"You are not alone": sex worker organizing in times of crisis

Published on 8 December 2020

Lees dit artikel in het Nederlands.

As the second wave of corona infections washes over the Netherlands, sex workers are still recovering from the silent disaster that unfolded earlier this year. Even though this group of professionals had to stop working longer than other people with 'contact professions', most prostitutes were excluded from financial emergency support. Without enough income to pay the rent, debt builds up and some people are losing their homes. However, sex workers who continued to work independently to prevent this from happening were actively tracked down and punished.

The Netherlands is not unique in this. Amnesty International reports that sex workers worldwide have been excluded from emergency aid and governments impose stricter measures on sex workers than on other citizens. The pandemic is used to implement repressive prostitution policies and police violence against sex workers is on the rise. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) reported an increase in police raids at sex workers' homes and workplaces, arrests, forced medical tests and (threat of) deportation.

Arrest instead of aid: the Sex Work Regulation Act and The Swedish Model

Meanwhile, the Dutch government is trying to further criminalize sex work through the Wet Regulatie Sekswerk (WRS), which translates to "Sex Work Regulation Act". This law proposal is modeled after "Swedish Model" laws, a type of legislation that doesn't regulate prostitution as work but as violence. People who live or work together with sex workers can be punishable under this law as 'accessories to violence'. In this way, business contacts, colleagues, customers, landlords partners, roommates, and sex worker organizations are criminalised.

However, in countries that have adopted this conservative legislation, is the new regulations are mostly used against sex workers themselves. For example, young migrant sex workers are being deported in Ireland for allegedly 'pimping' each other. Amnesty International has written about women in Norway who were raped, and were deported after reporting the incident to the police. Also in Norway, landlords were forced to evict sex workers during a police action called 'Operation Homeless'. This outlaw status of sex workers has led to a shocking increase in violence against sex workers in all countries that have introduced these kind of laws.

The WRS follows the same approach but also directly criminalizes workers themselves. There is a possible exception: sex workers can choose to be inspected by a government official and registered in a government database. If they are 'approved' (the criteria for approval are still unclear), they are allowed to work at licensed brothels or escort agencies. Municipalities are allowed to completely refuse local permits for these businesses (a policy choice that, although illegal, has already been implemented in most municipalities).

Interview with Dinah Bons: "You want to protect each other:

In short; the sex worker community is in crisis. The first wave of corona infections had a devastating impact. The second wave is now emerging and the threat of further criminalization is increasing.

Sex workers are responding - both here and worldwide - to this overwhelming setback by organizing their communities; people get together to care for each other when systems fail. Our communities have established emergency funds, strengthened mutual aid networks and are taking political action during this crisis against harmful proposals and for equal treatment.

To better understand how sex workers are dealing with the crisis and how sex workers are taking joint action, I spoke with Dinah Bons. Dinah is a local organizer in Amsterdam and Paris and a board member at sex worker organizations ICRSE (Europe) and NSWP (worldwide). She is also active at Trans United Netherlands and she is one of the founders of Trans United Europe, the European, sex worker-led trans BPOC network.

Your CV is very impressive! When did you start community organizing?

In 1991, in New York, at ACT-UP. In Manhattan, where ACT-UP began, people would come together to represent the streets where they worked or lived. We were the Black and Hispanic Youth Group of Christopher Street. We worked on the pier and on Westside Highway. Our first action was a sit-in at the hospice in the street. People from the community considered it a scary place but it was right next to where people cruised and worked. We wanted to make clear that we are all one community. After that, we organized and supported all kinds of street actions and demos. Also blockades, marches ...

Wow, that's almost 30 years of activism.

Sometimes people ask: “when did you start sex work?” I am now fifty and around the age of 17 I had my first customer, so yes, that is quite some time! And that community of sex workers around me, that has always been there. It has been different at different stages of my life, but sex work has always played a role. Also because, if you are a person of color and LGBT, especially gay, and you look nice of course, people quickly pick up on that. When you go out clubbing but honestly, that happens everywhere. Even later, even when I had a job and I was financially okay. That always kept happening.

Has the work changed during that time?

