As International Sex Workers Day approaches, many will rush to be seen. Statements will be issued, social media tiles shared and a flurry of symbolic visibility will flicker across timelines. But for sex workers on the front lines, skin-deep solidarity does nothing to help them navigate broken health systems, violent law enforcement and exclusionary public policy. <\/p>\n
What makes sex work dangerous are the laws, policies and attitudes that surround it.<\/p>\n
When police wield condoms as evidence, when shelters deny access based on moral judgment, when courts dismiss violence on the basis of occupation, the message is clear: sex workers\u2019 lives matter less.<\/p>\n
This leads to a brutal reality in which sex workers are 17 times more likely to be killed than the rest of the population, according to a The<\/em> Lancet <\/em>review<\/a> of more than 800 studies.The majority of sex workers report that they\u2019ve experienced physical or sexual violence<\/a>, whether it\u2019s at the hands of clients (up to 76%) or from non-paying actors (up to 64%). <\/p>\n What little recourse the broader population may have in law enforcement (as citizens, survivors of abuse, or as workers) is simply not available to sex workers when their jobs are a crime. A number of studies<\/a> show that up to 100% of sex workers have been raped or beaten by the police. <\/p>\n Even worse, police officers often target and extort sex workers. A Serbian sex worker told researchers: \u201c[The officer] pulled out a police badge and said \u2018C\u2019mon, you want me to take you in [to jail] or screw you?\u2019 I was scared, and allowed him to screw me.\u201d<\/p>\n Sex workers are stripped of their dignity day in and day out. They are no more than a legal inconvenience, a public relations liability, a line item in someone else’s report.<\/p>\n This is not a coincidence. It is the result of systemic neglect. <\/p>\n The dangerous politics of protection<\/strong><\/p>\n Human rights violations against sex workers are often masked by the language of public safety.<\/p>\n In many countries, \u201crescue\u201d operations involve rounding up sex workers, jailing them and forcing them into rehabilitation programmes that neither respect their rights nor improve their safety. Such abuses are only strengthened by those in the the anti-trafficking sector who continue to conflate consensual sex work with forced labour. <\/p>\n At the same time, governments refuse to work with sex worker-led organisations as legitimate stakeholders in violence prevention. <\/p>\n The result? Interventions designed in boardrooms instead of communities and funding cycles that prioritise \u201crescue\u201d over rights. <\/p>\n Even in relatively progressive contexts, decriminalisation is debated endlessly while police brutality continues without pause. <\/p>\n Most countries operate under partial criminalisation or vague regulatory frameworks that leave sex workers exposed to violence without legal recourse. These grey zones are not neutral, they\u2019re often lethal.<\/p>\n And in today\u2019s political climate, where anti-rights movements are gaining ground in every region, sex workers are among the first to be targeted, often alongside LGBTQ+ people and migrants. The rollback of hard-won human rights always starts with those who have the least institutional power. And too often, sex workers are treated as expendable.<\/p>\n