Access Denied: Sex Worker Health and Well-Being in the Context of Criminalization

Abstract

This chapter is based on findings from a study funded by HIV Ireland, in collaboration with the Sex Workers’ Alliance of Ireland (SWAI) focusing on the impact of the recent sex purchase ban on sex workers’ health and well-being in the Republic of Ireland. Through a participative framework, employing peer led focus groups, this study explores how sex workers in Ireland are navigating their health and well-being within a restrictive legal environment. This research positions sex workers as experts in their own lives, challenging dominant discourses which discredit sex workers’ realities when they trouble abolitionist frameworks. This chapter reports on key findings emerging from sex worker voices collected in this study including impacts of sex working laws on health, safety, well-being and access to justice and indicates recommendations for rights based and inclusive policy for sex workers.

Beyond marginalisation: The changing dynamics of communication post‐COVID‐19among the female sex workers of Kolkata

“…I also want to point out that sex work is considered to be a criminal activity in many countries (Harcourt & Donovan, 2005), and this contributes to a situation whereby sex workers are forced to work in risky environments and are easily exploited and abused (Munro & Scoular, 2012; Vanwesenbeeck, 2017). The concept of criminalisation increases the experience of exclusion and tags the individuals as deviants, making it hard for sex workers to seek legal protection or any other form of healthcare services (Cameron et al, 2021; McGarry et al, 2021).…”

‘I miss being honest’: sex workers’ accounts of silence and disclosure with health care providers in Ireland

“…colonialism, globalisation) inflicting injury upon more vulnerable populations. Indeed, for sex workers, regimes of criminalisation, poverty, racism and sexual stigma become institutionalised as everyday violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004) and structural violence becomes internalised as a symbolic violence, regarded as both natural and inevitable (see McGarry and Ryan 2020). Grenfell, Platt, and Stevenson (2018, 104) argue that challenging the inequalities that shape sex workers' health requires a 'fundamental shift [ … ] in power relations that institutionalise, legitimise and normalise suffering and inequalities.…”