Oh, well I've worked in a time before the Internet! I'd use specific codes in street-based work, like using clothes and a certain type of body language. In certain places in New York you'd know that if someone would walk there, it's for that. Even people you'd usually have to be afraid of like the police, for example. If they were there, alone, then you didn't have to worry about being arrested. It's a way of interacting, using certain codes everyone relies on. Acting in this way? Standing there like that? Then you know, this is a worker, that is a client. Without the outside world realizing what's going on. Pretty clever, actually!

You really have to trust each other for that to work.

Definitely. That's one of the reasons why a strong sex worker community is so essential. If you work in a certain segment, your niche or your corner, you want a good relationship with the people who are there. You wish good things just as much for someone else as you do for yourself, you want to protect each other. That's how it works, at least for me. I've really learned that from doing street work where you are so dependent on each other. You are each other's eyes and ears. Together you ensure that you have good customers who know that they shouldn't try anything because they would get a reputation as a bad client. You really are each other's family, it is about safety but also about food, or housing, or fashion tips, you name it. These friendships have a major impact on your safety and your economic situation. It is very important that you know that you are not alone.

The pandemic

From the beginning, Corona-related measures and policing in the Netherlands have honed in on sex workers. For example, the city of Amsterdam warns sex workers via WhatsApp that the sex work ban is being actively enforced. Police in The Hague, also via WhatsApp messages, ask sex workers to take their (legal) advertisements offline and advises them to contact aid organizations to apply for benefits and "returning to your country of origin". While other "contact professions" such as hairdressers and nail salon studios were allowed to resume in May, sex workers were told that their work would be forbidden until September 1st.

Police still organize raids at the workplaces and homes of sex workers by posing as clients. When sex workers agree to meeting up, their place of work is searched by specialized police teams. These house raids lead to hefty fines and sometimes evictions for sex workers. While this policy of tracking down and punishing prostitutes was already popular municipal policy, it did not have a legal basis before the epidemic. After all, prostitution is - under normal circumstances - not a criminal activity.

What was it like for you when the pandemic started here?

The first thing I noticed was the closing of borders and the restrictions on the freedom to move. Then, the ban on sex work and how that immediately impacted everyone. Whether you are in high end escort or work in a club or on the street, it did not matter. The possibility to simply do your work, out in the open - to earn money! - was gone for everyone. Bam.

There was also a strain on people without papers and people who don't work in a way that's completely legal or official. You could feel tension at institutions like police and the public prosecutor's department (Openbaar Ministerie). I also had to think about my health, of course. What if I ended up in the ICU, in my case as a woman of color, trans, with HIV. And many people are in the same boat as I am, sex workers as well as disabled people.

Practical and political action

Sex workers in the Netherlands quickly took action in response to the situation. Sex worker group Liberty The Hague sets up an emergency fund, action group SAVE (Sex workers Against Violence & Exploitation) starts a helpline for social support. In collaboration with supportive social workers, sex workers lobbied for access to emergency financial support. Organizations affiliated with sex work also presented a work protocol in addition to the usual hygiene guidelines for the industry.

Abroad, sex workers also take action remarkably fast. One of the European organizations who does so is ICRSE, the organization where Dinah Bons is a board member. ICRSE supports local and national initiatives, conducts research, and campaigns to protect the rights of sex workers during the crisis.

What made that quick response possible? Have you seen the pandemic coming for some time? Or did ICRSE simply have all the necessary tools available?

Both, I think. Look, ICRSE is a European network. We consist of sex workers from different corners of both the region and the community. That gives you a certain capacity. Then you'll notice, hey, something is going on in Europe and it has to do with increased criminalization of sex workers, Swedish Model thinking, with gender backlash, with restrictions on the rights of LGBTQI + people and with a shift to right-wing politics.

That message also came through very strongly when we held a conference last year with many sex worker organizations; we might not know what exactly, but something might happen that makes it necessary for us to work very closely together. Something that makes us want to pay close attention to political allies and human rights allies. Something to do with that sense of tightening you can already feel.

So, we started to set out a plan with our team. We were already working on that for Covid. That's why we were able to get up and running really fast when the pandemic started, I think, I think it's great you could see that.

