Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with Sex Workers Implementing Comprehensive HIV/STI Programmes with | Page 29

1 Community Empowerment

1.2.1 Working with communities of sex workers
Community empowerment is a process that takes significant time and effort, especially since in
many contexts sex work is stigmatized and criminalized. Trust, empathy and respect are important
for all partners. Building trust involves treating sex workers with dignity and respect, listening to
and addressing their concerns, and working with them throughout the process of developing and
implementing an intervention. The goal is to cultivate a programme that is eventually run entirely
by sex workers, and where sex worker-led organizations are respected as partners by officials and
service providers in health, law enforcement and social services.

Box 1.1

Meaningful participation
Meaningful participation means that sex workers:
• choose how they are represented, and by whom
• choose how they are engaged in the process
• choose whether to participate
• have an equal voice in how partnerships are managed.

The meaningful participation of sex workers is essential to building trust and establishing relationships
and partnerships that have integrity and are sustainable (see Box 1.1). This may be challenging for
service providers who are more accustomed to establishing the parameters within which services
are provided, and prescribing how relationships or partnerships are to be conducted. As sex workers
and sex worker organizations become more empowered, there will be greater expectations of
power-sharing and power-shifting (see Chapter 6, Section 6.2.8). In the initial stages of community
empowerment, sex workers may have less experience in organizing as a group. National, regional
and global sex worker-led networks are able to provide essential technical assistance and support
(see Chapter 6, Section 6.6). Allies also have an important role in facilitating meaningful participation
of sex workers, with community self-management the shared goal.
Partnerships are crucial but must be built and maintained in a way that does no harm to sex workers.
Social exclusion, punitive laws and the normalization of violence, stigma and discrimination not only
impact the daily lives of sex workers but influence policy-makers and affect the attitudes of officials
and service providers. All partners should share the responsibility for supporting the shift from sex
worker disempowerment to sex worker empowerment. Given that 116 countries criminalize some
aspects of sex work, and the vast majority of countries have other punitive laws that are used against
sex workers, safeguards need to be built into partnerships to ensure that sex workers do not face
a backlash for organizing, do not fear that identifying themselves as sex workers will lead to arrest
and harassment, and do not experience further stigmatization from health-care providers.

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