers constitutes a policy—whether explicit or implicit—of tolerance for such abuses.
Lawful and Unlawful Repression
Seizure of Condoms and Safe Injecting Equipment
In 12 countries, sex workers reported having experienced police seizing or destroying their condoms. This was a particularly pronounced phenomenon for sex workers surveyed in Albania, Kazakhstan, Romania and Serbia. In all of the same countries (see chart below), sex workers also recounted having experienced police using or threatening to use their condoms as “evidence of a crime”. Though less frequent than the seizure or destruction of condoms, the phenomenon of “condoms as evidence” was nonetheless reported at a high rate in Albania (50%) and Serbia (70%).
Of note, though frequently associated with street based sex workers, both condom seizure and destruction by police and “condoms as evidence” were reported among the samples that were entirely composed of indoor or brothel-based workers (Kazakhstan, Russia). The use of condoms of evidence within indoor locations presents a complex legal dynamic because it can specifically incriminate many people: including a sex worker who has her name on the lease or on the bills, a manager or a support worker such as a receptionist, cleaning staff or security staff under, often draconian, third-party laws (such as laws against owning, managing or being found in a brothel or laws against earning money from sex work or “pimping”). In other words, if there is the risk that the presence of condoms at an indoor venue might incriminate management or other workers, there may be large pressure placed on sex workers not to have condoms on their person or at the location. This reduces sex workers’ ability to negotiate safer sex, to ensure the quality and reliability of the condoms being used, and to enforce their use. To be clear, however, the use of condoms as evidence is simply a manifestation of the root problem of the criminalization of sex work.
Percentage of Reported Experience of Condom Seizure or Destruction by Police
In all of the countries that included at least two injecting drug-users amongst the sex workers who were interviewed, some injecting drug users have reported to experience seizure or destruction of their syringes by police and some have experienced police threatening to use or using syringes as “evidence of a crime”. These countries include: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia. Seizure or destruction of injecting equipment is generally presumed to take place primarily on the street or in public settings. However, in some cases, sex workers who inject drugs and who happen to work only in indoor locations have reported experiencing it.
Extortion, Arrest and Detention
Sex work-related arrest was a very common occurrence for sex worker respondents in most, though not all, countries. Of note, 95% and 90% of sex workers interviewed in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan respectively were arrested in the previous year although neither of these countries have either criminal or administrative laws against sex work. Rather, sex workers in these countries, as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria where high arrest rates were also reported, are frequently arrested and detained under public order or misdemeanor laws or under the pretext of residency checks. Such charges can result in a fine or imprisonment depending on the context. In Kazakhstan, for instance, such charges can result in up to 10 days in prison.
In contrast, in Serbia and Ukraine, where a significant majority of sex worker respondents had also been arrested in the past year, selling sex is an administrative offense. In Serbia, charges can result in a fine or imprisonment of up to 30 days.
In Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Russia, Serbia, and Ukraine sex workers reported not only high levels of arrest but high levels of extortion. Indeed, as was found in our previous research in 2007, arrest and detention were frequently used tools by police to enforce extortion, to exert violent control over sex workers or to retaliate against sex workers who resisted their abuse.
Sex worker respondents in Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland and Slovakia reported very low rates of arrest, extortion and sex work-related fines. However, even when not targeted with arrest or fines explicitly for sex work, in Montenegro, Poland and Slovakia, street-based sex workers described being discriminatorily targeted with charges for minor offenses such as littering, disturbing the peace, lack of ID documents, not wearing reflectors on the side of the road, or more serious offenses such as drug possession.
Even when lawful, arrest and detention placed sex workers at higher risk of violence by other perpetrators through displacement to more dangerous areas and lack of access to police protection, which we discuss at length below. Furthermore, police repression impeded sex workers’ ability to take basic health and safety precautions, such as to work in groups for better protection (since this could draw police attention) or to take the necessary time to assess a client to see if he was dangerous or agreed to condom use. Lastly, police repression created not only significant psychological stress but a constant distraction. A woman indoor and outdoor worker from Serbia explains:
“I’m constantly watching out for police I’m not concentrated on work at all.”
Such distractions present additional safety risks because they can impede sex workers’ ability to focus on the careful and crucial assessment of safety risks before getting into a car or opening the door.
Forced HIV and STI Testing
In Kazakhstan, 85% (17) of sex workers, all of whom worked indoors, had been forcibly tested for HIV or STIs while in police detention in the last 12 months. In Kyrgyzstan, 15% (3) of sex workers, both street and indoors had, and in Romania 20% (4) sex workers had.
In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, even though forced testing for HIV and STIs is illegal and selling sex is ostensibly decriminalized, police can require sex workers to present a medical certificate with their HIV status from a state-operated clinic or hospital. During the raids, the police ask sex workers for these certificates. According to Natalia, of the NGO Ameliya in Kazakhstan:
“The police usually have their own database with photos and names and sex workers, and each one’s medical certificate. Usually, when they find out during these raids that a sex worker doesn’t have the medical certificate, they require her to return back to the police station after one day with a completed medical certificate. If a sex worker refuses to comply, the police finds ways to force her to get this medical certificate by giving fines. (Obviously this all is illegal and a violation of rights, since in Kazakhstan too, HIV/AIDS testing can be done only voluntarily).
The medical certificate that the sex worker gets has to be issued by a state hospital (the police don’t accept certificates issued by private clinics). If it’s discovered that a sex worker is HIV-positive, the police will inform the brothel/sauna owners. Sauna owners will fire sex workers [outed as HIV-positive by police]; and police together with the AIDS-center can instigate a court case against the HIV-positive sex workers for spreading HIV.”
In Romania, prostitution was an offense under the criminal code until February 2014. Forced testing of sex workers in the course of police raids has previously taken place, although it has never been a common event. Only two previous incidents were documented by the NGO ARAS since 2010. In 2011, ARAS filed an official complaint regarding the issue. Police responded that such measures were in the public interest and permissible when they had the suspicion that individuals might be breaking either the law against prostitution or the law against spreading STIs.
Percentage of Sex Workers’ Who Reported Arrest for Sex Work, Extortion, Fine for Sex Work or Other Arrest in the Past 12 Months
Extortion, Arrest and Detention of Clients (percentage)
It is not a criminal or administrative offense to purchase sex in any of the countries included in this research. Nonetheless some sex workers reported their clients being arrested or detained for seeking their sexual services. Almost all of these reports were from street-based sex workers. In a number of countries, clients are discriminatorily targeted with broad public order infractions or other offenses as part of efforts to move sex work out of one part of the city. The vagueness of public order laws or by-laws are frequently used to threaten clients into making extortion payments to police in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
In Serbia, sex workers’ clients are not actually charged with any offenses but are detained in order to provide testimony that a sex worker was committing the offense of selling sexual services for which the sex worker is subsequently charged or extorted under threat of being charged. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to Belma Lepir-Cviko of the NGO PROI:
“Some sex workers’ clients were detained by the police for interrogation in order to discover existence of organized sex work. They were detained under Law on Offences against Public Order, Sarajevo Canton, 2007.”
In some cases, sex workers who use drugs trade sex with drug dealers or other drug users in exchange for drugs. In these cases, clients can be targeted with drug laws for arrest or extortion.
In Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey, police extort clients under the threat of disclosing to their families, colleagues or the public at large, that they sought to purchase sexual services. In some contexts, this was particularly the case for clients frequenting male or transgender women sex workers. In Macedonia, officers of the Ministry of Interior extorted clients under threat of sending a court letter to their homes disclosing that they had been purchasing sexual services.
