Ines realized that if her physical appearance “as a human rights defender during the day” matched how she looked on the street at night, she was significantly “easier for police to catch.”

A few months before we met, she cut her hair and bought second-hand “ugly men’s clothes.” During the day she wore loose jeans and a short sleeve collared shirt typical of Indonesian men. At night she changed back into her dresses.

Her top security tactic as a human rights defender was to split her identity in half. Some community members appreciated Ines’ sacrifice, but other transgender women resented her new daytime male appearance. Some said she does not represent them anymore. Some said she was no longer the transgender leader they once rallied around; that she was “just a gay man now.”

In the years after meeting Ines, I conducted more than 300 interviews with sex worker rights defenders around the world. In dozens of living rooms, brothels, street corners, train stations, mosques, beauty salons, abandoned Soviet warehouses, boats, beaches, and clinics, sex worker rights defenders echoed Ines’ experience of life at the dangerous intersection of these two radical identities – sex worker and human rights defender.

In El Salvador, sex worker rights defenders’ own clients and managers begin physically attacking them after learning about their activism.

In Tanzania, police force the vast majority of detained sex workers to perform oral sex in exchange for release – but only visible community advocates are asked to perform sex to secure others’ release.

In Myanmar, police follow sex worker rights defenders to brothels to conduct “anti-prostitution” raids during a human rights training. Defenders are forced to make split second decisions about whether to deny their sex worker identity to avoid arrest – shattering trust with their community – or to proudly claim that they too are sex workers, go to jail with the others, and drastically limit their ability to advocate for the release of the group.

Like her colleagues around the world, the risks Ines faced on a daily and nightly basis stemmed directly from her visible human rights work. Sitting at the Islamic school, I asked Ines what the international community could do to help. She gave simple and actionable answers: physical space to organise, secure transportation for defenders, emergency cash for short-term relocations, and unequivocal recognition of their work as human rights defender activity.

In recognition, respect, resources and protection, Ines deserved much more than she received.

Ines died in March of 2019. She had been admitted to the hospital two days prior with HIV-related complications including Tuberculosis. Ines’ closest friends did not know she was HIV positive. Shame, stigma, poverty, widespread discrimination against trans people and sex workers in health clinics, and a desire to keep protecting her community all kept Ines from seeking treatment.

Ines died of discrimination. She died of the money she did not have because of the clients she walked out on. She died of the emergency phone calls she answered instead of making money. She died of the rallies she led and the dresses she did not wear and the make-up she washed off and put back on twice as often as other sex workers. She died of homelessness and hunger and untreated, curable, preventable diseases.

She died at age 33 because even activists are not immune from the violence of shame weaponized against the intentionally poor and the strategically disenfranchised.

Ines died from the hundreds of intersecting forms of violence she spent a decade peacefully raging against.

Her friends held her funeral on the side of a mountain outside Yogjakarta. Four hundred trans, queer, and sex worker friends sat in folding chairs in the sun and told stories about her voice, her power, her hair, her whisper, and the way her face looked when she marched.

Her spirit survived what her body could not. This report is for her.

Erin Kilbride
Research & Visibility Coordinator
Front Line Defenders

1.2 Summary

Sex worker rights defenders are human rights defenders.

Sex worker rights defenders (SWRDs) protect their communities’ rights to live free from violence and discrimination, to access healthcare, housing, justice, and employment, and to organise, assemble, and advocate for rights.

According to research conducted by Front Line Defenders in more than a dozen countries between 2017 and 2020, these human rights defenders (HRDs) are arrested, attacked, sexually assaulted, detained, delegitimised, and defamed for their peaceful, legitimate human rights work.

The human rights work of SWRDs looks very similar to the work of defenders protecting other rights, especially from marginalised, criminalised, or stigmatised groups. However, due to the lack of visibility, legitimacy, and respect afforded to the concept of sex workers as human rights holders, the work of SWRDs is, correspondingly, often not recognized as HRD work.

On fact-finding missions in Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and El Salvador, Front Line Defenders spoke with more than 300 sex workers and sex worker rights defenders (SWRDs) about the risks, threats and protection needs faced by those who become visible advocates for human rights. [1] [2] This report analyses cases and testimonies of HRDs who operate at the intersection of these two identities – sex worker and human rights defender – and finds that a large majority of violence perpetrated against these HRDs is demonstrably in retaliation for their human rights work.

The targeted persecution experienced by SWRDs includes arrest, sexual assault in detention, extreme financial burdens as a result of their activism, raids on their homes and offices, threats from managers and clients (their own and those of the sex workers they defend), physical attacks and police surveillance while conducting health outreach work resulting in a loss of community trust, threats to relocate the areas in which they personally sell sex from the areas in which they are known HRDs, public defamation campaigns, and discriminatory exclusion from policy making in areas in which they have clear, demonstrable and unmatched expertise.

Sex workers, like many marginalised and stigmatised groups, experience extremely high rates of human rights violations, including of their rights to health, to justice, to live free from violence and torture, to a fair trial, to housing. The report documents a range of strategies and programs SWRDs use to protect their communities, featuring cases, stories and testimonies which transcend narratives of a victimised, sexualised population employing ad hoc survival tactics, and explores a broader, more nuanced collection of strategic, creative, methodical and intersectional systems of protection designed and deployed by HRDs. [3] SWRDs’ human rights work includes emergency response following attacks and arrests, establishing safe community spaces, public health advocacy, gender rights trainings, police reform, protection planning, legal and health counselling, prison aid and promoting access to justice for survivors.

SWRDs’ work benefits those who identify as sex workers, and those who were coerced to sell sex or forced into the sex trade unwillingly. This work includes: negotiating access to brothels, conducting trainings on how to access justice mechanisms and report experiences of violence, identifying medical needs, harm reduction, and advocacy for freedom of movement and free choice of employment for those seeking to leave sex work.

Defenders report that being both an HRD and a sex worker mutually reinforces both the capacities and the risks of each identity. Their visibility as activists magnifies the risk of being arrested, detained, and abused using the laws and practices typically deployed against sex workers. The violations they experience are those typical to sex workers in their areas (such as sexual assault in detention in Tanzania, or police violence on the street in Myanmar), but the odds of experiencing these violations increase due to their visibility as defenders. Additionally, defenders report experiencing unique violations above and beyond what are typical for sex workers in their area, such as different forms of torture in prison, threats by name on the street, targeted abuse on social media, and demands for sex in exchange for an advocacy meeting with a police commissioner.

Defenders report a tension between the desire to be visible as activists to better serve their communities, and more conventional sex worker protection wisdom which places primacy on privacy and discretion. As a result, many defenders report that they are frequently forced to make security choices in which the two identities are at odds with one another. The security precautions they take as defenders are often the “exact opposite” of those typically employed by other sex workers in their communities.

Defenders also say that the intersection of these identities can also be a source of strength and capacity, not just increased risk. The unique skills, perspectives, and expertise held by sex workers are foundational to their effectiveness as advocates. From negotiating access to brothels (in order to provide medical care and gender justice trainings, for example) to running emergency hotlines and responding to night-time raids, the vast majority of their human rights work can more effectively or only be done by local sex workers. Likewise, the skills developed as activists have, in many instances, made defenders feel they can manage their safety better.

Globally, when SWRDs are harassed, threatened, arrested, attacked, sexually assaulted, and defamed, the fact that there is a high level of violence perpetrated against sex workers in almost all countries leads to the dismissal of evidence that these attacks are often perpetrated as a result of defenders’ activism. SWRDs report being told by a range of actors, from local police to their own families, that the physical and sexual attacks they experience are “just because you’re a sex worker.” [4] The denial of this causal relationship between sex worker rights activism and targeted persecution delegitimises their status as activists and limits their access to protection mechanisms and services available to HRDs.

