Improving Laws and Policies to Protect Sex Workers and Promote Health and Wellbeing

"This research found that • Legal and policy reforms are needed to improve the health and wellbeing for sex workers. • DC prostitution laws are not successful at stopping sex work because people rely on sex work for survival and for access to money, housing, and other necessities. • Harassment, violence, and coercion by the police and others in the community against sex workers are facilitated – indeed, encouraged – because sex workers are criminalized. • Sex work is different from trafficking, but criminalization of sex work allows exploiters to use the threat of arrest to control and traffic their victims. • DC laws stigmatize sex workers, and stigma creates barriers to accessing HIV care and prevention, regular medical care, community programs, and other services. These barriers act to trap sex workers in cycles of poverty and homelessness...."