The arrest and extortion of sex workers’ clients affected sex workers in a number of ways. Firstly, it often diminished their earnings. This could be as a result of police sabotaging potential transactions, reducing a client’s disposable income or by dissuading clients from purchasing sex. Secondly, as we will see below it led to sex workers being displaced to frequently more dangerous working environments, in order to follow clients who wish to evade police attention. Thirdly, by dissuading or displacing clients, it diminished the pool of clients sex workers could access and sometimes led to sex workers losing contact with “regular” or habitual clients who they knew and trusted. In Poland, both sex workers and their clients were discriminatorily targeted with misdemeanor charges as part of a campaign to remove them from the area. As a woman street sex worker from Poland explained:
“Police want to remove sex workers from highways and they stop their cars next to our site under pretext of traffic control. We have fewer and fewer clients.”
A diminished pool of available or desirable customers can lead sex workers to accept clients they may otherwise have refused due to safety concerns and can thus augment health and violence risks for workers.
Percentage of Sex Workers’ Who Reported That Their Clients Had Been Arrested, Detained or Extorted By Police
Displacement and its Impacts
Across all sex workers surveyed, over a third of street based workers (34.6%) had been displaced from their work location in the past year due to arrest, police extortion or fines. Although less frequent, a quarter (25%) of all indoor sex workers across the region nonetheless reported being displaced to a new location in the past 12 months due to police repression. What is more, 18.6% of sex workers surveyed across the region reported having been displaced due to police arrest, extortion or fines targeted at their clients.
Percentage of Sex Workers Displaced in the Past 12 Months Due to Police Arrest, Extortion or Fines.
Percentage of Sex Workers Displaced in the Past 12 Months Due to Police Arrest, Extortion or Fines of Their Clients
Displacement was sometimes a result of sex workers fleeing violent persecution by the police, as in Bulgaria, where sex workers sometimes move to areas under the jurisdiction of a less violent police precinct. Many sex workers from different countries reported making the trade off of moving to an environment that has many more risks of attack by a perpetrator from the general population in exchange for diminishing the, often violent, control police had over their work. In some instances, displacement was the explicitly stated objective of government officials and police authorities. A cis woman street worker from Poland explains:
“There is the “Clean Highway Action”. The commander orders subordinates to “clean” the streets of sex workers by persecuting us and our clients under the pretext of other violations. The vast majority of these operations are conducted by Traffic police.”
In Belgrade, Serbia, sex workers reported a massive and concerted police campaign to move them from the city centre to the highway:
“I moved to the highway Bubanj Potok from the park in city centre.” (Roma cis woman street sex worker)
In other instances, police’s repeated actions to preemptively sabotage sex workers’ work may have had more to do with harassment and domination of sex workers than with strategic displacement efforts. Such actions nonetheless created substantial pressures on sex workers to move to other locations in order to be able to earn a living. The following quotes are all from women street sex workers in Slovakia, some of whom are Roma and/or injecting drug users.
“The [police] stand next to me, then I earn nothing because they scare away my clients.”
“Police fine my clients.”
“When I go to work, they keep following me and asking me to leave the client’s car”.
The data from this research show that displacement principally affected sex workers in five ways: a more dangerous working environment; reduced access to services; reduced ability to screen clients; the psychological impacts of hiding and constant fear; and economic losses.
Dangerous Environment
Of sex workers who had been displaced because of police repression against them, more than a quarter identified the new location as harder to get help if they were in danger (25.7%). For sex workers who were displaced due to repression targeted at their clients, the proportion for whom it was harder to get help rose to almost a third (32.1%). Indeed for almost all other indicators (darkness of location, isolation, difficulty accessing condoms), displacement due to repression targeted at clients placed sex workers in even more dangerous working environments than repression targeted at them alone. This may be because displacement of clients can result in sex workers following clients to their chosen locations. Clients may be more likely to select even darker and more isolated areas than sex workers since they do not have to balance the concern for police detection with the threat of attack by other perpetrators, to the same extent as sex workers do.
Sex Workers Displaced by Police Arrest, Extortion or Fines Who Identified The New Location As:
Sex Workers Displaced by Police Arrest, Extortion or Fines of Their Clients Who Identified the New Location As:
Displacement, particularly when a continuous dynamic, often isolated sex workers, making it harder for them to assist each other or get assistance from the general public, but also making them easier targets for predatory perpetrators. As a trans woman street sex worker from Serbia explains:
“I am not allowed to stay in one place. I am always going from one to another to avoid being arrested. I’m always in danger of being abused by hooligans for standing and working all alone.”
New environments were often simply more dangerous because they were unknown to sex workers – and sex workers were unknown to others near-by. Thus, even if police displace sex workers to a location that is objectively similar in terms of safety features, at least in the short term, the newness of the location presents its own risks.
Reduced Access to Services
Displacement can also result in a reduced access to social, health, violence and harm-reduction services. NGOs may have set up around previous sex work or drug use areas and sex workers being displaced to new areas or spread out all over a city may both increase their distance from a resource and increase the difficulty of peer or outreach workers contacting them (See table above). As one sex worker recounts:
I have to hide in small, dark and empty streets to avoid police. So it’s harder for me to find clients or meet people giving out condoms or other material.” (Woman street sex worker, Bulgaria)
Many of the substantial gains made in service access become compromised when sex workers’ contact is limited. This is particularly true of services and interventions that require longer-term support and the creation of a trusting relationship, such as for leaving a violent relationship or situation, leaving homelessness, reducing one’s risk- taking, or to seeking treatment, either for addiction, mental illness or for HIV or Hepatitis C. Interrupting service access through displacement in all likelihood has a much greater effect on such processes- which are not measured in this study- than on condom and syringe availability.
Reduced Ability to Screen and Refuse Clients
Displacement compromised sex workers’ ability to evade perpetrators posing as clients or abusive clients in three critical ways: reduced ability to use screening techniques; a reduced and in some cases more dangerous pool of clients and lastly, the loss of regular or trusted clients.
Firstly, some environments, such as highways to which sex workers in Serbia were being displaced make it dangerous for cars to stop for very long along the side of the road. This cuts short the amount of time a sex worker has to see whether a client is aggressive or drunk; has other people with him; or weapons hidden in the back of the car; matches the description of a known aggressor or agrees to the terms of services (including condom use). As one street sex worker from Serbia explains:
“I’m scared to work on the highway. It was easier in the park in the centre of the city. It is harder to assess [a client’s safety] in the car.”
In some cases, the lag in clients may subside after a campaign of police sweeps is over, in other cases, subsequent displacement or scattered sex work areas may reproduce or maintain the problem. The economic pressures of fewer clients made it harder for sex workers to refuse clients they might otherwise have because of perceived risks or concerns. In some cases, law enforcement pressure on clients reduces the pool of clients who fear law enforcement, leaving behind a greater proportion of clients who don’t, and are potentially more likely to have abusive behaviors for this reason. A female street sex worker from Montenegro explains:
“I have less work [here]. Although it is well-lit, it is more risky, clients are odder and more violent”
One form of minimizing risks for sex workers is to rely on “regular” or habitual clients who are known and trusted- essentially “pre-screened”. However, displacement led many sex workers to lose such contacts. As a Serbian street sex worker explains:
“I’ve lost many regular clients for changing locations.”
These combined pressures created important health and safety risks. They predominantly affected street workers. However, indoor sex workers who were forced to shift locations often faced similar safety risks associated with a reduced client pool and the loss of contact with regular clients.