SWRDs face rampant violations of their rights to freedom of assembly and association. Coming together, even in private, is a radical, resistant, and dangerous act for defenders whose very identities are criminalised. Still, SWRDs insist on their communities’ right to assemble. Many of the contexts in which they work are diametrically opposed to sex worker networking. State-sponsored efforts to prevent worker organizing are varied and vast: online censorship of SWRD accounts; laws that criminalise working together in the same apartment for safety; arrests of defenders sitting together in coffee shops; violence against detainees that intentionally divides transgender and female sex workers.

Despite the persistent risk of violence and arrest, SWRDs succeed in creating physical spaces for their communities to come together – from living rooms to attics, from a salon in a village to a certain tree in a certain corner of a certain public park. These spaces defenders carve out are life-sustaining, and fundamental to solidarity, training, and collective well-being.

Defenders interviewed for this report explained that their activism revolves around one central point: Sex workers have a right to exist, to collaborate, to live, and to fight openly and collectively for these rights.

1.3 Why Sex Worker Rights, Why Front Line Defenders, Why This Report

Front Line Defenders strives to make and sustain meaningful contact with HRDs who are often excluded from international and national protection programs, such as those working in rural areas, on indigenous peoples’ rights, those defending sexual and reproductive rights, or those working on LGBTIQ+ rights. This includes through field visits, specialised trainings, campaigns aimed at raising the profile of lesser-known defenders, and research projects to investigate and publicise the unique risks facing certain types of activists.

The 1998 UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders “identifies human rights defenders as individuals or groups who act to promote, protect or strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms through peaceful means.” Front Line Defenders was founded in Dublin in 2001 with the specific aim of protecting at-risk human rights defenders – people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The human rights work of marginalised, stigmatised, and impoverished communities is often undervalued and delegitimised as valid human rights work. One type of protection work that Front Line Defenders engages in is working directly with human rights defenders from marginalized communities to document and visibilize their critical, powerful human right work, to directly combat false, defamatory narratives about them. [5]

In 2017, Front Line Defenders identified a gap in organisational knowledge, and in the human rights defender field more broadly, on how to best support and protect sex worker rights defenders, who operate at the intersection of multiple economically and politically marginalised identities. [6]

The organisation embarked on process of internal learning which included consultations with multiple SWRD networks to identify gaps in organisational knowledge vis-a-vis the human rights work, risks, and specific protection needs of SWRDs at risk. While this process was originally conceptualised of as an internal learning endeavour related to the organisation’s campaigning, grant making, trainings, digital security support, and other protection programs for HRDs, sex worker rights defenders consulted during this period requested that FLD make the findings of these consultations public.

The vast majority felt that a report on the specific risks faced by leaders of their communities, produced by what they perceived as one of the leading HRD protection organisations, could significantly impact access to HRD services, protection, funding, trainings, and in general to support existing efforts to validate the human rights work of sex worker rights defenders as a legitimate strand of human rights work amongst broader human rights and HRD networks.

Defenders explained that while hundreds of studies detail attacks against sex workers in general, and several academic studies have explored various aspects of sex worker organizing, no publicly available documentation had examined, in an in-depth, intentional, and global manner the risks facing sex workers who dare to advocate for their communities.

Correspondingly, sex worker rights defenders driving these movements for rights are marginalised from mainstream human rights discussions and activities. They seldom feature in broader human rights conferences, campaigns, websites, donor priorities, trainings, and workshops, and are conspicuously absent from most HRD discussions, spaces, and gatherings. Sex worker rights defenders have very little access to networking opportunities within the human rights and HRD fields. In the same way that rural defenders working on land and environmental rights are often excluded from urban-based activism and advocacy activities (security trainings, meetings with officials, etc), so too are sex worker rights defenders often marginalised.

1.4 Visibility Goals

CIn El Salvador, Myanmar, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, and Tunisia, SWRDs shared many of the same advocacy and visibility goals related to their security and protection. They echoed the goals verbalised during original consultations in 2017, which formed the basis of the proposal for this report.

This report is formatted to best serve the visibility goals of the defenders who gave their time, risked their security, and organised their communities to meet with Front Line Defenders.

The unifying visibility and advocacy goals expressed by the more than 300 sex workers and SWRDs interviewed for this report include:

1. Visibilize and affirm the human rights work of sex worker rights defenders as human rights defender work.

Chapter 2 explores the powerful, life-saving human rights work of SWRDs, demonstrating the legitimacy of their status as HRDs.

Defenders in all countries visited are working on countering defamation, delegitimisation, and creating new narratives which correctly frame their work as human rights defence. This includes campaigns targeting a variety of audiences and stakeholders, including state officials, donors, feminist groups, other HRD networks, international NGOs, health care providers and fellow sex workers.

Affirming the human rights work of SWRDs as legitimate human rights work necessitates visibilizing that sex workers are entitled to the same basic human rights as everyone else. The human rights of those who self-identify as sex workers are often regarded as somehow less fixed, inalienable, or indivisible than any other area of human rights. SWRDs in all countries visited named this belief – that the rights they defend are negotiable or debatable – as the single biggest underlying threat to their security. This view is often espoused by police, security forces, government institutions, women’s rights organisations, international NGOs, other HRDs, and defenders’ own families.

For defenders, the implication of this notion is that the human rights work they do is not properly human rights work, because the populations they defend do not deserve rights based on the identities, bodies, and labour sectors in which they exist. In many instances, defenders have effectively been told they can claim rights for themselves and their communities insofar as they are willing to renounce the right to claim rights based on, and deriving directly from, a sex worker identity. In other words, that if they reject the identity sex worker, and the concept of sex worker rights, they will be allowed to claim rights from an alternate, victimised space.

This report therefore takes a theoretical framework which affirms the human rights of sex workers, and sex worker rights defenders as HRDs.

All SWRDs interviewed for this report identify as sex workers themselves, and claim rights not in spite of, but directly from this physical, political, and economic identity.

2. Legitimise the risks that sex worker rights defenders face as a result of their activism, and dispel the violent, derogatory myth that all threats faced are “just because we’re sex workers.”

Chapter 3 highlights the key threats, risks, and attacks reported by SWRDs across multiple regions. Researches documented detailed attacks which demonstrate that perpetrators targeted defenders specifically because of their work as HRDs.

Denying linkages between their activism and the attacks they endure precludes defenders from accessing a wide variety of mechanisms for redress, protection, training, advocacy, and recognition.

This report critically analyses the threats faced by SWRDs through a gendered political lens. It highlights the ways in which, by operating at the intersection of these two identities, a large majority of violence perpetrated against SWRDs is demonstrably in retaliation for their activism.

3. Visibilize the specific protection needs of sex worker rights defenders, or the unique implementation needs vis-a-vis existing protection schemes, mechanisms and opportunities

Chapter 6 lists protection recommendations and calls for an end to violence against sex worker rights defenders based on an amalgamation of key threats discussed internationally.

4. Secure access to, and build allies within, local and national level criminal justice institutions, namely local police precincts and district level judiciaries.

SWRDs in all countries visited have successfully established connections with local and state level police to conduct human rights and sensitivity trainings. Defenders in all countries visited want to continue building on these connections. Defenders in several countries highlighted the need to make in-roads with national level justice departments to conduct similar trainings for judges on human rights, gender expression, sexuality, labour rights, and the rights of HRDs.

1.5 Letter from the Director

Since Front Line Defenders was founded in 2001 we have consciously sought to reach out to and support those human rights defenders who are most at risk. In all of our global work there are some human rights defenders who are more at risk because of the nature of their work, exposing corruption for example, but there are also many HRDs who are more at risk because of their identity or because of the identity of the community whose rights they are seeking to defend.

People will come to any discussion that includes the term sex work from different moral and ethical perspectives. It was a challenge for me and for some of my colleagues. However, I don’t think anybody can deny that the communities that identify themselves to be sex workers are amongst the most marginalised in all parts of the world. When members of these communities advocate for access to health care or against police violence they are clearly engaged in human rights work. And these individuals, networks and organisations are amongst those human rights defenders most at risk globally.

