This presentation on the crucial importance of decriminalising sex work was given by Janelle Fawkes, Chief Executive Officer, Scarlet Alliance (Australian Sex Workers Association), at the AFAO Members Forum – May 2015.

1. Too hot to measure: the indicators
don’t include sex workers
Janelle Fawkes,
Chief Executive Officer
AFAO Conference Sydney
15th May, 2015

2. Indicator gaps
• No human rights indicators
• No stigma and discrimination indicators that
cover key issues for sex workers
• No indicators that measure enabling vs
disenabling legal environments
• No indicators that measure ‘maintaining low
rates’ rather than ‘reducing’ HIV and STIs
• No indicators that demonstrate the impact of
criminalisation

3. So much evidence

4. Executive Summary
With heightened risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted
infections, sex workers face substantial barriers in accessing
prevention, treatment, and care services, largely because of
stigma, discrimination, and criminalisation in the societies in
which they live.
These social, legal, and economic injustices contribute to their
high risk of acquiring HIV. Sex workers remain underserved by
the global HIV response.
This Series of seven papers aims to investigate the complex issues
faced by sex workers worldwide, and calls for the
decriminalisation of sex work, in the global effort to tackle
the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The Lancet: Special Edition on HIV and Sex Work

5. The Lancet: Special Edition on HIV and Sex Work
Launched at AIDS2014, the series examined the enablers and
barriers to preventing and treating HIV infection in high, middle
and low income countries with varying rates of HIV among sex
workers.
The findings were consistent across all settings.
decriminalisation and
community-led interventions

6. Findings:
Decriminalisation of sex work could have the largest
effect on the course of the HIV epidemic, averting
33–46% of incident infections over the next decade
through combined effects on violence, police
harassment, safer work environments, and HIV
transmission pathways.
Scale up of ARTs would avert HIV infection by 9–34% in
contrast to the 33–46% reduction achieved by
decriminalising sex work alone.
The Lancet: Special Edition on HIV and Sex Work

7. Over 100 sex workers from 30 countries attending the AIDS 2014
Sex Worker pre-conference contributed to sex worker consensus
statement on biomedical developments:
• ‘Current and existing implementations of biomedical approaches are
doomed to fail because they don’t take into account discriminatory legal
frame works that create barriers for sex workers.’
• ‘Legal barriers for sex workers are still so significant that unless we resolve
those issues first, through the full decriminalisation of sex work, test and
treat or treatment as prevention are abstract concepts that have no
meaning for sex workers... but will divert resources away from approaches
that we know work’.

8. Decriminalisation not...

9. Legalisation vs. Decriminalisation
• Decriminalisation of sex work is the removal of all laws
specific to sex work. Laws relating to sexual assault and
violence, workplace safety regulations, age of consent, public
nuisance, etc all remain in place and are equally applicable to
all people. Police are removed as the regulators of the
industry.
• Legalisation includes making specific laws that govern how
sex work can occur legally (usually in very narrow contexts –
often with harsh penalties for non-compliance). Legalisation is
often a means of controlling or containing the sex industry,
and usually has the aim of ‘protecting society’ rather than
being in the best interests of sex workers. It results in a
licensing model.