Psychological Impacts: Hiding and Constant Fear
The persistent fear of police arrest or violence, coupled with frequent displacement exact a heavy psychological toll on sex workers. Two sex workers describe it as so:
“I feel more and more scared of police arrest. I’m changing places to work all the time.” (Self-identified male Roma street sex worker working as trans, Serbia)
“It’s always the same, I move further into darkness and isolation… You suffer psychologically because you are forced to work on streets you don’t know, fear and anxiety is leveling up. You are nervous and scared.” (Trans woman and street sex worker, Serbia)
Economic Losses
Displacement created economic losses for sex workers in a few ways. Firstly, because new locations made it harder for both known and new clients to locate them, as these sex workers report:
“My clients didn’t find me [where I was displaced to].” (Roma street sex worker who injects drugs, Serbia)
“I was forced to move from the highway to a gas station and now I have fewer clients.” (Cis woman and street sex worker, Poland)
Secondly, because being in a more hidden location, often meant they were more hidden from clients as well:
“I cannot earn money because I have to hide to avoid arrest or violence from the police.” (Roma woman and street sex worker, Bulgaria)
Thirdly, because some sex workers were not displaced geographically but temporally. That is to say, that rather than move to a new location, they tried to avoid working the hours when police were most likely to be around, thus cutting into their potential income-earning time:
“I am scared, less work, less hours, less money.” (Street sex worker, Serbia)
For indoor sex workers, having to move one’s work and/or home space to a new location requires significant amounts of money. This is particularly true, if police raids are frequent as in the following experience:
“After every police intervention in our work, we have to move to another address. This is the third address for the last year (in indoor raids)” (Cis woman indoor sex worker, Bulgaria).
One indoor worker explained the costs of such moves as follows:
“Moving expenses, loss of clients, and fear clients may be police.” (Cis woman indoor sex worker, Russia).
Along with moving, some indoor workers also cited the cost of investing in new advertising.
Violence
Violence by State Actors: Police
In most of the countries where this research was conducted, sex workers reported high rates of physical and sexual violence by police. In Bulgaria and Serbia, the majority of sex worker respondents had experienced physical violence by police in the past year while in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia and Russia more than one in five respondents had. In Kazakhstan, sex workers reported an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence, with 90% (18/20) having experienced sexual violence by police in the past year.
Percentage of Sex Workers Who Report an Experience of Physical and Sexual Violence by Police in the Past 12 Months
Sex workers reported that physical and sexual violence by police is largely occurring in the course of arrest and detention, or under the threat of arrest and detention. This echoes the findings of our research in 2007. Furthermore, in large parts of the region, anti-sex work laws, and the use of public order laws as anti-sex work laws, are still providing cover for physical and sexual violence and enabling the use of arrest and detention as means of enforcing extortion and violent control over sex workers.
In some instances, police beatings were reported to take place in public. Public police violence not only contributes to sex workers’ feelings of helplessness but presents the added danger of communicating to the broader public that sex workers are acceptable targets for violence and that such violence is necessary for “public order”.
Social, Racial and Gender Profiling for Repression and Violence
Sometimes, police control over sex workers extends far outside of when sex workers are actually working and becomes a form of social profiling for repression of those identified or presumed to be sex workers. Such social profiling was highly gendered and directed almost exclusively towards women, both cisgender and transgender, who were either “known” to police as sex workers or presumed to be such based on trans status or drug use. A number of cis and trans women sex workers reported being targeted for arrest, detention, extortion or violence whenever they occupied public space, even if it was doing everyday things like walking to visit friends and family or buying bread. In Serbia, one cis woman street and indoor sex worker explained that:
“Police stop me and check me for my docs even when I’m not working. I feel like I have ‘hooker’ stamped on me”.
In Central Europe, the police control and targeting of sex workers is not only frequently gendered, but frequently racialized. In our survey, it was most often Roma cis women who reported living under the constant threat of police violence. Indeed numerous Roma women sex worker respondents from Bulgaria spoke of their attempts to become “invisible” any time they were out in public: of hiding, wearing no make- up and plain clothes, in the desperate attempt to avoid police beatings, often with a bat, that occurred every time they were seen by certain officers.
Being “known” to police as a sex worker presented additional risks of violence to women who encountered the police in the course of drug arrests. One sex worker from Kazakhstan recounted being arrested by police outside of a place where people dealt drugs. She felt that it was their recognition of her as a sauna sex worker that contributed to them forcing her to have sex under threat of being sent to forced drug rehabilitation.
Police violence and control could not only extend wide into public space, but deep into sex workers’ private and intimate lives. Sex workers of all genders recounted instances of police targeting and surveillance in their homes or children’s homes – even if these were not locations from which they worked:
“Now I feel everywhere is insecure for sex work. I had to change working hours. Now I cannot even take friends to my house because of the fear that police will think they are clients”. (Male indoor sex worker, Turkey)
“I have changed my behaviour: I withdraw myself. I only contact other trans people and live with them together. Police used to stop me because I was dressed as woman. They mistreated me.” (Trans woman and sex worker, Macedonia)
The all-pervasive threat of state repression and violence frayed at social safety networks, curtailed the development of meaningful intimate relationships and left many sex workers precariously isolated.
Violence by Non-State Actors
Sex workers were asked to explain their decisions to report or not to report to police in up to two incidents of physical violence, and up to two incidents of sexual violence by non-state actors that they experienced in the past twelve months. Here, we look at who sex workers identified as the perpetrators in these incidents. Many sex workers experienced more than two incidents of physical and sexual violence by non-state actors in the past year, and selected which incidents they wished to discuss. This most likely introduced some bias in the proportions of different perpetrators. For instance, spousal abuse was frequently reported to involve multiple violent incidents but sex workers who reported spousal violence frequently chose an incident involving a different type of perpetrator as their second incident to discuss. The numbers below may therefore overestimate perpetrators who only committed one incident (such as assailants posing as a client or clients who sex workers were able to later evade) and underestimate repeat perpetrators such as spouses or managers who were in longer-term relationships with sex workers (and possibly more difficult to evade).
The most common category of perpetrator was “assailants posing as clients, or clients”. The very high rate of violent incidents occurring in the workplace highlight how crucial it is to address factors that diminish sex workers’ ability to get assistance at work and screen or refuse clients.
Almost a third of incidents of physical violence and a tenth of incidents of sexual violence were attributed to spouses. It is also only a partial picture of the domestic violence sex workers face because a large number of perpetrators reported as “other” were non-spousal family members. This is alarming for a number of reasons. Firstly, sex workers are often specifically excluded from domestic violence shelters and services. Secondly, although some harm-reduction, health and social service projects for sex workers have begun to address and integrate anti-violence work into their mandate, few have specifically developed programs tailored to sex workers in situations of spousal or familial violence.
Individuals in a management/brothel owner role accounted for a small proportion of incidents of physical violence but over 15% of incidents of sexual violence. Of note, however, is that almost half of the latter were attributed to police who were brothel owners.
Lastly, a number of incidents were attributed to “other” perpetrators. The latter included family members who were not spouses; friends; acquaintances; members of organized transphobic/homophobic/racist/misogynistic hate groups; “hooligans”; “passers-by”; and unidentified assailants.
Obstacles to Reporting Violence by State Actors
Previous Experience: Police Violence, Extortion, Arrest and Detention
In this context, it is not surprising that one of the greatest deterrents for sex workers to report police violence is in fact their very experience of police violence, arrest and detention. Indeed, implicit in their assessment of the risk of interacting with police to report violence is the threat that violence could happen again.
The more police violence is routine, widespread, or systemic, in other words that it is an open secret and policing is explicitly or implicitly structured around it, the more reporting violence carries simultaneous risk of interacting with police who are involved in perpetrating it. In Kazakhstan, as mentioned above, 18/20 or 90% of sex workers report sexual violence by police in the past year (and 4 report it occurring between one and three times a month) under the cover of a system called “subbotnick” – a reference to the day of free labour citizens needed to do for the state in Soviet times. There, one of the risks of reporting sexual violence is sexual violence:
“If you seek police assistance and have no IDs, you risk being detained or sent to ‘subbotnick’.” (Indoor migrant sex worker, Kazakhstan)
In some cases sex workers experienced abuse from an individual officer, or in an isolated incident. In these situations, reporting police violence carried the risk of exposing them to more police, furthering potential risks of raids or abuse. In one case of reported sexual violence, a police officer in Bosnia and Herzegovina forced a sex worker to have sex under threat of “outing” her to “the police”. Implicit in the police officer’s threat is the knowledge that being known to the broader police force as a sex worker is frequently a threat to a sex worker’s well-being, not a form of protection. He is implicitly disavowing the theory that he himself is “just a bad apple”.