There are many people who believe that the term “sex work” denies the human rights violations perpetrated by criminals involved in trafficking and the coerced exploitation of vulnerable people. Front Line Defenders is strongly opposed to trafficking and coercion. However, we also recognise that “sex worker” is not just terminology for moral or legal debate. It is an identity that has been adopted by communities who are amongst the most defamed and stigmatised. Our approach, in all our work, is to respect the language and identities used by the human rights defenders we seek to support. This type of solidarity is particularly important for defenders who are frequently spoken about in terms that further their stigmatisation and the denial of their rights.

This report began as a process of learning and review to see how we could be more effective in providing support to human rights defenders working in extremely difficult contexts. The first major lesson was that we already knew more sex worker rights defenders than we thought we did. We’ve now met with organisations and defenders who had been in our network for years, but previously only identified themselves to us as women’s rights defenders, or land rights defenders, or LGBTIQ+ defenders. The discrimination faced by sex workers is so pervasive, they assumed they needed to hide certain parts of their identities from us in order to be considered legitimate HRDs.

As FLD staff, we are constantly discussing strategies for surmounting barriers to getting resources to marginalised HRDs – we are known for funding and responding in fast, creative ways. In the case of defenders in this report, one of the biggest barriers to accessing HRD protection support turned out to be the discrimination and delegitimisation of their communities.

Five years ago, staff going on mission were not expected to seek out and engage with SWRDs. This was not a category in our minds, even as we aimed to support more marginalised groups of defenders. Now, it is standard to hear Protection Coordinators and other staff report back about meetings they held with sex worker rights defenders to discuss threats to their security, in the same sentence as they discuss meeting with a wide variety of other defenders. Support for SWRDs at risk has now been integrated across all our programmes including digital protection, urgent appeals and advocacy, protection grants, rest and respite, our annual Award and the Dublin Platform. Our active engagement with SWRDs has also been a learning experience that has strengthened our capacity to support others.

In one of our internal meetings wrestling with the complexities of all this, I told our staff that while I worry about the health and safety of coal miners, I absolutely defend the rights of miners to organise and advocate for their rights. It is of course not a perfect analogy, but it touches on the core of why we are developing our work with and support for sex workers rights defenders. They are at risk because they are defending the basic human rights of communities that are amongst the most marginalised in every society. And that means they must be an integral part of our core work.

Andrew Anderson
Executive Director

1.6 Key Findings and Recommendations

In Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and El Salvador, FLD researchers visited a minimum of four cities per country. On each trip, between 25 and 35 SWRDs were interviewed, as well as an additional 20-40 sex worker community members. Front Line Defenders interviewed sex workers who do not identify as activists, community leaders, outreach workers, peer educators or advocates in order to differentiate risks that are unique or, or experienced differently by, HRDs.

The SWRDs who jointly organised the Front Line Defenders research missions also led the selection of communities with whom researchers would meet. Researchers aimed to meet defenders with a range of gender identities and sex work locations, such as bars, street based, managed indoor and managed outdoor.

In-depth interviews were selected as the method of data collection in order to explore the lived experiences of SWRDs. Front Line Defenders covered travel costs for all participants interviewed in person, and internet costs for defenders interviewed remotely.

Defenders and fellow sex workers from their communities were interviewed using semi-structured format which enabled them to discuss a wide range of topics according to their priorities and comfort level. Defenders chose whether they wished to be interviewed individually or as a group. Some defenders identified their experiences more as a collective than an individuals, and wished to share their stories in groups; others preferred privacy and were interviewed individually. Mothers and caregivers who wished to hold their children during interviews did so. All SWRDs were given information in their own language about the purpose of the research, how their identity would be protected, and varying levels of anonymity they could choose (for example, first name only, pseudonym, film recording, audio recording, or written notes only).

All participants were informed of their right to skip questions, withdraw their consent at any time, take breaks from the interview, redirect the researchers to more relevant or appropriate topics, and have recording devices removed from the room at any time. Researchers stopped using handheld audio recorders after a group of sex workers on the first research mission in Tanzania said the devices looked similar to the tasers which police often use to assault them during arrests.

The data analysed includes these interviews with SWRDs and their communities, field observations, and literature reviews.

Limitations

No report conveying the stories and experiences of people working in such radically diverse spaces can claim to be representative. Instead, the cases and testimonies in the report were chosen because they are emblematic of the most common violations reported to Front Line Defenders by SWRDs during this research. The countries were chosen in part because regional networks of SWRDs identified struggles there as being similar to or emblematic of struggles across that region.

The nature of Front Line Defenders HRD-led approach to research means that the identities of the sex worker communities in this report largely “correspond” to the gender, class, and racial identities of the most active sex worker rights organisations in each of the countries visited. In Tanzania, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and El Salvador, all participants identify as cisgender women, gay men, or trans women, the majority of whom have citizenship in the country where they sell sex and experience some form of housing insecurity.

This report does not do justice to the extreme violence facing SWRDs around the world who are further marginalised along alternate race, gender, class and ethnic lines, in addition to the risks they face as sex workers and HRDs. Researchers made strong efforts to meet with HRDs from a range of gender identities, sexualities, and ethnic backgrounds, but acknowledge that a range of experiences including those of undocumented, migrant, refugee, gender-nonconforming, trans men, and disability justice advocates have not been adequately visibilized in this research.

Front Line Defenders sincerely hopes that this report is a step towards, not the end of, better documentation and response to threats facing these particularly marginalised defenders. More work is critically necessary to visibilize and respond to the risks facing undocumented and migrant SWRDs, which include the potentially lethal threat of deportation.

In Myanmar, Tanzania, El Salvador, and Kyrgyzstan, race is conceptualised of in ways that eschew Western ideas about whiteness and Blackness. In acknowledgement of the extreme rates of violence faced by Black transgender women in the United States and elsewhere, Front Line Defenders hired SWRDs from BIPOC- and trans-led organisations to provide expert feedback. Commentary from some of these SWRDs appears in companion materials to the report, such as social media graphics and OpEds. Their commentary is published in conversation with the testimonies of SWRDs from Myanmar, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, and El Salvador. Tensions and differences in conceptualizations of race are preserved, visibilized, and discussed in the text and accompanying materials, rather than flattened.

1.8 Acknowledgements

Front Line Defenders expresses its sincere gratitude to the hundreds of sex worker rights defenders who generously gave of their time and emotional labour to the production of this report. Defenders from more than 20 countries provided expertise, testimonies, analysis and patient guidance at all stages of research and internal learning.

Defenders took social, personal, familial, financial, professional, and emotional risks to welcome researchers into their homes, community spaces, NGOs, clinics and brothels. They increased their risk of police surveillance, harassment, arrest and abuse in prison for reporting exactly these violations to Front Line Defenders. HRDs whose families do not know of their sex work risked being outed; sex workers whose clients do not know of their activism risked losing income. HRDs risked community trust by inviting non-sex worker researchers to interview populations more commonly spoken about than listened to. HRDs risked being made more visible and therefore more at risk from criminal networks. All risked re-traumatization during the retelling of violence against their communities.

Front Line Defenders researchers are especially grateful to the compassionate expertise and personal risks taken by the translators who coordinated and co-led the investigative research trips. This work would not have been possible without Yazzy Omary Musenguzi (Tanzania), Aizat Shakieva (Kyrgyzstan), Virginia Lemus (El Salvador), and an activist in Myanmar whose name has been withheld for security.

The HRDs who served as translators and fixers on research missions now hold the immense weight of hundreds of first-hand stories of victimisation, resilience and resistance that make up this report. This is a burden that Front Line Defenders continues to work with them to alleviate through financial and socio-emotional support, but it is a burden that will always be born – first, foremost, and primarily – by local human rights defenders.

