Complex combinations of law, policy, and enforcement practices determine sex workers vulnerability to HIV and rights abuses. This paper attempts to bring clarity to the discussion concerning the regulation of commercial sex, the rights of sex workers, and reducing vulnerability to HIV among adult female sex workers. Varying combinations of law, policy, and enforcement practices are shown to come together along identifiable themes to determine how sex workers live and work.
Though there is a great deal of literature on the effects of criminalizing sex work, the ways in which other forms of law and practice contribute to shaping the working environments of sex workers in different places is less understood. The consequences of the lack of recognition of the sex worker as a person before the law in many countries are hardly discussed. The absence of recognized legal status—not confined to sex workers—may be the result of the lack of a birth certificate, identity card, voter card, or other means that societies create to recognize individual legal personality, which make it possible to act and make claims in society.
This can mean that the sex worker is deprived of the benefits of citizenship even though they are born the country in which they work. It is suggested that in some places this phenomenon may be as much to blame for many of the deprivations and violations of rights suffered by sex workers as are other more commonly recognized concerns.
Health programs that focus solely on the sexual health of sex workers to the exclusion of this fundamental issue of status may inadvertently reinforce this problem. In this paper, the singular focus on criminal law is extended to consider the many factors that create and reinforce sex worker marginalization and social exclusion. The range of regulatory mechanisms used to govern sex work, enforcement practices, lack of clarity in the language used to describe this, and the claims of sex workers are discussed, as well as the limited steps that have been taken towards seeing the sex worker as a person possessed of at least some rights.
We draw particular attention to the failure, in many places, to recognize sex workers as persons before the law. This means they are unable to make enforceable claims against office holders, employers, and service providers who, as a consequence, are not held accountable to sex workers.