This is a key issue, because in “Arrest the Violence” we saw that many people attributed the impunity for violence against sex workers to sex workers’ reluctance to report, based on the “mistrust” of police. This framing tends to locate the problem with sex workers’ actions or inaction. What is clear from our data is that when sex workers are not reporting, they are making a very calculated and informed decision about the risks, for them, their colleagues and their families. Previous experiences of arrest, detention and violence are often decisive factors in those calculations, which in some cases can include the risk of being killed:
“I am scared [to report police violence] because [the police] beat me. Worse, they can kill me.” (Roma trans woman, sex worker and drug user, Albania)
Furthermore, previous experiences of discrimination by police made many sex workers consider that if reporting was not harmful, it was certainly futile.
In contrast to stereotypes of sex workers’ passivity, what is striking from the data is firstly, the extent to which a number of sex workers have attempted to report violence and secondly, the degree to which police, and in some cases other perpetrators, actively attempt to prevent sex workers from reporting, force them to drop their cases or retaliate against them when attempt to access justice.
Deterrence: Police Actions
Most common was deterrence from police which we have separated here into threats and police collusion, and the cover of lawfulness.
Police Threats
Sex workers reported receiving the following threats from police to deter them from reporting police violence:
Reporting a sex worker to “the” (other) police
Arrest and Detention
Violence
“Outing” to Family as a sex worker, or as trans
“Outing” to Police
Loss of child custody and institutionalization of children
Expulsion from a Neighborhood (work and home)
Preventing a sex worker from being able to work
Harm to their child
As one sex worker recounts:
“I did not report because the police] were threatening that they would harm my son.” (Male Roma street sex worker, Slovakia)
Police Collusion and the Cover of the law
Another major deterrent to reporting was police collusion. This could take the shape of multiple police facilitating the commission of violence or facilitating a cover-up:
“When police officers want sex, you have to give them. Otherwise, the first shift, tells the next shift to arrest you.” (Roma cis woman street sex worker, Bulgaria).
“One police kicked me in the leg. How am I to report that, if I know three other police officers will testify it never happened” (Roma trans woman, street and indoor sex worker, Serbia).
Or both, as in the case of a Roma street sex worker from Bulgaria who reported being beaten in detention until she lost conscience, hemorrhaged and miscarried. She woke up in the hospital to the news that police officers had ensured the medical records indicated she had been found beaten by a stranger and rescued by them.
Another deterrent was the perception that violence was part of a collective mandate that either emanated from superiors, or was known and accepted by them, such as when sex workers were beaten as part of efforts, sometimes highly publicized, to “clear” streets or neighborhoods. This also allowed police to benefit from a perceived cover of lawfulness for their abuse.
“The police beat me to move off a street as they warned me they would.” (Roma self-identified male working as trans street sex worker, Serbia)
When Sex Workers Report Police Violence to Police
Despite all odds, some sex workers do take steps to report police violence to the police. In the past 12 months, sex workers surveyed had reported 15 incidents of police violence to the police in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine. Only one incident of sexual violence by police was reported to police in the same time frame. None of the cases resulted in a court trial, conviction or public inquiry. However, in Ukraine, a sex worker’s formal complaint against a police officer for physical and sexual violence resulted in the offending officer being fired although criminal charges were not laid.
Sex Workers’ Experiences of Reporting Violence by Police in the Past 12 Months
*Denotes the case from Ukraine.
Retaliation: Police Actions
A small number of sex workers reported frequent retaliation from police or witnessing retaliation against other sex workers.
Retaliation took the forms of:
Targeted Arrest
A sex worker in Bulgaria gives one such example:
“We had a colleague here who went to complain because she was beaten by a police man. [The policemen] came here and searched specifically for her. They detained only her because they already knew that she was the one giving complaints” (Trans woman street sex worker- bold added, Bulgaria).”
Violence
A sex worker in Bulgaria recounts one such situation:
“There is one police officer. He beats all the girls. He has beaten me also – with a bat and kicks. He hits at bones and the face. He kicked me in the loins once, a month ago and I got a hemorrhage as a result. When he arrests you, he handcuffs and beats you every time he passes near you. He also spits and swears at you. He beats us more if we get medical certificates for the injuries he has caused.” (Roma woman street sex worker- bold added, Bulgaria )
Threats to the sex worker, to her children, to her family, to her colleagues. To anyone who would offer her shelter.
Outing (including with megaphones in public.
Police Collusion and the Cover of the Law
Police collusion was again a factor in collectively punishing sex workers who had reported police violence. Furthermore, police officers often used the cover of anti-sex work laws to punish sex workers for reporting their rights violations: arrest and detention were means to remove sex workers’ freedom, harm their families, compromise their economic security and place them under constant control and threat of violence. Implicit in this, was a threat to other sex workers who would report or would support and assist sex workers who did. In some cases, police explicitly threatened sex workers who hid or otherwise assisted sex workers being persecuted by police for their reports.
Police Inaction or Mistreatment
Even in the few cases where sex workers managed to have their complaints taken seriously and respectfully, the case went no further.
“[Police officers] threw rocks at me. I reported it in the police [station] but they laughed at me and told me to get out and not to cause trouble. I went back to the police with a representative from the NGO Helsinki Committee and then they were polite.” (Trans street and indoor sex worker, Macedonia). (same person reported general violence many times)
Of course, previous experiences of abuse, mistreatment or inaction often become the basis of sex workers’ decision not to report subsequent events. In the case of the Ukrainian police officer who was fired, the sex worker recounted that she had not been treated respectfully. She cited both her previous experience of discrimination and insufficient evidence for why she did not report 4 subsequent experiences of sexual violence by police that year.
Also, bad experiences trying to report violence from one kind of perpetrator often impacted sex workers’ subsequent desire to report other kinds of perpetrators.
Reported Non-State* Perpetrators According To Incident
* In 6 instances, or close to half of the incidents of reported sexual violence by management/brothel owners (42.9%), the perpetrators were police officers who happened to also be brothel owners.
Obstacles to Reporting Non-State Violence
Sex workers reported 50 incidents of physical violence by non-state actors to police in all countries in the survey other than Russia and Kyrgyzstan. However, serious obstacles precluded or impeded reporting.
Sex Workers’ Experiences of Reporting Violence by Non-State Actors in the Past 12 Months
Previous Experience: Police Inaction or Mistreatment
Similar to police violence, previous experiences of police inaction or mistreatment weighed heavily in sex workers’ decisions not to report violence.
“If I report [my husband], he will find out and I’ll have more problems with him. I have reported previously but the police didn’t take any actions.” (Roma woman street sex worker, Macedonia).
I didn’t report [the attack] because of previous discriminatory experience with police. I simply don’t feel comfortable and safe with police.” (Drug using woman street sex worker, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sex workers sometimes anticipated police mistreatment based on police’s regular shaming them for engaging in sex work.
“Police officers told me I shouldn’t work in the street, shouldn’t be there [meaning it is my fault], so I decided not to report the incident to the police.” (Roma woman, street sex worker and injecting drug user, Slovakia)
Indeed, preemptively blaming sex workers for abuse that might be directed at them not only dissuades reporting, but contributes to the normalization of violence against sex workers.
