Above image: Sex workers from an income generating collective that provides catering serving lunch at a police training workshop on HIV in Ethiopia. The NGO Timret Le Howit has consistently bought sex workers and police together for training and community events resulting in reduced violence and much better conditions for women (Photo Timret Le Howit).
Sex Workers, Empowerment and Poverty Alleviation in Ethiopia (Cheryl Overs)
This case study explores economic, legal and social issues that affect sex workers, with a particular focus on the role of poverty in sex workers’ lives and the potential for poverty alleviation policies and programmes to help lift as many sex workers as possible out of poverty in order to reduce the exploitation, illness and violence associated with their work.
In surveys, sex workers overwhelmingly indicate they would like another occupation, particularly in very poor countries. This has been taken to mean that relieving the poverty of individual sex workers will lead them to stop or reduce sex work. On this analysis, reduced poverty will mean that the number of women entering the sex industry, or staying in it, will be reduced and/or that the harm associated with sex work would be diminished because the numbers of partners or of unprotected sexual contacts would reduce. However, the validity of this logic and the benefits, costs and consequences (intended and unintended) of poverty alleviation in the context of sex work have not been tested or even well documented.
Excerpt from the report about police:
Participants in each group [of sex workers] were unanimous that police usually ignore sex workers. In all sites, police visit bars and other places of prostitution as customers relatively openly, and sometimes even in uniform. No participant in any of the groups reported any personal experience, or knew of a sex worker or other person involved in the sex industry having been charged with a prostitution-related offence. Participants in the Addis Ababa group said that crackdowns against street sex workers do occur, usually associated with key dates in the government calendar such as meetings of the African Union or elections. Even then, the police mainly move women on rather than arrest them.
There was strong agreement in all groups that bribes are not paid to police in order to escape arrest, as has been reported in many other countries (Family Health International 2002). Exceptions to this were mentioned in two Addis Ababa groups in which women cited payments as low as 30p to local police which may be seen more as a tip than a bribe to avoid arrest. (This contrasts markedly with the findings of a similar study in this series in Cambodia (Overs 2013), as well as other literature on sex work (see website of Network of Sex Work Projects, www.nswp.org).
Click here to read the full report
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