Removal of criminal law removes the main barrier to sex workers achieving justice. It creates a space that can be filled by effective rights based policy and labour regulations and law.
Article in HIV AIDS Policy Law Rev. 2011 Oct;15(3):1, 5-14.
Individuals working in the sex industry continue to experience many negative health outcomes. As such, disentangling the factors shaping poor health access remains a critical public health priority. Within a quasi-criminalised prostitution environment, this study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of occupational stigma associated with sex work and its relationship to barriers to accessing health services.
A new anthology by Les éditions du Remue-ménage (http://www.editions-rm.ca/) on the sex workers rights movment will be launched in Montreal on November 10th 2011. Co-editied by Maria Nengeh Mensah, Claire Thiboutot and Louise Toupin, this book reproduces and presents the various forms of resistance that have inspired sex workers around the world to mobilize and demand social recognition.
Conventional sex work research has tended to pathologize women in the sex industry by studying them as victims who lack the ability to make informed decisions about their lives and their work. Radical feminist research in particular has been successful in affecting public discourses, policy debates, and research agendas in this regard. While sex workers themselves contradict and critique conventional social science and radical feminist research, rarely are their voices heard and rarely have they been included in research processes.
Article in the Arch Dis Child doi:10.1136/adc.2009.178715.
Article in in Cult Health Sex. 2010 Oct 19:1.
A report by Crago A-L published by the Open Society Institute. The publication highlights the creative ways in which sex workers in eight countries have organized to defend their human rights and health
STELLA is a Canadian sex worker group that has developed its own code of research ethics for clinical trials on new HIV-prevention and treatment technologies or sero-prevalence studies.
This paper examines the position of prostitutes (and of ex-prostitutes and women seen to behave ‘like prostitutes’) in reported rape trials in Britain, Australia and Canada over the last 150 years. It suggests sex workers suffer a high incidence of sexual assault and asserts that until recently, it was almost impossible for sex workers to seek justice for these crimes. Charges of rape made by sex workers were often not taken seriously by the police and courts.