The following sex worker rights organisations provided research mission support, testimonies, expert guidance, and/or peer reviews:

• Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP)
• EMPOWER, Thailand
• Tanzania Community Empowerment Foundation (TACEF), Tanzania
• Eagle Wings Youth Initiative, Tanzania
• Bridge Initiative Organisation (BIO), Tanzania
• Tanzania Service Foundation (TASEFO), Tanzania
• Warembo Forum, Tanzania
• YOSOA, Tanzania
• Tais Plus, Kyrgyzstan
• Shah-Aiym, Kyrgyzstan
• Podruga Charitable Foundation, Kyrgyzstan
• Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW), Thailand
• Aye Myanmar Association (AMA), Myanmar
• Asociación de Mujeres Trabajadoras Sexuales LiquidAmbar, El Salvador
• Orquídeas del Mar, El Salvador
• Estrellas del Golfo, El Salvador
• Colectiva Venus, El Salvador
• Colectiva Flor de Piedra, El Salvador
• Plataforma de Personas que Ejercen Trabajo Sexual, (PLAPERTS), Peru
• Asociación de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina (AMMAR), Argentina
• Sex Work Alliance Ireland (SWAI), Ireland
• Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) USA, United States
• SWOP Sacramento, United States
• Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS), United States
• HIPS, United States
• International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), Belgium

Several other SWRD organisations and individuals requested that their names be withheld for security. Front Line Defenders is grateful for their brave work designing and contributing to their documentation.

Throughout the planning, research, and drafting phases, meetings with allies, organisations, and donors with strong histories of supporting and funding SWRDs were critical to shaping both the research methodologies and ongoing framing of the report’s findings. Front Line Defenders is grateful for the guidance provided by:

• Red Umbrella Fund
• Sex Work Donor Collaborative (SWDC)
• Sex Worker Giving Circle at Third Wave Fund
• American Jewish World Service (AJWS)
• Foundation for a Just Society (FJS)
• Open Society Foundation (OSF)
• NEO Philanthropy
• AIDS Fonds
• Fondo Semillas
• UHAI East Africa Sex Health ands Rights Initiative

Feminist partners from the Women Human Rights Defenders International Coalition were critical to shaping both the research methodologies and framing of findings.

1.9 Protection & Safeguarding

The human rights work of SWRDs benefits those who identify as sex workers and those forced or coerced to sell sex unwillingly. The work of SWRDs helps victims and survivors of trafficking, and is recognized by anti-trafficking experts as critical, life-saving work. This work includes: conducting trainings on how to access justice mechanisms and report experiences of violence, identifying medical needs, harm reduction, building connections and trust, and advocacy for freedom of movement and free choice of employment for those seeking to leave sex work.

Trafficking in persons, as defined in Article 3(a) of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, is a crime under international law.[9][10]

Many adults are trafficked, forced or coerced into commercial sex and many children are victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Such crimes, and their devastating consequences on the lives of victims, persist due to a range of factors including poverty, corruption, criminal networks, stigma, and inequality based on gender, race, class, sect or caste.

Front Line Defenders fundamentally opposes all forms of trafficking in persons, coerced labour and slavery, including the abuse of children, and seeks to support where requested HRDs who face risks as they work to bring those responsible to justice.

Trafficking violates a wide range of human rights, including Articles 4, 5, 13, 23, 24, and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirm all people’s rights to freedom from slavery and inhumane treatment, freedom of movement, free choice of employment, reasonable working hours, equal pay, and an adequate standard of living. [11]

Trafficking is a grave violation of human rights, and HRDs working in this space are critical to protecting those affected.

All defenders and community members interviewed for the production of this report were consenting adults over the age of 18, who specified which labels and identity markers they wished to use to represent their personal and professional lives.

1.10 COVID-19

Sex worker rights defenders and their communities were among those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus itself and state responses to the pandemic affected queer and sex worker communities in ways that exacerbate existing systems of classed, gendered, sexualised and racial injustice. As the need to respond to emergencies rose, HRDs from these groups faced increasing risks of arrest, physical attack, and psychological trauma.

Launch plans for this report, originally scheduled for 2020, were delayed out of respect for the capacity of SWRD partners. [13]

However, during the crisis, Front Line Defenders produced a new crisis response report documenting the impact of the pandemic on LGBTIQ+ and SWRDs.[14]

Between April and August 2020, Front Line Defenders gathered testimonies from than 50 at-risk HRDs protecting LGBTIQ+ communities and sex workers in 13 countries. Defenders around the world reported an increase in physical attacks, sexual assault, arrests, raids on their homes, and harassment by security forces during COVID-19.

In Tanzania, the investigation found a spate of attacks on activists’ homes after it became known locally that they were housing LGBTIQ+ people or sex workers at risk of homelessness, hunger and police violence on the streets. Also documented in the report are mass arrests at the offices of LGBTI rights organisations; closure of HRD-run medical clinics; sexual harassment and detention of transgender HRDs at security check points; homophobic and transphobic defamation portraying HRDs as spreaders of COVID-19; and severe psychological trauma over their inability to fully respond to the many dire needs of their communities.

Given the specificity of the December 2020 report, this report does not include cases or analysis from defenders during the pandemic.

This chapter presents examples of SWRDs’ work alongside stated principles from various international human rights treaties, declarations, and conventions. The explicit reference to these documents is not intended to reify structural and linguistic hierarchies which privilege an academic discussion of human rights. Their mention is in response to a clear ask from SWRDs interviewed for this report to: clearly name their work as human rights work and to conceptualise their activities inside the same frameworks used to discuss and support the work of other human rights defenders.

These include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR); UN treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT); and labour rights standards such as those from the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact.

2.1 Emergency Response

Freedom from torture, and from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (Article 5, UDHR)
Equal protection under the law; freedom of discrimination (Article 7, UDHR)

In addition to the above abuses, SWRDs in Kyrgyzstan also receive emergency calls from sex workers during employment raids and forced medical testing by police.[20] Sex workers often have defenders’ personal numbers memorized in case of such emergencies. Sex worker rights organisations Tais Plus[21] and Shah-Aiym [22] train their Outreach Workers on emergency response protocols, including risk assessments for deciding between an emergency night-time response or delaying action until the morning.

2.1(b) – At Police Stations

In all countries in which Front Line Defenders conducted research, SWRDs do advocacy or emergency response at police stations.

Detained sex workers in Myanmar often have to wait several days before being permitted a phone call to family or friends. This is particularly dangerous and potentially lethal for transgender sex workers held in cells which do not correspond to their gender identity. Police threaten to lengthen detention periods and prison sentences if detainees call lawyers for help. To prevent retaliation against detainees who call for support, HRDs from AMA conduct routine checks of police stations. Additionally, concerned family members of sex workers call the AMA hotline to report missing persons, which means detainees themselves do not have to call. AMA has worked in the community long enough to establish this relationship of trust not only with sex workers, but with their families as well.

HRDs in several cities in Myanmar have also built a rapport with many police officers who now allow them to conduct these routine checks. Similarly, in Kyrgyzstan, Outreach Workers from Tais Plus wear organisational badges when they go to police stations following emergency calls. They often have to negotiate access to the station, and many say their affiliation with Tais Plus helps. Once inside, Outreach Workers document each detainee’s case, assess immediate medical needs, and contact allied lawyers.

In Tanzania, SWRDs in Dar Es Salaam, Mwanza, Arusha, and Zanzibar all respond to emergency calls from sex workers in police stations to advocate for release, provision of medical care, and adequate conditions in detention.

SWRDs and sex worker communities in several towns in Tanzania told Front Line Defenders that they have observed several patterns of sexual abuse in detention. As a result, defenders stressed the need to act quickly, often abandoning their own clients (and source of income) to go to the station and secure others’ release as soon as possible. SWRDs know that sexual assault is highly likely within the first hour of being brought to a police station. They know it is likely to occur at least once each day that a sex worker is detained. They know that for female sex workers in particular, sexual assault by police officers often occurs at timed intervals. At one police station in Arusha, female sex workers were sexually assaulted daily at approximately 3 pm. For HRDs responding to emergency calls related to arrests and detentions, this creates an environment of extreme stress, psychological pressure, and urgency vis-a-vis “knowing exactly what will happen if we don’t respond in time.”

