Overview and Evidence-Based Recommendations to Address Health and Human Rights Inequities Faced by Sex Workers

Excerpt

This volume uses community case studies and data from around the world to highlight the sustained health and social inequities that sex workers in all of their diversity experience in 2020. Guided by a balanced community–academic partnership, this volume aims to ensure that sex workers’ voices are amplified in describing both challenges and the ways forward. Collectively, the chapters describe an elevated burden of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, drug-related harms, violence and other human rights violations, and significant unmet sexual and reproductive health needs. They also demonstrate that sex workers are not passive recipients of such inequity, but rather actively resist and continue to mobilise to advocate for improved health, safety, and human rights conditions and policy changes. Evidence-based recommendations include sex work decriminalisation, ensuring accessible and sex worker-friendly services, removal of punitive policing and surveillance, community empowerment, and strengthening capacity for community engagement in research, policy, and programmes.