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Court-based research: collaborating with the justice system to enhance STI services for vulnerable women in the US http://t.co/3vEaFQVO

The fractal queerness of non-heteronormative migrant #sexworkers in the UK by Nick Mae http://t.co/X7oGFeDI

‘only 31% of the sample of indirect sex workers reported having been engaged in commercial sex in the last 12 months’

Old but good. Violence and Exposure to HIV among #sexworkers in Phnom Penh http://t.co/rkrRGiBa

Someone is Wrong on the Internet: #sex workers’ access to accurate information http://t.co/aMSXhygd

resource

Banking Services for Sex Workers

There are a number of people who earn their living directly or indirectly through commercial sex work. Exploitation, vulnerability, forced labour; servitude, stigmatization characterizes Commercial Sex Workers (CSW). A sense of immorality, criminality, and informality associated with their work keeps them excluded from mainstream society. This clandestine work does not allow them to enjoy any social power. They are compelled to keep themselves away from participating in any social, political or economic activities with mainstream society. Moreover, the lack of education, economic opportunities and health opportunities further marginalizes them. Their involvement in protest movements can only be traced in the

70 per cent women enter flesh trade voluntarily: study

An article in the Indian Express by Shruti Nambiar on the 3 May 2011. Pune: Seventy per cent of women sex workers are not pushed or forced into flesh trade but are drawn to it by the lure of higher income, according to the preliminary result of a survey released by women’s group Akshara. The preliminary results of the first leg of a pan-India study being conducted by two University of Pune researchers was released on April 30. The study by Department of Economics researchers Rohini Sahni and V Kalyan Shankar aims at establishing the premise that prostitution is part

A Regressive Move Which Would Further Stigmatise and Endanger Sex Workers

Last week Rhoda Grant MSP and Lord Morrow were invited to speak about their respective proposals to criminalise the purchase of sex in Scotland and Northern Ireland at an event in the House of Commons tellingly entitled ‘Prostitution and Sexual Exploitation: Tackling Demand in the UK’. These proposals represent a radical change to the criminal law in this area and, if passed, would have severe consequences for sex workers. They are not supported by public opinion, academic evidence, sex workers themselves or by the majority of those delivering front-line support to sex workers. Both Rhoda Grant and Lord Morrow made

The Economics of the Commercial Sex Industry

A report by Ahlburg, D and Jensen, E. Commercial sex is a service and the non-price determinants of the demand for commercial sex are the same as for other commodities or services: the number of potential consumers, their preferences and incomes, the prices of other commodities and services, and perhaps their expectations of future prices and income. Since males, particularly single or divorced males, are the main demanders of commercial sex, an increase in their numbers can increase the demand for commercial sex. An increase in the numbers of postpubertal males can occur or a number of reasons, including high

Nigeria: Sex Workers Account for 32 Percent of HIV

Commercial sex workers account for 32 per cent of HIV prevalence in Nigeria, the Director-General, National Agency for the Control of AIDS, (NACA), Prof. John Idoko, has disclosed. He said this at a press briefing yesterday in Abuja to flag off this year’s World AIDS Day commemorated worldwide every December 1. According to Idoko, Nigeria is at present the second most burdened with the disease, with about 4.1 per cent of her population, about 6.5 million people living with the virus, after South Africa. He also disclosed that the country had the highest burden of mother-to-child transmission in the world,

This condom delivers an anti-HIV drug, prevents pregnancy, then disappears

This is a very promising development (ed) Researchers at the University of Washington have just published a paper in PLoS One describing how they’ll use “electrospinning” to create next-generation female condoms made from specially customized nano-fibers. According to a release about the study from University of Washington: Electrospinning uses an electric field to catapult a charged fluid jet through air to create very fine, nanometer-scale fibers. The fibers can be manipulated to control the material’s solubility, strength and even geometry. Because of this versatility, fibers may be better at delivering medicine than existing technologies such as gels, tablets, or pills. Basically,

Listen to sex workers: support decriminalisation and anti-discrimination protections

Article in Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Volume 3(2): 271 – 287 (November 2011). Despite the massive achievements of the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria and the historic significance of this important organisation, sex workers as a community and the funds we had attracted drew an unhealthy level of interest from the health and community sector, stemming from a perception that sex workers were politically unable to run their own collective, and that the funds we had lobbied for could be better spent by people who were not sex workers. This perception was not helped by the very

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China .

The karaoke bar has become a ubiquitous symbol of urban China that is often taken to represent evidence of globalization, corruption, and sexuality. Tiantian Zheng’s book Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China finally helps the karaoke bar and its occupants come alive. Zheng returned to her hometown of Dalian, a port city in northeastern China formerly governed under Japanese colonial rule, to conduct this institutional ethnography of the karaoke bar. Indeed, she lived with hostesses inside a karaoke bar, which resulted in a rich ethnographic experience that allows her to illustrate the true role of karaoke

Sex Workers Mobilising in Namibia, Reports and Resources

UN consultant Mathew Greenall shares resources about recent work with sex workers in Namibia, including a literature review. ‘In Namibia, as in many other countries, sex workers have limited opportunities to be heard when they want to talk about human rights, and as a result, the discussions are often constrained by the need to relate them to issues like HIV or trafficking. In this context it is heartening to see not only that news outlets in Namibia gave significant coverage to the events organised by local sex worker organisations (front page of The Namibian; articles in New Era and Republiklein), but

Caught Between the Tiger and the Crocodile: The Campaign to Suppress Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation in Cambodia

In 2008 Cheryl Overs of PLRI supported Women’s Network for Unity and the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers to respond to the introduction of the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation. This article describes events in Cambodia at that time, including the abuses that ocurred in the crackdown on the sex industry generated by the law. The law abolishes the distinction between consent based sex work and trafficking by demming any commercial sex out of which anyone has profited to be ‘ sexual exploitation’ which is not distinguished from ‘trafficking’. In this way the law makes almost

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