2.1(c) – Physical Attack

SWRDs also receive and respond to calls from sex workers who have been physically attacked. Most need transportation home or to a hospital. Indigenous SWRDs and other SWRDs in rural areas also provide sex workers with transportation home from safe, non-violent client bookings to prevent abuse by police or members of the public while walking home.

This type of emergency response work often means that defenders have to leave their own client bookings, jeopardize their income, and take their own bikes or motorbikes to the location of an attack. SWRDs in Tanzania have been attacked while responding to emergency calls like this at night. Defenders report that because they appear to be out selling sex even though they are responding to an emergency, they are targeted by police or harassed or assaulted in public. (Section 3.6(b))

In Myanmar, when SWRDs arrive at the scene of a physical or sexual assault by police, those same officers will often follow the HRD and the victim to the hospital and continue to harass them.

2.1(d) – Public Humiliation

SWRDs in San Salvador conduct emergency response missions following group violence and public humiliation by security forces. WHRDs from Asociación de Mujeres Trabajadoras Sexuales LiquidAmbar, a sex worker rights organisation in El Salvador, receive emergency calls from sex workers during joint raids conducted by the Salvadoran Army and local police. Security forces break into sex work establishments, force all clients to leave, and illegally demand that workers show soldiers their HIV test results. Soldiers then force workers out into the street, often at gunpoint and without clothing. In public, they separate workers into two lines according to alleged HIV status: the “dirty” line and the “clean” line.

WHRDs report that sex workers who refuse to show test results have been framed for possession of drugs, detained, and forced to have sex with soldiers and officers in exchange for their freedom.

SWRDs go to the scenes of raids after receiving emergency calls from workers, and have also successfully built relationships with some Army commanders. They use these relationships to advocate for an end to forcing people to show medical test results (which is illegal in El Salvador), and also to end the degrading practice of forcing workers into “dirty” lines in public. Defenders say that when security forces humiliate sex workers in public, it harms their reputation among clients and drastically reduces their ability to financially support their families.

2.2 – Legal Counselling

In Myanmar, most sex workers and SWRDs interviewed by Front Line Defenders had spent one to three years in prison on prostitution charges; some had served multiple three-year sentences (the maximum allowed by the penal code). Legal support for arrested sex workers is especially critical in countries like Myanmar, where defenders say the most arrests result in prison time. In other countries (including those featured in this report) sex workers are often detained, sexually assaulted, and released without trial or sentencing.

As a result, SWRDs in Myanmar have trained as paralegals with a Yangon-based law clinic to provide pro bono support to arrested sex workers, and to bring cases to court following police or client violence.

SWRDs in Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Tanzania and El Salvador also assist sex workers to file police reports about violence from other officers and clients, but say sex workers’ fears about interacting with the police often prevent them from seeking justice.

2.3 – Prison Aid

In Myanmar, families of detainees use monthly prison visits to bring food and sanitary supplies to detained relatives, to fill the gaps in prison nutrition and health care. SWRDs conduct “family visits” for sex workers whose families cannot afford time off work or to purchase supplies, or who have disowned their sex worker relatives.

2.4 Health Education & Medical Interventions in Sex Worker ‘Hotspots’

SWRDs are often the only local or international actors providing health education and safety materials to their communities or bringing medical professionals to the wide variety of locations in which sex is sold. As the only ones willing and able to access many of these locations, they ensure health care for sex workers who would otherwise endure untreated injuries and life-threatening illnesses as a result of health policies and programs which exclude, marginalise, and stigmatise them.

Health education is not always conceived of as activism or human rights advocacy, let alone activism which might put a defender at risk. SWRDs interviewed for this report, however, have been arrested and attacked for activities such as handing out pamphlets on gynaecological health. In these contexts, helping marginalised groups access health care becomes dangerous activism.

HRDs from AMA frame their health outreach, distribution, and trainings as human rights defence because they fill gaps left by public health programs.

Defenders visit sex work “hotspots”, conduct routine medical assessments, and bring allied medical professionals into these spaces. This work necessitates long term, consistent engagement with sex workers to earn their trust; SWRDs spend years cultivating these caring relationships. In dozens of interviews across Myanmar and Tanzania, SWRDs detailed cases of sex workers with a wide variety of work-related injuries, infections, and diseases for which they were able to secure a medical intervention without the workers losing their jobs. These included gynecological care, infections, open wounds, bruises, C-section wound complications, respiratory issues, and a range of other short and long-term medical issues.

“I was doing health education at a brothel we know well when the owner of the brothel next door, one I didn’t even know existed, came to me and told me about a girl with genital warts. The owner said another health org refused her care because she was in a brothel, so the warts had gotten very bad. Me and my nurse went to see her. It had affected her brain and she couldn’t care for herself. I went back to her every single day, consulted with a doctor at the hospital, and brought her to the hospital. Now, the manager trusts us and all the sex workers in that brothel have regular health services from AMA Bago.”
- Mimi, SWRD and Paralegal, AMA Myanmar

2.5 Negotiating Access

SWRDs have extensive experience negotiating access to controlled spaces of sex work, which are managed or surveilled by both state and non-state actors. There are many risks related to entering and speaking with workers inside. SWRDs deploy a variety of strategies to earn the trust of managers and negotiate access to these spaces, in order to provide trainings, consultations, and services on gender rights, anti-violence, access to justice, labour organizing, health care, safe sex, worker security, and other human rights topics.

Like many other human rights defenders, such as those working on prisoners’ rights, police brutality or women’s rights, SWRDs have to negotiate with perpetrators of human rights abuses in order to help people access to their rights.

In some contexts, trainings which explicitly focus on human rights (such as how to report a violent assault or recuperate unpaid wages) can only be conducted under the guise of health education, or after a reputation has been built under the banner of health outreach.

Local SWRDs are often best placed to conduct human rights trainings and advocacy – compared with national and international organisations working on health, anti-trafficking, migrant rights, and labour rights – because they have spent years establishing the trust of managersand workers through their long-term health outreach work.

SWRDs in several countries report that one key barrier to entering sex worker establishments stems directly from the criminalisation of sex work. If prostitution, brothel keeping, or other activities connected to sex work are criminalised, the managers of karaokes, bars, hotels, and massage parlours will vehemently deny that sex work happens in their establishment. HRDs say that, in their assessment, sometimes these denials are based in genuine fear that NGOs are working with the police to shut down brothels. Other times, these denials are an excuse to prevent SWRDs from coming inside to give human rights trainings to workers. [25]

While some women’s rights and anti-trafficking organisations believe that decriminalisation undermines efforts against trafficking, many SWRDs say that the criminalisation of sex work inhibits defenders from accessing managed spaces, where workers face some of the most egregious violations of their rights.

Another key barrier preventing SWRDs from doing human rights work in controlled establishments is the widely held belief that sex worker rights organisations are primarily concerned with helping women leave the sex industry. Defenders in Myanmar explain that mainstream anti-trafficking organisations have large profiles and a lot of resources, which they use to publicly conflate rights discourse with abolitionism. This hinders the ability of local HRDs to access some of the most violent, abusive spaces where workers desperately need health care, labour advocacy support and access to justice trainings. Managers of those spaces firmly believe that “human rights” necessarily means abolitionism, and this prevents HRDs from doing any other form of human rights work in that space.

In El Salvador, SWRDs are often asked to pay bribes to meet with workers in some brothels, because managers assume they will permanently lose any employee who attends a human rights training. Defenders report that it is not only the managers, but also the workers who have internalized the rhetoric that equates rights with leaving their jobs. As such, workers often refuse to meet with HRDs on this basis, assuming that a “human rights” training will shame them, or that HRDs will insist they quit their jobs.