Previous Experience: Police Violence, Extortion, Arrest and Detention
Sex workers previous experiences of police violence and repression dissuaded many from reporting violence they experienced from non-state actors. It factored heavily into their assessment of the possible risks to their safety that reporting could cause. Three sex workers explained as follows:
“Well the police attacked me numerous times before, so I do not see how they could help me, they would only hinder.” (Migrant female indoor sex worker who injects drugs, Montenegro)
Even when sex workers had not experienced police violence, the police’s role in compromising their ability to work, even if within the confines of the law, was a determining factor in many sex workers’ ability to freely report violence. The possibility that reporting and exposure to police could further jeopardize their work and economic security proved too great a risk for many. Two sex workers explain this dynamic:
“I do not count on police to defend me if they give me fines every week. I am more afraid of police [than the aggressor] because they are the ones who do not allow me to work, give me fines and bring me to the station.” (Cis woman and street sex worker who injects drugs, Montenegro)
“If I reported, I would have to explain to the police that I am a sex worker and that he was my client and that would jeopardize me and my job” (Woman indoor sex worker, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sex workers who had dependent children felt an even greater pressure not to report and risk compromising their economic security. As a Roma woman street sex worker from Montenegro explained:
“[I did not report the violence against me because] I have three underage kids and I am sex worker.”
Some sex workers who were not known to police as sex workers were able to report violence that took place outside of the workplace, such as often spousal violence, without “outing” themselves to police. However, being outed to police remained a risk. In fact, a number of sex workers reported that their violent spouses threatened to out them as sex workers to police if they ever dared file a police complaint.
In a further complicating dynamic, sex workers very frequently reported experiencing violence from spouses, family members or neighbours specifically as punishment FOR their engaging in sex work. In those cases, to report the violence would in all probability out them to police. Conversely, a number of sex workers who were attacked at the workplace feared not only that reporting the crime de facto outed them as sex workers to police, but that police would in turn out them to their families. As one sex worker explained her reluctance to report an attack:
“I don’t want police to know about my sex work and to be punished for that and for them to tell my mother.” (Cis woman indoor sex worker, Albania)
For sex workers in same-sex relationships, reporting spousal violence carried the implicit risk of outing oneself as gay, lesbian or bisexual to police. Lastly, for migrants, reporting their spouses or other attackers posed the risk of deportation.
Inadequate Protection/Threat of Perpetrator Retaliation
Numerous cis women sex workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Romania and Kazakhstan mentioned experiences of reporting spousal violence to police only to face inaction, or no more than a verbal warning to their spouses. In a number of situations, women reported facing violent retaliation from their husbands following the reports. This speaks not only to police inaction but also to the police’s inability to offer necessary protection to women who report violence. Potential retaliation and lack of protection were a factor for perpetrators encountered in the workplace as well:
“[I will not report because police will insult me] and clients can come next time and kill me.” (Indoor woman sex worker, Albania)
Threats of Violence and/or Job Loss by Abusive Management or Abusive Spouses in a Managerial Role
Sex Workers working in brothels that operated illegally recounted management threatening to fire them if they reported violence from clients or attackers posing as clients. For sex workers wishing to report abuse by brothel management or owners, there was the further risk mentioned in a number of countries, that doing so would nullify their possibility of working at their current establishment and possibly elsewhere. Lastly, sex workers who had spouses working in a managerial role controlling their sex work reported being threatened not to report violence to police. These dynamics are explored in greater depth below in the section on third party laws and parallel justice.
Sexual Violence: Issues of Law, Evidence, Outing and Self-Incrimination
Reporting sexual violence presented many challenges that are not unique to sex workers, such as sex workers’ perception that they had insufficient evidence or the fact that sexual violence sometimes took the shape of violent control and forced sexual acts, following other acts that had been agreed to:
On clients who commit sexual violence: “Usually, they take condom off, they insist on having sex longer than agreed, they take control over you by violence. How to report that?” (B, Serbia)
Furthermore, in the case above, acknowledging the prior consensual acts with a client would be to self-incriminate to police. Indeed reporting sexual violence in the workplace, for sex workers in contexts that penalize or criminalize sex work, poses the risk that if police do not believe you that it was non-consensual, you have potentially selfincriminated yourself.
Male or trans sex workers seeking to report sexual violence often faced ridicule, and discrimination or dismissiveness.
When Sex Workers Report Non-State Violence to the Police
Despite all the obstacles, as mentioned above, sex workers surveyed reported a total of 60 violent incidents to police in the past 12 months. The most frequent explanation of why they decided to report in that instance was them reaching a kind of tipping point: often the seriousness of a beating by a spouse making them realize their life was in danger; or a spouse extending the abuse to children; or an attack in the workplace that felt particularly life-threatening. However, major obstacles remained after sex workers reported violence.
Victim Found Guilty
Reporting violence presents the risk that perpetrators will counter-accuse sex workers of fabricated charges and that they- not the perpetrators- will be found guilty. This was the experience of a sex worker from Turkey:
“In the past, I was a victim of violence and when I reported this to the police, they police turned me into the guilty one- meaning that I was found guilty instead of the perpetrator. So I don’t trust the police, I don’t report.” (Woman street and indoor worker, Turkey)
The risk that sex workers will not only be disbelieved, but presumed guilty of something is significant enough that it is sometimes reportedly used by perpetrators. A migrant indoor sex worker in Romania recounted being called to a man’s home to offer him services, only to be ambushed and gang raped by four men who threatened to accuse her of theft to police if she tried to report them. She was dissuaded: “[The police] would have believed them and not me, a Moldovan.”
Another theme that emerged in Romania and Kazakhstan was that justice could be “bought” as perpetrators often have more resources than sex workers. A Romanian sex worker reported one such incident: “I did report a client who cut my legs but he had more money, gave a bribe [to police] and got away.” Many sex workers feared the fact that perpetrators could not only “buy” their innocence when accused by a sex worker, but sometimes could go so far as to “buy” a sex worker’s guilt on fabricated charges.
Police Inaction or Mistreatment
As with police violence, many sex workers experienced police inaction or mistreatment when they reported violence:
“I had problems with my intimate partner because of my work. He did not approve of my occupation and was looking for all sorts of excuses to beat me while he was drunk. I complained to the local police but he said they cannot take legal action against my intimate partner because we are a family and we should sort it out ourselves. They can only hold a prevention talk and they did it.” (Female indoor sex worker who injects drugs, Kazakhstan).
“I reported the case when four men caught me and raped me. They threw my bag into a near-by river and took my money. However, the police acted carelessly with my report because I am known as someone on the other side of the law and perhaps they think I deserve bad things to happen to me.” (Female street sex worker who uses drugs, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
“They say we are trash and don’t want to help us.” (Roma woman street worker, Bulgaria – She has extensive experience of police violence and one experience of mistreatment while trying to report a perpetrator posing as client. She did not report a subsequent incident of violence).
“I was beaten severely. Went to emergency and to police station after. Bus driver didn’t help me. Nobody helped me: I’m a transgender.” (Roma trans woman working indoors and on the street, Serbia)
Unsurprisingly, as with police violence, one experience of police inaction or mistreatment with police was frequently pivotal in dissuading sex workers from reporting further incidents of violence. This finding saturates the data.
Police Violence
One sex worker reported experiencing further violence from police as a consequence of reporting violence to police:
“I was assaulted by a client. My friend called police. When police came, they left our clients home and detained us. On the way they threatened us, we had to pay and also to have sex with them so that we would not be placed into a detention center since neither me nor my friend had any IDs” (Woman indoor sex worker who injects drugs, Kazakhstan).
