Bethan Jenkins AC/AM Blog

I’VE been meaning to blog about this issue since a fascinating meeting of the cross party group on human rights, which I chair. Our guest speaker that night, Tracey Sagar from Swansea University, talked to us about sex workers and the violence inflicted upon them, and gave us an insight into the lives of women who have fallen below the radar of society.

Tracey’s team have been given support by the Big Lottery Fund to map a four-year project into empowering sex workers, and to reduce community disaffection towards them. There is little known in Wales about this subject, according to Tracey, and so the work they are doing may shape a pan Wales strategy for the future.

To enter the sex work industry is often a conscious decision, but we learned that many women feel forced in to it for lack of any other alternatives. While many sex workers have professional qualifications, many of them are addicted to crack or heroin. Some have been victims of sexual abuse in the past, and the majority of the women Tracey works with have children, deciding to work on the streets as a way out of poverty.

However, getting out of poverty doesn’t seem to be achievable for many of these women at present, as they can’t access services that should be there to help them. That’s why the setting up of Cardiff Sex Forum with third sector organisations, the Police and statutory organisations is important in order for people to acknowledge there is a problem, for street workers to be fast tracked on to support programmes, and to be given sustainable alternatives to working on the street.

Street sex workers tend to work in more isolated ways now: outside normal hours and areas, using mobile phones to fix appointments. They are avoiding the police (as are the kerb crawlers), making them harder to track by outreach workers. All this puts them at even more risk. What was interesting about what Tracey said was that street sex workers are mainly local and therefore part of the community. They are entitled to the same protection afforded to everyone else. But quite often they are targeted and abused by the very community that should be there to support them, with neighbours shouting expletives at them, or physically attacking them.

The protection of sex workers had been mainly overlooked by public policy, including the Welsh Assembly Government’s latest strategy on violence against women, The Right to be Safe. Such strategies only tend to consider women who had been trafficked, or focus on ways out of prostitution. This reinforces the distinction between the deserving and undeserving. There is much more work to be done in this area, if only to ensure that women don’t fall in to the trap of thinking that working on the street will help them. We need to empower current street workers to seek support networks and help, and most importantly educate communities, and organisations lining our high streets that street workers need to same services as everyone else in Wales.