It's impressive.

But in the area of emergency funds, you were very quick to start the Dutch Emergency Fund. I thought it was great to see that the Hiv Vereniging immediately wanted to support it as a financial sponsor. That encouraged me to set up an emergency fund in Paris as well. There, we were able to distribute food and provide financial support through a queer bar. It is always complicated when sex workers deal with money because people immediately think of pimping, money laundering… You really need the help of allies.

Ha, I was only quick because I had been learning from groups like Lysistrata for some time. And because of support from organizations such as Trans United Europe!

Right, that's exactly what we're talking about! To have a network and community that is so vibrant and resilient that you can work that way. You can get the info, gather people around you and then you can go! It is really nice to see that we can achieve things like that, despite all the misery.

Working at the intersection

ICRSE and SWAN published a research report about the impact of Covid-19 on sex workers. In addition to facing hunger, loss of housing and debts due to loss of income, sex workers are facing issues in accessing to healthcare services and medication, migration and travel, and safety. Increased policing especially impacts undocumented colleagues; some people can't leave their home out of fear of deportation.

Your research shows that single mothers, trans people, migrants and refugees in particular have continued to work out of financial need. Can you elaborate on why that is? Do you see this reflected in the Dutch context?

Based on what I've seen in the Netherlands recently, I see that the communities where people have the least privileges and can experience the most forms of exclusion, there's an entanglement with institutional racism and intersectional injustice.

For example, women who don't fit society's standards of respectability, like unmarried mothers. When you escape that type of patriarchal structure, or you can't fit in, or you don't want to participate in it. That's when you are in a corner that gets hit the hardest, where there's less access to a certain economic comfort, I think.

The poverty threshold is also a leading factor. If you could hardly make ends meet before the pandemic, then you are in trouble right now. That also has an impact on where you live, how you’re able to present yourself. And, in our profession, on how you work and where you can work.

Furthermore - I am glad that there is more and more room for this in activist minds - there is a problem with race in Europe. There. Period. Including in the sex worker movement and in the LGBT movement. It is great, how much work we're all doing together but that subject is still difficult to discuss.

Still?

Yes. If you look intersectionally at who is impacted most right now, you can almost do a tick-box exercise: you're a woman, you are trans, you do not fit into that patriarchal mold. You have fewer opportunities on the labor market, your housing is a struggle, relationships are a struggle, et cetera. And then there's the axis of skin color, which institutions respond to in an extreme manner.

If a person of color runs fast on the street, or the lock to your bike doesn't open immediately and you're fumbling with it, you'll be approached more quickly by neighbours, or a police officer walking by. That whole story, that is something that is always an extra layer of complexity that sex workers of color have to navigate in their work. In other words, when you get a client, you might think, oh, he likes me, that's nice. Or you know right away, that jerk is just here to vent his racist crap and I'll just have to deal with that because I need the money, you know what I mean? If you are a sex worker of color, you really understand that. It is something we have always dealt with in our work. That is something that is now given a bit more space, we can talk about that more.

But racism in the movement itself? If you bring it up, it's seen as an attack. "We are not racist", "you're being negative...", that's the kind of response you often get. We all want to be inclusive in what we do. Excluding people, that's not why we're in this, right? But in the Netherlands, I don't see any representation of black and brown sex workers while, when I look around me… There are many!

It is a difficult topic to discuss because there's a lot of painful stuff there we still can't properly unpack yet; That racism affects us all, that everyone is part of a racist system, including people of color. That it is simply a pitfall that we all have. Everyone has racist ideas.

The question we have to ask ourselves is: How can we empower ourselves in such a way that we can open up these structures that we have built - and that are very good - so they offer the space needed to involve people, so that they feel safe, that they feel at home.

For example, at ICRSE we talked a lot with PICUM, a migrant organization of people without papers. That organization isn't focused on sex worker rights, they are focused on other things. But when we talk and try to explain that we belong together, that sex workers also came here with migration flows, then you find each other

That's what you want to do. Also, for example, with people living below the poverty threshold and their organizations. You always have to make that connection, in your own organizations and groups. Only if you can be that inclusive in your own community, your community is open. Then, you'll have the reach you want, for the movement you want to be.

