Written and interviewed by Tenzin Dolker
Edited by Muna Gurung
Illustrations by Priyanka Singh Maharjan

AWID and the Red Umbrella Fund are organizing a teach-in on feminism and sex work.

This report shares highlights from the four recipients of AWID’s “Innovation Seed Initiatives” whose projects focused on advancing the rights of sex workers.

Against bleak ghosts of familiar urban landscape and CCTV cameras labelled “for your protection” the news on the radio skits between weather forecast, rationing, raids, a special public appearance by the queen, politicians promising increased production and London quarantine zones to be avoided “for reasons of health and safety”.

- Impressions from V for Vendetta, 1982

On 24 May 2017, the divisional court in Ankara overturned a conviction for sexual assault of human rights defender, Kemal Ördek. Instead the three perpetrators were sentenced to seven years and six months imprisonment for the charge of ‘aggravated burglary.’ The man previously convicted and sentenced for the sexual assault was acquitted.

The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) joins with sex worker rights organizations around the world in calling for the voices and perspectives of sex workers to be heard by the European Parliament when they vote on 26 February 2014 on the recommendation of the European Parliament’s Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Committee (FEMM) to criminalize the clients of sex workers.

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AWID institutional member since 2014, SZEXE was established by predominantly street-based Roma sex workers and their allies who joined together to protest the introduction of a law regulating sex work.