Publications & Tools

OpenDemocracy has a wide range of argicles and reports on Sex Work within its Beyond Trafficking and Slavery Channel

“Hacking//Hustling used a participatory action research model to gather quantitative and qualitative data regarding the impact of the removal of Backpage and the passage of FOSTA-SESTA on two groups of sex workers: those who work online, and primarily street-based sex workers who have limited access to technology. The results of our online survey (98 participants) and street-based survey (38 participants) indicate that the removal of Backpage and FOSTA-SESTA have had detrimental effects on online workers? financial stability, safety, access to community, and health outcomes.” Advised by Naomi Lauren at WCIIA (our Grantee-Partner).

A reference brief by OSF that “aims to clarify terms and illustrate examples of alternatives to the use of criminal law as a response to sex work.”

2022 report “Myth-Busting the Swedish Model: The Evidence Debunking 10 Key Claims of Client Criminalisation” which find that “the benefits of the Swedish model by its proponents are not supported by the evidence. Sex workers are not decriminalised – a finding corroborated by an Amnesty International report on the situation in Ireland – and there have been rises in cases of human trafficking, with victims of this trade made even more vulnerable within a system of criminalisation.” This finding is supported Swedish sex worker-led organisation Fuckf?rbundet (member of ESWA and NSWP) in their 2019 report Twenty Years of Failing Sex Workers.

This Policy Brief was developed in collaboration with Accountability International and funded by Ford Foundation. It provides an overview of issues impacting decriminalisation of sex work across multiple regions in Africa.

Amnesty International’s Policy on State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers. “This policy has been developed in recognition of the high rates of human rights abuses experienced globally by individuals who engage in sex work; a term that Amnesty International uses only in regard to consensual exchanges between adults. It identifies the most prominent barriers to the realization of sex workers? human rights and underlines states’ obligations to address them.”

Published in 2019 on World AIDS Day (1 December) – author LaLa B Holston-Zannell (Trans Justice Campaign Manager) addresses the intersection between transgender rights, neding HIV transmission, and decriminalizing sex work.

Amnesty International published its policy on protecting sex workers in 2015 and in 2016 published this research summary. “The policy calls on governments to take several critical steps to protect the human rights of sex workers, including: decriminalize consensual sex work, ensure that sex workers are protected from harm, exploitation and coercion; include sex workers in the development of laws that affect their lives and safety; and end discrimination and provide access to education and employment options for all.”

This joint briefing paper by NSWP and INPUD highlights the specific needs and rights of sex workers who use drugs, as a community that spans two key populations. This document provides an overview of some of the most endemic and substantive ways in which sex workers who use drugs face double criminalisation and associated police harassment, intersectional stigma, compounded marginalisation and social exclusion, heightened interference and harassment from healthcare and other service providers, infantilisation, pathologisation, and an associated undermining of agency, choice, and self-determination. A Community Guide is also available.

A primer on sex work developed by OSF in 2015.

“Human Rights Watch has conducted research on sex work around the world, including in Cambodia, China, Tanzania, the United States, and most recently, South Africa. The research, including extensive consultations with sex workers and organizations that work on the issue, has shaped the Human Rights Watch policy on sex work: Human Rights Watch supports the full decriminalization of consensual adult sex work.”