Against All Odds: Ending Impunity
It is worth noting, that despite the significant obstacles, some sex workers were successful in reporting violence, and in 14 instances of physical violence and 4 instances of sexual violence in the past year, perpetrators were convicted. In some cases, despite prior experiences of police repression or violence, sex workers were able to find other supportive officers who took their complaints. A street sex worker from Bulgaria, who had experienced no violence from police in the past year but routinely fled them, and an indoor sex worker from Bosnia and Herzegovina who had experienced violence from police in the past year successfully had two such experiences:
“I was with a client who seemed to be normal and didn’t expect any problems. But suddenly, he asked for anal sex and I said I don’t offer this service. Then he raped and robbed me. I went to the police, they were very polite. They listened to me very carefully and made me undergo a medical exam also. It’s true I have to hide from them while working on the street, but in this case, they did their job on the best way.”
“I reported my partner because I could no longer put up with the abuse and harassment and occasional sexual sadism and abuse. He beat me so I couldn’t walk and he even raped me. Everything ended up in court and now my ex-partner can’t approach me anymore.” (Woman indoor sex worker, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She had experienced one incident of sexual violence by police in the past year (forced sex under threat of arrest). She was taken seriously and treated respectfully when she reported both physical and sexual violence by spouse to police.)
Other positive experiences included the following:
“I was advised to take a lawyer. He got three years in prison for armed robbery.”(Indoor woman sex worker, Poland)
“A client refused to pay and punched me in the eye. I went to the emergency center and got analysis of the injury and took that to the police station. They caught him and he was convicted and given 6 months in prison. After that I realized he had attacked a lot of my colleagues who work in the same area (Roma trans woman street sex worker, Serbia).
The experience above speaks to the powerful ripple effect in decreasing violence for others when impunity is ended.
Dynamics between State and Non-State Violence
Mutual Reinforcement
As detailed above, both state and non-state perpetrators could create obstacles to reporting either state or non-state violence. As a result, violence by state and non-state perpetrators could mutually reinforce each other, leaving sex workers increasingly stranded and isolated through continuing cycles of violence. Sandra’s response to our survey is one illustration of this phenomenon. Though some of Sandra’s quotes appear earlier in this report, we reproduce them here because it is taken together, that the impact of state and non-state violence on one person’s life becomes clear.
Economic Security versus Physical Safety: An Impossible Trade-Off
A very common theme that saturated the data was that sex workers feared that reporting violence to police risked compromising their ability to work. This fear centered on two risks: firstly, that reporting would expose sex workers, their workplaces and their clients to police raids; secondly, that brothel owners or managers would fire sex workers who reported violence (and refuse to hire them elsewhere) out of fear that their reports would trigger problems with police.
Sex workers articulated having to make a choice between economic security and the chance to possibly increase (or possibly decrease) their physical security by reporting violence. This is all the more of an impossible trade-off given that economic security is a crucial means of reducing risks of violence and escaping violence.
If reporting a perpetrator compromises a sex worker’s ability to earn sufficient money, it may make her or him more financially dependent on an abusive spouse, and unable to access a safe shelter. Given widespread discrimination against sex workers, drug users and trans women in anti-violence shelters, a sex worker’s economic self-sufficiency is often her or his only route to safe shelter and out of a situation of spousal or familial violence.
Furthermore, economic savings are a necessary prerequisite for indoor sex workers who need to change work and/or home location in order to evade threats to their safety. In other words, if an indoor sex worker is no longer able to work because she or he reports a perpetrator to police, she or he may very well compromise his or her ability to move to a new location that is unknown to that perpetrator. Both on the street and indoors, financial pressure makes sex workers more likely to accept a client they would otherwise refuse due to perceived safety (or health) risks. Thus, if reporting a perpetrator compromises sex workers economic security, it places them at higher risk of another encounter with a perpetrator.
This finding points to the need to analyze attacks on sex workers’ work not only in terms of direct violence by police or of the risk for violence created by changes in labour conditions, but also in terms of the implications of lost income and economic insecurity on sex workers’ ability to avoid or escape violence.
Child Custody Dynamics
When asked to describe their experiences of violence by state actors, two women spoke of the loss of their children to state custody and institutions on the grounds of sex work or sex work and drug use (as opposed to the valid grounds of abuse or neglect). One woman explains:
The Family Court wanted to deprive me of custody of my 6-year old daughter because the probation officer of my neighbor reported me and my profession to Court. My daughter was taken to the orphanage. (Indoor woman sex worker, Poland)
The threat of losing custody of their children to police on discriminatory grounds prevented sex workers from reporting violence and thus contributed to impunity for violence against them. From Montenegro, one sex worker who injects drugs explained how police threats to take away her children prevented her from reporting violence at their hands:
“[All of the police] know I am a sex worker. Police took me in for drug possession. They found some [drugs] on me, not enough to arrest me, but enough to detain me. They held me for the whole night, naked, only in my underwear. They wanted me to snitch on someone, anyone, but I did not. Then, they slapped me. And continued [interrogating and slapping me]. At the end they threatened me that they will take my kids away. I could not report them (…) in case they took my kids away.” (Woman street sex worker who injects drugs, Montenegro)
Third Party Laws and Parallel “Justice” and “Protection”
A recurrent theme in the data was that the threat of police repression and violence against sex workers, in combination with the threat from other assailants created by a lack of police protection, led sex workers to search out for alternative security arrangements. However, in doing so, particularly indoor sex workers were confronted with the effects of laws against third parties – such as brothel managers or individuals earning money from sex workers. These laws, rather than reinforce sex workers’ autonomy and safety, often created greater dependency for sex workers on third parties or the police, placing them at high risk of human rights violations.
On the Street
Some street sex workers sporadically hired or called on the assistance of friends or family to violently intervene with an assailant or would-be racketeer. Friends in some instances could sometimes have connections (true or fictional), that made them intimidating to perpetrators. However, they were rarely available with great immediacy in a crisis situation.
More commonly, a number of cisgender women street sex workers worked for someone who acted in a management capacity: who controlled their work and earnings; acted as a dissuasive presence for perpetrators posing as clients or bands of racketeers; provided a form of parallel justice for non-state perpetrators and in some countries, paid off the police. In some cases, these management roles were occupied by individuals who were also spouses or intimate partners of sex workers, though not necessarily. Such individuals rarely provided security in the sense of preemptively intervening in an attack on a sex worker, although this was reported once: “A client tried to rape but he was beaten by my pimp instead.”
Rather, men in management roles on the street were more commonly known for beating up an assailant after violence had occurred. Or, according to four different sex workers, beatings served to enforce a client’s obligation to pay, under the threat of violence, or violence. This form of parallel justice was nonetheless potentially dissuasive to perpetrators who identified a sex worker as having a “man” or a “pimp”.
In Bulgaria, sex workers who worked on the street for men in a management role reported that they were shielded from police arrest, extortion and routine police violence. Independent sex workers in Bulgaria confirmed this when they reported that police would arrest all women sex workers on the street, except for those who had pimps. (The systemic and routine arrest and extortion of independent sex workers was also confirmed by sex workers whose work is controlled by men. In answer to the question of whether they had been arrested in the past year, they all explained that they hadn’t, but qualified that it was because they had a “man”.) Indeed, police repression creates a strong incentive for a number of primarily cisgender women sex workers to enter into arrangements that offer them little control over their labour or personal lives, a high risk of violence and seizure of their earnings in order to evade police control over their labour and personal lives, police violence and police seizure of their earnings.
Working for a man in a managerial role who paid off police, could in some cases procure you a measure of police protection from other perpetrators. In one case, rather than dole out parallel justice, Raina in Bulgaria described how her manager assisted her in calling the police. She had gotten into a prospective client’s car after agreeing on a price. He started to stab her in the head and legs, she managed to escape and run to other sex workers and her “man”:
“I ran to them and they saw me bleeding. I was all in blood. [The other sex workers] called the ambulance and my man called the police. The police men came almost immediately to the place, they even came with me to the hospital. To be honest, they were very nice, of course they questioned me because they need to do their job but also they gave me some tips of what to do in such cases. They tried to find the person but could not because he disappeared very fast.