Defenders report that this perception also becomes a risk factor for them when brothel managers, especially those connected to organised criminal networks, believe defenders are only encouraging workers to leave permanently, rather than helping them access rights while employed. (See Section 3.5)

2.6 Labour Rights Advocacy

The labour rights activism of SWRDs is expansive, varied, and life-saving. SWRDs in Myanmar, Tanzania, El Salvador and Kyrgyzstan have successfully achieved, among other labour victories:

• better and more consistent access to health care, including longer time off from work to go to the doctor;
• negotiating access to controlled or closed establishments for medical professionals;
• recuperating unpaid wages for sex workers;
• relocating to a new brothel, parlour, or restaurant with better working conditions, including for those who are threatened or coerced into remaining in their current establishment;
• taking leave and traveling home to visit their families;
• retaining their identity documents and not forfeiting them indefinitely to managers;
• demanding a work environment free from client violence;
• accessing reporting mechanisms in the event of an attack.

Sex workers interviewed by Front Line Defenders say they prefer to report labour rights violations to SWRDs from their own communities because it reduces the risk of retaliation at work. Some managers punish workers who contact labour advocates; if the HRDs themselves are sex workers, calls can be disguised as calls to friends. Additionally, workers prefer to report labour rights violations to SWRDs who are known to have sold sex, to avoid the risk that they will be shamed when asking for help.

SWRDs in several countries utilize the trust and connections they built doing health outreach work in order to conduct labour rights advocacy for sex workers facing physical, sexual, or financial coercion at work. This includes instances when managers are either unresponsive to reports of client violence, or when managers actively facilitate exchanges between sex workers and clients who are known to be violent.

SWRDs also work to support, nurture and build capacities with existing informal networks of labour activism inside brothels and other establishments. These include more experienced sex workers who help new workers travel to hospitals and negotiate more time off, and small groups of sex workers sharing collective bargaining tactics.

2.6(b) –Freedom to Choose Work

Sex workers have the right to choose and change their employer and place of work, to resign from their jobs, and to seek employment elsewhere. SWRDs who focus on brothel-based work report that very often, neither workers nor managers understand workers’ rights related to freedom of choice in employment and freedom of movement. Defenders with AMA Myanmar, for example, educate both parties on this category of labour rights, and do targeted advocacy with managers who coerce or threaten workers not to quit.

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work

2.6(c) – Access to health care for workers

Sex workers have the right to access health care. Many encounter discrimination at hospitals and clinics, but their right to health is also violated even before seeking care, when their rights to freedom of movement and a safe work environment are denied.

SWRDs in several countries conduct advocacy with managers to negotiate more leave time for doctor visits, as well as permission to bring nurses, gynecologists and other medics to establishments to treat workers on site. In many brothels in Myanmar and El Salvador, sex workers are permitted little or no sick leave, and rarely granted permission to visit the doctor. Some report being followed and threatened after seeking medical care.

SWRDs report that while the denial of doctor visits appears, on the surface, simply to maximize profits by keeping workers on site and taking clients for as many hours per day as possible, their outreach to managers has revealed a different motive. SWRDs have found that the restrictions on access to medical care are due to managers’ fear that medical providers will shame or coerce sex workers into leaving their jobs permanently.

Through ongoing, multi-year dialogues with managers, medical providers, and sex workers in Myanmar, HRDs with AMA Myanmar have significantly increased access to medical care for workers. These victories include more time off (to seek medical care off-site) and increased access for medical professionals to controlled spaces of sex work to visit sex workers who fear violence and discrimination at hospitals.

Their advocacy wins were predicated upon educating managers and workers about the distinction between abolitionism and workers’ rights, and an insistence that worker’s rights necessitate access to health care. HRDs host community dialogues about freedom of movement, freedom to choose one’s employment, access to health care, and freedom from discrimination while seeking that health care.

2.6(d) – Adequate Pay and Favourable Working Conditions

Sex workers can collectively advocate for better pay if they know that workers in other locations are making more money. SWRDs document pay scales in different establishments and regions, and serve as liaisons between workers who cannot physically meet one another. This gives sex workers insight into what they could feasibly be charging for their services, and allows them to connect with workers in other locations despite not being able to travel there personally.

SWRDs also help workers recuperate unpaid wages without being forced to quit their jobs. In Myanmar, defenders facilitate meetings between national anti-trafficking organisations, establishment managers, and sex workers to encourage a broader view of what anti-trafficking work can entail. “Trafficking,” as explained by sex workers who have experienced it, often means coerced relocation and temporarily unpaid labour.

Some sex workers who willingly begin work at one establishment are transferred to another against their will, or may agree to go under false promises of better pay. If they want to recuperate unpaid wages at the second establishment and/or return to their former place of employment, but do not want to leave sex work entirely, they are left with few options. Calling an anti-trafficking hotline could result in a raid on their establishment, the arrest of their colleagues, prison time, violence from managers, losing their children, deportation if they are undocumented, loss of wages, and an inability to find work in the future.

Cases like these are common in Myanmar and SWRDs play a critical role. They help sex workers advocate and negotiate process with the establishments, without shaming or coercing them into leaving their field of work entirely. They bring in anti-trafficking organisations strategically, to advocate for fair pay without belittling the workers or threatening the establishments. SWRDs are well-placed to conduct this advocacy because they have established trust with many establishment managersand workers via their long-term health outreach.

2.6(e) – Security Coordination

In Myanmar and El Salvador, different state authorities place contradictory boundaries on where sex workers can safely work. Security forces threaten workers to relocate to different streets, blocks, and hotels, which often further conflict with where local gangs and criminal groups “allow” sex workers to be.

SWRDs in Myanmar and El Salvador say an important part of their work is negotiating clear territorial boundaries within which street-based sex workers can work.

In Myit Kyina, Myanmar, SWRDs say that three different local authorities establish three different arbitrary nightly boundaries within which people can buy and sell sex. The town council, auxiliary fire brigade, and local police each set different rules which contradict one another.

Sex workers effectively have to choose which authorities’ rules they will “violate” each night, and suffer punishment from those officers. Each authority harasses sex workers, demands bribes or sexual services, and violently relocates workers to new locations. In this new location, sometimes just minutes later, the workers are again subjected to similar treatment from another authority. The fire brigade in Myit Kyina also subjects sex workers to collective punishment; if one sex worker in a street-based group cannot afford the nightly bribe, the whole group is arrested, attacked, or sexually assaulted.

Testimony: Nwe Nwe Win, AMA Supervisor, Myit Kyina

Nwe Nwe Win is the AMA Supervisor in Myit Kyina. She is a former paralegal who works primarily on violations related to freedom of movement and violence against street-based sex workers.

“Authorities, fire brigades, and police restrict the movement of sex workers; they each do patrols and tell them to relocate to other areas if they don’t want to be abused. But none of the boundaries line up. So one armed authority attacks you or demands a bribe or sex and moves you to a new area, where it happens again by another group. We’ve been working to coordinate meetings between all three groups, effectively to tell them they need to align the way in which they want to enforce the law.

“It’s harder for us to deal with harassment of sex workers on the street than to deal with an arrest, because if they’re arrested at least we know where to find them. We can go and negotiate their release and bring lawyers. If they’re just left in a cemetery or being pushed from street to street by the fire brigade, it’s much harder to protect them. And on the street, police confiscate phones so they can’t call us at all. This is why it’s so important to negotiate some sense of order on the streets.

“Girls call me all the time and beg us to do advocacy on making the street a safe place for sex workers. Very often they don’t want to report an attack or go to court, because that introduces many threats, they just want a safe place to work.

“I’ve worked with the local administration, fire brigades, and police to agree on consistent zones in which they will not threaten, harass or abuse sex workers. I’ve also worked hard to get them to accept a collective payment instead of an individual one, so they don’t arrest us all if just one girl can’t pay. Sex workers always take care of each other, with housing and health and money and stuff, so it’s much more natural for us to be able to pay each other’s fees if someone can’t afford it for a while. Now there are less attacks on the whole group.

“AMA is also part of a national coalition working to amend legal punishments for sex workers and provisions for our protection. There are 9 networks and organisations involved, together with the Ministry of Health: MSM networks, SWIM, AMA, the drug user network, My Positive Group, MP Women Net, the national NGO network, MINA faith group, and My Youth Star.”

