ANTI-TRAFFICKING POLICY FAILS TO ADDRESS THE NEEDS OF TRAFFICKED PEOPLE AND PREVENTS SEX WORKERS FROM ASSERTING FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

The UK’s anti-trafficking policy is undermining the rights of sex workers, leaving them vulnerable to arrest and conviction or, in the case of migrant workers, detainment and deportation. The UK is also failing to meet its human rights obligations to trafficked persons, particularly men, transgender people and people trafficked into non-sexual labour, says a report by sex worker rights network, x:talk.

The report, Human Rights, Sex Work and the Challenge of Trafficking was released on November 17. It describes how the UK’s anti-trafficking policy has created new crimes around the selling of consensual sexual services between adults and how its implementation has resulted in an increase in arrests and convictions for sex workers and others in the sex industry. The combination of anti-trafficking raids, brothel closures and increased surveillance of the indoor sex industry has caused serious disruptions to sex workers’ working environments and made the industry less safe, especially for migrant sex workers. The report describes the UK anti-trafficking measures as causing “an unprecedented incursion into the lives and work of people employed in the indoor sex industry”.

It finds that many undocumented migrants are unable or unwilling to exercise their rights as workers, or access basic services, such as healthcare. Provisions in the Policing and Crime Act 2009, introduced to combat trafficking, have resulted in a situation where migrant sex workers do not seek redress when they are wronged or abused and are more vulnerable to exploitation and rights abuses.

Ava Caradonna, sex worker and spokeswoman for x:talk, said: “We have always suspected that attempts to address human trafficking have been co-opted by people with another agenda—the eradication of the sex industry. What the x:talk report has highlighted is that, rather than assisting and supporting trafficked people, anti-trafficking policies have been most effective at putting the safety, health and even the lives of sex workers at risk. They have also helped to make sex workers a soft target for the Border Agency.”

Thierry Schaffausser, president of the GMB Sex Workers’ branch said: “The GMB has passed motions to support labour rights for sex workers as the best way to combat human trafficking and migrants’ workers exploitation. Prohibition actually worsens workers’ exploitation and creates the kind of conditions that generate trafficking. Last July, the LGBT TUC Conference also voted a motion calling for labour rights approaches to fight trafficking in the sex industry in the same way we do for all industries.”

x:talk is filing an FOI request for details of the Poppy Project [1], to coincide with the report’s release. The request aims to find out how the Poppy Project have spent more than £9m granted by the government and what support it is provided to trafficked women –information that is not currently publicly available.

Media Contacts:

Ava Caradonna 07914 703 372

Notes:

[1] The Poppy Project is the sole government-funded, dedicated service for women trafficked into sexual exploitation It received £5.8m from the Home Office between April 2006 and February 2009, with a further grant of £3.7m for three years from March 2009. The Poppy Project operates from an avowed abolitionist framework. Support through the project is contingent upon women giving up sex work and its program is aimed at ‘rehabilitating’ women out of the industry. The project has been publicly criticised for conflating the number of people trafficked into sex work in the UK.