However, Raina made a trade-off for this protection in terms of decreased autonomy. Her “man” pays off the police, and she has no control over her money:
“I am not sure [how many times I have paid off police in past year] as my man is dealing with police issue! I know we pay something but I really don’t care about this, for me it is important that I can work and I have no problems with police!”
In contrast, sex workers in Poland working for individuals in management roles on the street, frequently reported that their managers or “men” prohibited them from reporting violence by perpetrators to police, under threat of violence. As mentioned earlier, this could have been out of fear of being reported themselves under third party laws if they were not known to police; or for violence or coercion if indeed that was the case; or out of fear of sex workers building a relationship with police that made their role (and job) redundant. In some cases, men in management roles on the street could undermine or violently punish sex workers for resisting violence from assailants posing as clients. This is the case reported by a woman street sex worker from Poland:
“The client demanded oral sex without a condom, I didn’t want to agree. He started to abuse me verbally and push me around, then he grabbed my head and forced the service I denied. I bit him, so he stopped and went away. But then my pimp was dissatisfied, and threatened me to not report it.”
Indoors
Working indoors in most central European contexts, presented a lesser risk of being targeted by police violence and repression. However, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, this was not always the case. In Kazakhstan, indoor sex workers faced routine police raids and violence. For many sex workers, indoor locations had the safety benefits of being known locations, sometime with known safety features, and of working with other people near-by.
Third party laws, combined with police repression and violence, create a number of complicated safety, legal and labour trade-offs that sex workers must navigate.
A case recounted by three sex workers in Bulgaria, who were working together collectively without management, helps to illustrate the ways in which third party laws can make it more difficult for sex workers to remain autonomous. Three sex workers were working together from one apartment. The police raided and walked in, while one of the sex workers was performing sexual acts. They humiliated her and were rough with her. They detained the sex workers for a long time before releasing them. However, they charged only the sex worker whose name was on the lease, and to whom the other sex workers were paying rent in order to share the space, with “pimping” charges for earning money from another person’s sex work. Pimping charges are severe criminal charges that often carry prison sentences of many years. To avoid more police repression, they move to a new location. A group of racketeers posing as clients enter the premises of the new apartment and threaten the sex workers with knives that they must start paying them extortion money and that they will be harmed if they contact police. The sex worker who had been previously charged with pimping feared contacting the police and being charged again. She therefore called friends of hers to violently confront the racketeers when they came the next day. A fight in the streets ensued and the police came. One of the other sex workers who was present and who had previously escaped a situation of trafficking in Germany and had a very positive experience with German police, recounted what happened next:
“In the end, we were all brought in to the police station to give explanations. The good thing is that the racketeers were detained and sentenced but the attitude of police to us was awful. They did not beat us or something like this because we were not guilty, but they treated us like we were the scum of society. And this is not OK for me. I was in Germany to work and I had relations with the police there and I know that police should protect you. I have seen there how the girls are calling first the police if they have any problems and I have seen the attitude of the police to the girls. And here…here they treat us like non-humans. Yes, we are prostitutes, yes, we can be whatever we want, but still we are human beings, right?!”
The Police detained all of the sex workers at the police station for a few hours before releasing them and threatening new pimping charges against the sex worker whose name was on the lease.
As a result of the risk of pimping charges, police raids, and threats from violent racketeers, many sex workers opt to work for brothels owned and run by a third-party. In exchange, they pay a portion of their earnings to management (who may also provide other services such as marketing or security). When such establishments pay money to racketeers, the costs are generally passed down to the sex workers though, without necessarily having to manage the threat themselves. If such brothels are operating outside of the law and are unknown to police, then there is always the risk of a raid. Furthermore, if a violent incident occurs, sex workers may be unwilling to report the perpetrator to the police, out of fear of triggering a raid, or due to threats from management.
Alternately, sex workers frequently reported working for brothels where management operated illegally and in tight association with police. Indeed, laws criminalizing brothel ownership give rise to contexts where most or almost all the brothels or saunas operating have close ties to police. Though this may reduce police raids, in some cases, like Kazakhstan, sex workers are still repeatedly charged (though brothel owners may escape charges). While such situations generally shield sex workers from racketeers, they frequently result in both police and management colluding to perpetrate sexual and physical violence, such as in the case of routine “subbotnick” in Kazakhstan. Widespread collusion renders it difficult for sex workers to report abuses by either police or management without high safety risks and loss of employment. In some instances, police use their ability to shut down brothels according to the law, in favour of the brothels that they themselves own. These present many of the same safety risks for sex workers as venues operating in close connection to police.
Ultimately, third party-laws that criminalize all third parties (as opposed to laws that only criminalized coercive or violent third parties) frequently place sex workers in greater contexts of dependency on armed third parties. This allows sex workers less control over their earnings, while these armed third parties do not shield from violence, nor foster protective environments. Indeed, the very laws that would seem at first glance to be meant to uphold sex workers’ autonomy and prevent exploitation, are in fact used to target sex workers who attempt to work autonomously. This, in turn, gives rise to dangerous and exploitative working conditions.
It is worth noting that contrary to a dominant narrative of sex workers as passive victims to third parties, sex workers reported how they actively negotiate their relationship with third parties. However, this did not happen in isolation, rather it was part of a complex balancing of relationships between third parties, police, racketeers and other potential perpetrators. Sex workers reported the risks and protections they weighed and their decisions at times to stay or to move on to options that seemed better. However, they often did so, and continue to do so, within severe constraints on their power to control their labour, safety and well-being.
Enabling Factors for Reporting
Lastly, on a more hopeful note, there were some factors that sex workers reported to have proved helpful in reporting violence. For reporting police violence, having access to a sympathetic ombudsperson or to an independent body tasked with investigating police misconduct were key factors for sex workers in some successful cases.
For both state and non-state perpetrators, support from other sex workers, family or friends was key. This was true not only during the initial reporting, but over the long-haul, in situations where cases went to trial or were mediatized. In Turkey, sex workers reported that other sex worker friends would file a report of an attack in cases when the perpetrators threatened the victims with retaliation, if they themselves reported. Other sex workers and friends also sometimes served as witnesses.
A third factor was support from a sex worker organization and/or mainstream human rights NGO, and free legal representation. Sex workers reported that when they were accompanied by representatives from an organization to file reports with the police, they were treated more respectfully and taken more seriously than when they went alone or with other unaffiliated sex workers. This also diminished the risk of police arresting or otherwise abusing them as a result of the report.
Safe shelter was a crucial need noted by sex workers who faced threats and retaliation for reporting state or non-state violence. Sadly, most anti-violence or anti-trafficking shelters systematically discriminate against sex workers, drug users and trans women – particularly if they wish to continue working in sex work. Furthermore, these shelters are generally limited only to cisgender (non-transgender) women escaping either violent spouses or coercive third parties, and don’t service women, who for instance, need protection while they report violence from police or from racist or transphobic hate gangs. Only one organization in the region, TAIS Plus, an NGO by and for sex workers, formally offers safe shelter to sex workers who need to escape violence or report violence, regardless of perpetrator. (Furthermore, the TAIS PLUS shelter allows them to continue working).
Last, but certainly not least, policing priorities oriented towards sex workers’ safety, health and well-being, rather than repression, is perhaps the most significant possible means of diminishing violence against sex workers. On a systemic level, this requires law, policy and police practice reform. However, even in imperfect legal frameworks, such as in Poland, where buying and selling sex are not criminalized, yet third party-laws remain, police proactively make efforts towards ensuring sex workers’ safety and ability to report. This echoes our findings in 2007. Poland was the only country included in our survey where when asked to identify how policing affected them, some sex workers cited positive effects. Notably, these were from indoor sex workers who were not facing the same repression and displacement as their colleagues on the street. Nonetheless, as their quotes show, such policing priorities indicate possible ways forward:
“The [police] make me safe in case of any problems. I can call specific officers and I’m sure I’ll be treated seriously and respectfully.” (Indoor woman sex worker, Poland).