2.7 Storytelling, Knowledge Production, Safety Strategies

SWRDs host workshops and social gatherings to discuss physical protection, share security strategies, and promote community-based knowledge production. Much of this work includes oral storytelling and strategy sessions to ensure participation of community members of all literacy levels. Examples of SWRDs’ creativity and leadership in collective security include:

• mapping police checkpoints, patrols, and raid locations, and sharing them orally;
• creating memorization games to help people remember and use emergency hotline numbers;
• collecting and disseminating photos and identifying details of violent clients;
• matching experienced sex workers with newer workers to facilitate mentorship and intergenerational development of security tactics;
• hosting workshops on practical strategies for safety, with attendee groups based on location of work.

In some countries, SWRDs amalgamate, analyse, and share this information via WhatsApp chains or other messaging platforms. In Tanzania, defenders in Dar Es Salaam collect details of arrests, police violence, client attacks, and new strategies for working safely. They send out “security digests” to sex worker distribution lists on messaging applications.

In Myanmar, SWRDs share security strategies orally; defenders say they function essentially as oral storytellers, traveling to different sex worker communities and sharing long stories about police violence, clients, labour rights, and collective protection. The easily understood, engaging stories increase communities’ knowledge of security best practice and build solidarity across different towns.

Most HRDs who lead the storytelling work at AMA came to the organisation following their own experiences of sexual violence. They are experts in security and protection strategies related to street-based work and cultivating safe working relationships with clients. Many of the orators are transgender HRDs, whose communities have their own traditions of oral storytelling. Transgender defenders say they incorporate protection work into their communities existing social activities to make the strategies more accessible to other workers.

Testimony: Tan Win, Transgender SWRD and Makeup Artist, AMA Mandalay, Myanmar

2.8 Police Reform

Sex worker rights defenders are actively engaged with police departments and precincts to reform treatment of sex workers by police officers.

In El Salvador, Asociación de Mujeres Trabajadoras Sexuales LiquidAmbar has worked for years to build relationships with both local police and the Salvadoran Army to end the humiliating practice of forcing sex workers to publicly declare their HIV status during raids (See Section 2.1). In Kyrgyzstan, Tais Plus has worked for a decade to end the practice of forced HIV testing. The organisation began working in 1997 on health and HIV outreach to sex workers. Tais Plus officially registered in 2000, and began working on documenting violence and police abuse against sex workers in the mid-2000s. Defenders with Tais Plus now see documentation of police violence and proactive steps to train and reform these practices as central to their work.

In Tanzania, SWRDs have built relationships with and conducted trainings for local and provincial police, including in rural areas outside of Dar Es Salaam. SWRDs introduce police participants to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, related treaties and declarations addressing gender, health, and humane treatment in detention. Defenders use these trainings as opportunities to build in-person connections between sex workers and allied police officers, creating a network of individuals who come to know one another as citizens, neighbours, and fellow parents. Defenders say they are working build human connections between sex workers and police, to mitigate the violence sex workers experience on the street.

HRDs Working Against Police Violence: Tint Tint Wai, AMA Mandalay, Myanmar

SWRDs with AMA work with police to reform violent treatment of sex workers before, during and after arrests. Defenders report that the most arrests occur on the street and target people working alone, but they have also documented violent raids on massage parlours, karaokes, and other sex work establishments in which more than 20 sex workers were detained at once.

The Abuses: Police torture sex worker detainees using a variety of tactics including blindfolding, covering their heads with a bag or fabric, tying their hands with ropes, tasering and administering electric shocks. During raids on hotel rooms, police often threaten sex workers and their clients at gunpoint, forcing them to “get under the blanket and pretend to fuck” in order to photograph them for “evidence.” [31] In several cases documented by HRDs, a police officers have abducted sex workers from the street, brought them to a remote location, sexually assaulted them, left, and sent colleagues to arrest the sex workers.

SWRDs have documented rampant abuse in detentions, prisons, and police custody including denial of food, being made to wait more than 24-hours to use a bathroom, beatings, sexual assault, and stripping naked trans defenders and forcing them to proclaim a different gender identity. SWRDs have also documented cases in which male police officers forced female sex workers to remove all of their clothing and “photographed their vaginas” in their prison cells, claiming “evidence” was needed to show the court. Female sex workers are regularly forced to remove their clothing and “show their breasts” in exchange for release or to end other forms of abuse. [32]

The Defenders: Tint Tint Wai is a SWRD, health educator, and legal counsellor with AMA Mandalay. She co-leads the organisation’s work against police violence in Mandalay. Tint Tint Wai works directly with police stations to reform violations including: the lack of adequate systems for reporting and penalizing police violence against sex workers; the phenomenon of “arrest quotas,” which police officers openly reference as justification for warrantless arrests of sex workers; theft of sex workers’ money and phones by police officers on the street; the use of “informers” to find, attack and arrest sex workers; civilians posing as police officers to sexually assault sex workers; sexual assault by plainclothes and uniformed officers; police demands for sex “free of charge;” and sexual coercion including police demands that detained sex workers pay bribes or perform sexual acts in exchange for release from detention.

2.9 Human Rights Trainings

SWRDs provide human rights trainings for sex workers, the general public, government institutions and police forces.

2.9(a) – Trainings For Sex Workers

SWRDs rarely have access to their own private meeting spaces, due in part to rampant violations of sex workers’ rights to freedom of assembly and association. As such, SWRDs frequently travel to “hot spot” locations such as brothels, parks, and railway stations to provide human rights trainings. Many defenders also conduct human rights trainings in their own homes, or build alliances with NGOs, hotels, or restaurants to secure safe meeting space.

In Tanzania and Myanmar, defenders train sex workers on the UDHR and their rights under their countries’ constitutions and penal codes. Defenders teach practical strategies sex workers can use to advocate for their release if detained.

Defenders provide one-on-one trainings and counselling for new sex workers, who may not be comfortable attending larger group sessions and face unique security risks due to their inexperience with clients, police, family violence, and discrimination.

SWRDs also hold health rights trainings for populations who are systematically marginalised from mainstream medical care. They create and distribute lists of specific rights-related words, phrases, and concepts that sex workers can reference if they are denied care at the hospital (see Section 2.11(a)).

2.9(b) – Trainings For the Public

Defenders in Tanzania, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar organise community information sessions, workshops, and trainings for non-sex workers. In Tanzania, defenders host workshops on the universality of human rights, and frame the denial of health services as a key human rights issue.

Tanzania HRDs also run community campaigns to promote the legitimacy of sex worker rights defence as human rights defence. One HRD in Tanzania explained: “We want to explain that we are not ‘promoting’ anything other than human rights. We’re not promoting sex work; we’re not promoting homosexuality. We’re promoting the human rights of people who do sex work and are gay.”

In Kyrgyzstan, HRDs run community education campaigns and host public events to counter stigma and discrimination against sex workers. In El Salvador, transgender defenders in the Gulf of Fonseca region travel to rural, mountain communities to hold workshops on gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, bodily autonomy, and women’s rights.

2.10 Public Health Advocacy

SWRDs fight for their communities’ right to health in the face of systemic violence and marginalization from mainstream healthcare services.

In addition to negotiating access to controlled spaces of sex work for health providers (Section 2.5), and securing for more leave time for workers to go to doctor appointments (Section 2.6(c)), SWRDs also accompany sex workers to hospitals and clinics to help mitigate discrimination and abuse. SWRDs also play a critical role in representing the needs of their communities in local, national, and international health policies, programs, and interventions.

2.10(a) – Advocacy at Hospitals and Clinics

SWRDs accompany sex workers to hospitals and clinics for emergency, routine and long-term care. In Tanzania, sex workers in Dar Es Salaam call SWRDs when doctors and nurses refuse to treat them. SWRDs respond to discrimination in emergency situations, including doctors, nurses and hospital staff who:

• outright refuse to treat a sex worker’s injuries following a physical attack, which is often accompanied by derogatory language about the worker’s profession;
• leave injured sex workers unattended in hospital waiting rooms for days at a time, while several rounds of other patients with less severe injuries are seen;
• insist that police be called prior to beginning emergency, life-saving treatment, knowing that this forces the sex worker to accept being arrested (and the subsequent likelihood of sexual assault in detention) in exchange for medical care;
• public humiliation by medical staff including treating sexual assault wounds in public spaces and encouraging other patients and doctors to watch;
• cite non-existent policies about only treating sexually transmitted infections for couples (based on the logic that if you only treat one partner, the infection will return);
• refuse to treat female sex workers’ sexual transmitted infection “until she brings her husband in with her,” knowing that the patient has more than one sexual partner.