It strikes me how loud and clear the solidarity and cooperation is between sex worker-led groups and Black Lives Matter organizing in the United States.

And elsewhere!

Yes! And certainly in recent months. Many non-sex workers ask about it, they don't understand. How do you explain it.

We already talked about how racism can be a difficult topic in the sex work community. But now that there is such a clear link between police, violence and a community targeted by the police? Then sex workers feel, even white sex workers; this resonates with our own experience. We deal with the same system. Wherever you work, there is always that power instructed to detect and eliminate.

I think it is good that people stood up quickly in the BPOC community and in the trans sex worker community, saying; we haven't been welcome in the Black community. And now that we're, say, getting targeted so heavily as an oppressed community? If you don't get inclusive, if you don't include trans rights and sex worker rights in Black Lives Matter, then that whole BLM is bullshit, too.

That woke people up very quickly. Within the movement in, for example, New York, but also in England, in Belgium, and in the Netherlands. People spoke up out of their background as trans people of color, from sex worker-inclusive organizations and sex worker-led organizations, stating: you can't do this discussion without our support.

The people speaking up are those who have always done that, especially in those spaces that are, well... Sometimes it has been very proper, those Black movements and the migrant movements.

Huh? Proper?

Very heteronormative, blessings all over the place! That's something that's part of us because of colonialism, but we're decolonizing now. That includes decolonizing morality and sexuality. That's also something that's been taken away from us by Christianization and colonization.

There's still a lot of nonsense, but now there are also people who say: if we want to be authentic and real, we must also embrace these people. Like women who work hard, raising six children, and who do sex work next to a full-time job. We always knew that happens but we never talked about it because you're not supposed to. But now you see that those people are targeted harshly by the police, by the municipality, by health workers, and so on, and we don't accept that anymore. I think that's it.

Covid played a part in how quickly this developed. You're constantly together in your living rooms, not physically but on the speaker, from early morning to late at night. Organizing, talking, talking, talking. That makes everything flow very quickly. Also to the patriarchal, Black, organizers.

The pandemic has quite an impact on our movements.

It makes us communicate faster, more online and more across borders. We exchange information and connect people more quickly. I really consider that something special. There's also less room for embarrassment? There is danger, right now, so let's go, bam. You can see that kind of resilience all over.

But there is also the other extreme end of the spectrum. I have never had so much hatemail and similar misery as I've had recently. That's something you see all over, as well.

Does it put a halt on some types of organising work as well?

Yes. Financial work, the providers of funds are more careful, including funders that normally want to support sex workers. And work on the decriminalization of sex work.

The movements behind all repressive legislation have also started to accelerate. They're moving at top speed. All those, say, right-wing movements. You see it in the field of women's rights and LGBTQI + rights, especially trans rights. Hungary fell down, in Romania things are going badly, in the UK… It starts everywhere now. That too has started to flow faster and has been given more space.

Work in that area is also a bit on hold for us, I think. Everyone is so concerned with securing basic needs - surviving, not getting sick, being able to work again, not being able to work... These kinds of processes rush by us very quickly. But these things will have a huge impact on all of us, of course, especially sex workers. Very few people have proper policy knowledge about this. I think that's a dangerous thing.

What do sex workers need during this health crisis?

Equal treatment. That also means that if hairdressers, masseurs and other people with contact professions are allowed to carry out their trade, sex workers must be given the same space. Obviously taking extra care for the health of yourself and your customers.

Many people now realize for the first time that sex workers suffer from stigma and discrimination. I hear more and more people ask: how can I support sex workers? What can I do? What would be your advice to them?

If someone asks this question, they are already making a connection. They are reaching out. That is wonderful. That means someone already understands, in some way, what it is like to fight against "how it should be", against imposed rules and standards. First and foremost, we need allies that fight for the same kind of issues in their own field. We need people who understand how all these issues we work on are connected. That is really important.

Hella Dee

Hella Dee is a brothel whore, the founder of Dutch Emergency Fund. Her favourite unhealthy coping mechanism is Twitter.