“If the client doesn’t pay, I can threaten him with the police. It is effective.” (Indoor woman sex worker, Poland)
It is worth noting that there may be strategies that prove more decisive in diminishing violence, police violence in particular, more than solely improving the possibility of reporting it: such as public advocacy campaigns, or political will and engagement. This research is one way that SWAN is trying to ensure, under sex worker leadership, that sex workers are heard and supported in denouncing the severe and frequent human rights violations perpetrated by state actors against them.
HIV Implications
The results from this research carry many implications for country-level and regional responses to HIV. While HIV-prevalence rates among sex workers in Central Europe are low (2.2% for cisgender women sex workers in Serbia, 1% in Romania according to recent surveys), they are high among cisgender women sex workers in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and very high if they also inject drugs. In Ukraine, the HIV rate is 8.5% among cisgender women sex workers who do not inject drugs and 43% among those who do. In Kazakhstan, the HIV-rate is 15% among cisgender women sex workers who do not inject drugs and 44% among those who do. Prevalence rates among cisgender women sex workers who inject drugs in Russia have been estimated at between 17% and 65% depending on the city. There is scarce information on HIV-prevalence rates among transgender women or cisgender male sex workers.
Violence by state and non-state actors have been statistically in direct correlation with HIV infection for cisgender women sex workers in the region. In Russia, experiences of “client-perpetrated physical violence” and “client-perpetrated sexual violence” were statistically associated with a higher risk of being HIV-positive for cisgender women sex workers. In Moscow, “recent subbotnick” (sexual violence by police); experiences of “physical violence from clients”; and threats of violence from third parties were each statistically associated with STI/HIV infection for cisgender women sex workers.
This research has found that police repression of both sex workers and clients create further HIV risks for sex workers by displacing them to more dangerous environments, reducing their ability to screen clients and curtailing negotiations which impede sex workers’ ability to assess and enforce compliance with condom use. Police displacement was also found to further fracture the longer-term ties many sex workers need to social, health and harm-reduction services in order to be bridged to drug treatment, and HIV and hepatitis C treatment and care. This is consistent with our findings in 2007, from Arrest the Violence.
The economic toll of police fines and extortion create economic pressure to forego condom use and engage in riskier practices for higher monetary returns. Police use of condoms as “evidence of a crime”, confiscation or destruction of condoms impede sex workers’ ability to assert safer practices. Furthermore, they may result with indoor sex work venues such as brothels or saunas prohibiting condoms on the premises, out of fear of tipping off police, reducing sex workers’ ability to negotiate and enforce condom use. Police use of syringes as “evidence of a crime, confiscation or destruction of syringes similarly create major impediments to the ability of sex workers who inject drugs to reduce risks of HIV transmission via injecting equipment.
Violence by state and non-state actors can negatively affect sex workers’ overall psychological and physical health. In other contexts, violence against HIV-positive women has been found to be a barrier to treatment adherence – whether or not the perpetrator knew the victim was HIV-positive or on treatment. More research is necessary to better understand how violence may affect the ability of transgender and cisgender female and male sex workers living with HIV to access and adhere to treatment.
Police repression can further negatively impact access to treatment in a number of ways. Frequent arrest and detention can represent repeated treatment interruptions for sex workers on ART. Depleted earnings due to fines and extortion can make it difficult to have sufficient money for transportation in order to access care, or to provide oneself with adequate nutrition. Lastly, fears that one’s drug use or sex work might be reported to police or child welfare authorities can discourage sex workers from seeking testing, treatment and care. A number of countries in the region have laws prohibiting the transmission of STIs and HIV, some of which have been used to specifically target and charge cisgender women sex workers in recent years (in Romania and Macedonia). Such laws and their use to punish, publicly shame, control and intimidate sex workers present important obstacles to sex workers protecting their health and reducing transmission.
Recommendations
The Governments of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine and Turkey Should:
• Decriminalize sex work. Remove punitive laws for sex work, drug use and same-sex behaviour. Involve sex workers as partners in reforming sex work laws.
• End implicit or explicit policies of tolerance or encouragement for the police repression of sex workers and their clients.
• Implement policy directives to proactively work with sex workers to improve their safety and to ensure swift, thorough and respectful investigations of reported cases of violence against sex workers.
• Investigate and prosecute officers responsible for physical or sexual assault of sex workers.
• Investigate and prosecute officers responsible for extorting sex workers.
• Instruct Ministry of Internal Affairs officials to improve the quality of police work with specific regard to upholding the rights of sex workers, drug users, men who have sex with men, transgender people and the Roma community, including through specialized training, and allocate sufficient funds to realize this.
• Reverse any regulations establishing mandatory HIV or STI testing of sex workers and ensure that all health measures geared toward sex workers respect their human rights and support their control over working conditions.
Ministry of Internal Affairs Officials and Others with Responsibility for the
Quality of Police Work Should:
• Signal to law enforcement officers throughout the system that police abuse of sex workers will not be tolerated.
• Conduct internal investigations of police violence and corruption and make public the findings as well as the consequences for officers found guilty of misconduct.
• Make it mandatory for police to undergo training on international human rights standards and domestic laws regulating the conduct of law enforcement officers, with an emphasis on the need for respectful rights-affirming treatment of sex workers and members of other vulnerable groups.
• Increase salaries for police officers.
• Cooperate with NGOs working with sex workers to organize education of police about the problem of police violence against sex workers. Where appropriate, such cooperation should include policy directives and financial support for a system of police partnership with sex worker communities in order to institutionalize their right to legal protection.
• Establish a system to ensure police are accountable to the communities they serve.
Ministry of Justice Officials and Others with Responsibility for Legal Reform
Should:
• Re-examine laws and policies relating to the criminalization or penalization of sex work in light of evidence that such measures undermine both health and human rights. In particular, where laws, policies, or policing practices negatively affect sex workers’ health and rights through criminalization or other means, support sex worker-led legal and policy reform initiatives premised on sex workers’ human rights and workers’ rights.
• Ensure that sex worker groups are included in a meaningful way in the design of laws, policies, and programs that affect their lives.
Where Relevant, Ombudsman Offices Should:
• Investigate police violence, including sexual violence, against sex workers.
• Conduct outreach among sex workers, through cooperation with sex worker advocacy groups, to identify human rights issues affecting sex workers and formulate ways to address these abuses.
UN Agencies and Member States Should:
• Express opposition to laws and policies that criminalize or penalize sex work as there is a strong and robust evidence base for how such laws and policies fuel human rights violations and poor health outcomes among sex workers.
• Express opposition to violence against sex workers by police.
• Express opposition to forcible testing of sex workers for HIV or other STIs, as well as any other discriminatory measures against sex workers.
• Call for investigation and prosecution of corrupt and abusive police.
Donor Organizations or Governments Should:
• Fund efforts to remove legal and policy barriers to ending violence: such as laws that criminalize sex work, drug use and same-sex behaviour.
• Fund sex worker organizations and organizations that promote sex workers’ rights and health locally, nationally and regionally to support sex workers in advocating for their rights; documenting violations; providing rights-based services including safe shelter; and partnering with state actors and state bodies hoping to improve government responses to rights violations against sex workers.
• Fund initiatives to create additional violence services by and for sex workers, including safe shelter.
• Decrease police violence by fostering partnerships between sex workers and government ministries, including each country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
• Support the efforts of human rights groups to collaborate with sex worker groups and undertake projects to document and confront violence against sex workers by state and non-state actors.
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