These and other forms of violence, humiliation, and discrimination discourage sex workers from seeking medical treatment in emergencies and for long-term illnesses.

HRDs from TASEFO in Mwanza, Tanzania, provide sex workers with referrals to respectful, dignified, and knowledgeable health care options. Sex workers in Mwanza told Front Line Defenders that TASEFO provided the “most important service” they had ever accessed. HRDs extensively research and make connections with allied medical care providers, which prevents the violence and psychological trauma that sex workers experience at many medical centres.

Defenders also provide trainings for their community on specific words and phrases to use to advocate for themselves when faced with discrimination in medical centres.

2.10(b) – Public Policy

SWRDs are in a unique position to bring human rights and anti-violence discourse into government health policy spaces. In Kyrgyzstan, SWRDs in Osh built connections with government HIV services that they now use to advocate for police reform. Defenders have held advocacy meeting and campaigns to raise awareness of how police violence, brothel raids, and discriminatory treatment in clinics are proven barriers to HIV program efficacy.

Similarly, in Myanmar, AMA conducts advocacy campaigns and provides advisory services to government bodies, local organisations, and international NGOs working on HIV/AIDS prevention. AMA participates in the national strategy plan on AIDS, advocating for a rights-based approach to health policy. SWRDs are reforming public health policies and programs designed and operated at:

• the national level (such as multi-year national AIDS strategies),
• local level (such as neighbourhood clinics),
• and international level (such as in-country programming by UN bodies or INGOs).

2.11 Creating Spaces of Solidarity, Pride and Movement Building

SWRDs face rampant violations of their rights to freedom of assembly and association. Coming together, even in private, is a radical, resistant, and dangerous act for defenders whose very identities are criminalised.

SWRDs insist on their communities’ right to assemble. The contexts in which they work are often diametrically opposed to sex worker networking. State-sponsored efforts to prevent worker organizing are varied and vast: online censorship of SWRD accounts; laws that criminalize working together in the same apartment for safety; arrests of defenders sitting together in coffee shops; violence against detainees that intentionally divides transgender and female sex workers.

Despite the persistent risk of violence and arrest, SWRDs succeed in creating physical spaces for their communities to come together. They range from living rooms to attics, from a salon in a village to a certain tree in a certain corner of a certain public park. They are an absolute necessity for solidarity, training, and collective well-being. They sustain sex worker communities and encourage more people to become involved in the struggle for rights.

The vast majority of defenders interviewed for this report explained that all their activism revolves around one central point: that sex workers have a right to exist, to work, to collaborate, to live, and to fight openly for these rights. Amidst discourse and policies that debate the humanity of people who sell sex, the physical spaces defenders create for their communities are life-sustaining.

Examples of SWRDs’ creativity in establishing physical spaces of solidarity include:

• forming organisations despite blanket discriminatory bans on formal registration;
• opening their homes to sex workers for human rights programming, meetings, social events, emergency aid, protection trainings, and other movement needs;
• acting as the group representative and building relationships with owners of local churches, restaurants, hotels, and other potential meeting spaces;
• advertising and re-advertising community meetings, research opportunities and security trainings despite rampant censorship of sex workers on mainstream social media platforms;
• holding community meetings in the attics and basements of salons, keeping these spaces open after-hours to provide low-profile meeting space;
• advocating for housing.

SWRDs say that physical spaces create connections between sex workers of different generations, and that this in turn generates pride, confidence, self-worth, and advocacy skills.

Staff and volunteers with AMA provide “professionalism” workshops that counter the derogatory messaging sex workers receive about their profession. Defenders explain that when sex workers have only ever been exposed to messaging that constructs their profession as degrading and undeserving of respect, “they don’t fight for their rights because they believe they don’t deserve them.”

Khin Hnaing San is a Program Support Officer with AMA Mandalay. She previously worked with the INGO Population Services International, supporting men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender populations, sex workers, and people who use drugs. She says she wanted to work at AMA because of the organisation’s human rights framework.

This section examined the human rights work of SWRDs in Myanmar, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan and Tanzania. SWRDs defend the rights enshrined in the UDHR, ICCPR, CESCR, CEDAW, CAT, and ILO labour rights standards. SWRDs respond to sex workers who encounter violence, provide health education, legal and medical advocacy, negotiate freedom of movement for survivors of coercion and trafficking, and work with authorities to provide human rights trainings at the local and state level. The following section examines the risks and threats that SWRD face as a direct result of their human rights activism.

3.1(c) – HRD visibility leads to targeted arrest while selling sex

As result of their visibility as HRDs, SWRDs face an increased risk of arrest under the laws and codes used to persecute sex workers. SWRDs in Myanmar, Indonesia and Tanzania report being targeted by police on the street at night, while selling sex. They are singled out because of their known history of activism.

Myanmar allows for the warrantless arrest of people perceived to be soliciting sex. HRDs say this is due to a combination of two factors. The colonial, 1949 Suppression of Prostitution Act outlaws soliciting or seducing in public. Further, police are known to make warrantless arrests of people accused of, suspected of, or “known” to have committed crimes. Combined with the discrimination that sex workers already face, this places all sex workers at risk of arrest at any time if they are “known” to be sex workers.

SWRDs’ visibility from organizing, leadership on the street, presence in police stations, and other activities contributes to their being “known” as a sex worker, and puts them at an even higher risk of arrest than sex workers who are not visible activists.

3.1(d) – Arrests not explicitly linked to activism

Arrests based on identity, socio-economic class, and profession affect SWRDs’ family lives, economic stability, socio-emotional health, community status, and a wide range of other factors which in turn affect the efficacy and security of their activism. While it is not always possible to identify exactly which arrests were a result of their activism, it is clear that all arrests negatively affect their activism.

The UNAIDS Advisory Group on Sex Work explores this multi-faceted impact of criminalisation on sex worker’s lives, families, and work stating that:

The UNAIDS Advisory Group on Sex Work finds that “there is very little evidence to suggest that any criminal laws related to sex work stop demand for sex or reduce the number of sex workers.”

3.2 – Sexual Assault in Detention

Of the 82 sex workers Front Line Defenders interviewed in Tanzania, all but two had been sexually assaulted by police. Assaults occur on the street, in police vehicles, and in police stations.

All HRDs who had been arrested for their human rights work in Tanzania were sexually assaulted in detention.

The vast majority of assaults were physically perpetrated by police, but several defenders were assaulted by other detainees after police told them to punish the HRDs for their activism. (See Section 3.2(a))

Most SWRDs interviewed were also severely beaten by police before, during or after the sexual assault. Several were also subjected to degrading and inhumane treatment such as being made to act like animals, crawl through sewage, or have sex with officers in public in exchange for their release. HRDs who refused to do have been beaten and tortured. One WHRD was shocked with electric currents after she refused to perform sex acts during a one-week detention related to her human rights work.

The majority of HRDs interviewed in Tanzania had also been asked or coerced into having sex with officers to secure the release of >other detained sex workers, for whom they had come to the police station to advocate.

This constitutes a critical difference in the treatment of SWRDs as compared with the general sex worker population. While the vast majority of sex workers are asked for sex in exchange for release, only known activists appear to be coerced into providing sexual services to secure the release of others. (See Section 3.3)

In a discussion with a group of female sex workers and transgender sex workers interviewed in Yangon both reported that sexual assault in detention is significantly more common against transgender sex workers, and that holds true for abuses against HRDs. Transgender SWRDs were, in the assessment of both groups, more likely to be sexually assaulted in detention than cisgender WHRDs.