It’s getting undeniably tougher to defend SRHR and social justice in 2025. Hungary has enacted the EU’s first ban on Pride. The UK Supreme Court has effectively ruled that transgender women don’t belong in public space. ‘Foreign agents’ laws threaten to suffocate civil society from Georgia to Kazakhstan and beyond. Progressive organisations are losing funding the world over, peaceful protest is increasingly dangerous, and conservative interference is making it nearly impossible to provide comprehensive sexuality education anywhere.
For people and organisations who have not previously been much impacted by the anti-rights backlash, the current struggle against rising regression might seem undesirably novel, an abrupt chill cast by Trump and Putin’s lengthening shadows. For others, it simply represents a continuity of the repressive conditions they have already been surviving for a long time.
On International Sex Workers’ Day, 50 years since the movement-defining occupation of the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon, we recognise that sex workers are part of this latter group. They have always endured surveillance, marginalisation and criminalisation, and they have much to teach the rest of progressive society about resisting authoritarianism.
Globally, sex workers face exclusion from public health systems, violent abuse by police and the destruction of their families. Their digital privacy is routinely invaded. They are denied access to banking services. Their migration status is used as leverage against them, and their professional status is used to deny them residency. Even within many spaces that claim to be feminist, it is seen as too politically risky to come out in support of them publicly and so they are frequently rejected as partners. In short, they endure conditions that echo life under fascist regimes while others enjoy the impression of safety in the same, supposedly functional, democracies.
The rest of the progressive universe should care about this, deeply, first and foremost because sex workers are human beings. Now, though, it is also becoming painfully obvious that what began as the targeted repression of sex workers has expanded into a wider assault on rights and freedoms across other movements. Shadowbanning sex workers on Meta’s platforms paved the way for censorship of LGTBQ+ voices, reproductive health advocates and feminist organisers. Policing sex work in online spaces has helped normalise state intrusion into every corner of our digital lives.
Persistent refusal to acknowledge sex work as work has convinced the public that bodily autonomy and labour rights are in fact conditional, only to be enjoyed by certain groups. This in turn has made us more vulnerable to believing the right-wing fictions that there are good and bad abortions, or that some types of workers don’t deserve health insurance.
None of our fights are separate. They are part of the same political story about whether we get to make decisions about our own bodies and lives. Backlashes against sex worker rights, abortion rights and all other sexual and reproductive rights rest on the same tactics of repression: criminalisation dressed up as protection; narratives of victimhood instrumentalised to justify coercion; and the denial of autonomy and agency, especially for anyone who defies dominant norms.
Many IPPF Member Associations and partners in Europe and Central Asia are therefore seeking to deepen their work alongside sex worker movements, learning from their leadership and recognising our struggles are all interconnected:
- In Poland, sex worker-led groups are connecting people to reproductive care and legal advice;
- In North Macedonia, cross-movement cooperation ensures self-testing for HIV and PrEP distribution are reaching communities the government has abandoned;
- In France and the Netherlands, sex workers are rising to the challenge of reframing public narratives about consent, labour, and dignity;
- And in Norway, broad new coalitions are emerging that unite sex worker rights with labour rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and the truly inclusive kind of feminist organising we need more than ever.
Examples shared at our recent IPPF EN-ESWA regional strategy meeting reaffirm that there are many tangible steps that progressive actors can take, across a broad scale of engagement, to build on this work and offer real solidarity:
- Raise knowledge among staff and leadership on messages from the sex work movement;
- Share available infrastructure, like office premises and phone lines;
- Hire people with lived experience of sex work across all levels, not only in outreach roles;
- Consider serving as fiscal sponsors for unregistered activist groups;
- Offer whatever staff time, training or resources we can to support sex workers to achieve data sovereignty, so they can collect and publish their own evidence about their own lives;
- And at every level, from local service providers to national and regional institutions, do our bit to end the criminalisation and exclusion that undermine sex workers’ health, safety and voice.
It all starts with resisting the easy portrayal of sex workers as passive beneficiaries of care, and instead platforming them as organisers, experts, and co-creators.
In holding the front line before many other actors even noticed the threats encroaching on all of us, sex workers have long since demonstrated solidarity in a way that the rest of the movement for SRHR and social justice now needs to step up and repay. They are targeted because their autonomy threatens the systems we are all working to dismantle - patriarchy, white supremacy, state control over our bodies.
The task now is to make sure we’re in good shape to show up together - by recognising that those most frequently seen as marginal have long been leading the way.
Words by Catherine Bailey Gluckman
when
region
European Network
Subject
Sex Workers
