Taking small steps: Sensitising the police through male sex workers’ community-led advocacy in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

Kenyan sex worker-led organisations (SWLOs) often play a key role in the national HIV response. Accounts of these organisations frequently focus on their community-led approaches to promote sexual health. This paper addresses sensitisation, an underexplored but significant activity in the political agency of sex workers (SWs). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a male SWLO in Nairobi, we examine how male SWs strategically use their position in the national HIV response to create spaces of police sensitisation. Taking police sensitisation as a manifestation of community-led advocacy and a 'politics of small steps', we examine how SWs respond to, resist and remake the political landscape of police violence. The strategy supports SWs in changing existing power relationships between themselves and the police, albeit within the confines of a criminalising legal system. The analysis of sensitisation practices supports a reimagining of SWLOs that stresses their political agency in the production of new political spaces and expands the focus on African SWLOs beyond HIV work to their political activities, which advance SWs' health, rights and social justice.

Ensuring access to justice: the need for community paralegals to end AIDS by 2030

“…In Kenya, an assessment of a property rights programme for women, which included paralegal support, reported decreased HIV vulnerability [ 21 ]. Additional evaluations of HIV‐related paralegal programmes have found positive results in projects that have worked with men who have sex with men [ 22 ]; sex workers [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]; persons who use drugs [ 27 ]; prisoners [ 17 ]; pregnant women [ 28 ]; and widows [ 17 ]. These findings illustrate how community paralegal programmes can be a key component supporting effective health systems and addressing health risk (Table 2 ).…”

When the Law Fails to Protect: Stigma, Violence and Sex Workers’ Multi-Layered Responses in the Kenyan Cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisii and Meru

“…Reducing violence against sex workers will only be achievable by taking SWLOs' community structures seriously and by incorporating sex workers' expertise, networks and strategies into future interventions (e.g., Woensdregt & Nencel, 2021).…”

“…In the absence of formal protective structures, Kenyan sex workers access support through SWLOs. While these organisations have gained external legitimacy and visibility through HIV-related work (Česnulytė, 2017;Woensdregt & Nencel, 2022), they are strongly involved in activism and advocacy and thus play a political role in Kenyan society (Mgbako, 2016;Woensdregt & Nencel, 2021). In 2018, there were more than 75 community-led sex worker groups aligned with KESWA (interview with representative of KESWA, August 2018).…”

“…Kenyan SWLOs increasingly engage in sensitisation workshops or other types of events, at which sex workers meet potential perpetrators such as police officers, health care workers and people working around the hotspots. During such sensitisation events, sex workers share their experiences with sex work, stigma and violence and raise awareness on the existing climate of impunity for perpetrators (Woensdregt & Nencel, 2021). In Kisii, a woman made the following statement about the effects of sensitising people working around sex workers' hotspots:…”

Making Noise

“…This article is part of a larger ethnographic study (van Stapele et al, 2019;Woensdregt & Nencel, 2022a, 2022b) with a Kenya-based sex worker-led CBO (henceforth 'SWL-CBO'). The indepth interviews at the heart of this article were conducted with 15 professionals working in fundermediaries and who worked directly with the participating CBO in our study.…”