This means providing real equal protection under the law--including civil liberties--for all sex workers. Eastern Europe's Sex Workers Rights Advocacy Network (SWAN) has also provided a minimal framework for this idea with its Founding Principles:
SWAN Founding Principles
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We understand sex work as the unforced sale of sexual services for money or goods between consenting adults. Sex work includes street prostitution, escort services, telephone sex services, pornography, exotic dancing among others.
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Sex workers are human beings who have the same human rights as any other person. Sex workers should have the same rights and responsibilities as all other workers, and as every other citizen and resident of a nation.
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Protection of the rights of sex workers is crucial for the effective reduction of harmful illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B and others STIs, and the efforts at prevention and treatment of these illnesses at all levels-individual, community and national. To ensure protection of these rights, sex workers should be able to work legally. [Author's Note: Bruce Lambert, "AIDS in Prostitutes, Not as Prevalent as Believed, Studies Find;" (New York Times, September 20, 1988). Numerous sources in the U.S. confirm the fact that prostitutes do not spread AIDS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, 1993; 5(no. 3): pp. 7, 11, 17. 123 of 202,665 adult and adolescent males diagnosed with AIDS since 1981 denied any risk factor but sex with a female prostitute, or 0.04% (that's 4/100 of 1%) of adult/adolescent males diagnosed with AIDS. From " Prostitution in the United States; The Statistics. "]
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Barriers preventing access to health, social, and drug treatment services need to be removed to improve the situation, quality of life, health and social well-being of all sex workers.
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Activities related to sex work between consenting adults should be decriminalized. All national criminal laws relating to adult prostitution must be repealed. All regional and local laws and regulations targeting sex workers to prosecute the practice of their trade must be repealed.
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Sex workers together with other community members should have an active role in designing commercial regulations of the sex trade.
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Targeted, pragmatic, and comprehensive social programs must be developed in consultation with sex workers and implemented to improve relations between the police and sex workers as well as between sex workers and the community at large.
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Targeted, pragmatic, and comprehensive social programs must be developed and implemented with the involvement of sex workers to raise awareness about safer sex, safer drug use, and HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and support.
I think that the best way to empower and protect sex workers is to create unions--with health and pension plans--for the sex workers ( Industrial Relations Journal 38:1, 70--88 ISSN 0019-8692).
I do not think that sex workers should be required to join this union. But I do think that if you make it so advantageous for the sex worker to join the union--obstetrics/gynecological, blood screening, and other health care benefits for a small co-payment; union cards with the professional sex provider's last blood test result date for fastidious customers; child care; drug rehab, social and educational services, including those for battered women; political action committees to keep police and politicians honest, and provide sex workers with a united voice; legal services for use against exploitive club or brothel owners. The sex workers' union must not act as a super-pimp: the union does not command, it serves. If you make joining the union sufficiently advantageous--and relatively inexpensive--you will see large percentages of sex workers joining the union out of simple self-interest.
One of the areas where the union should be involved would be helping with zoning and other regulation, for areas where certain types of sex work can take place without causing "problems" for the general public. For example, we probably don't want streetwalkers plying their trade in front of public schools, or a brothel next door to a children's playground. Some degree of regulated decorum and restraint should be established in order to--in the words of science fiction fandom--"not freak out the mundanes." (See International Union Rights: Journal of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights; Volume 12, Issue 4, 2005; ISSN 1018-5908, for more on this subject.)
I am not nor have I ever been a sex worker in any sense of the word. Thus, any opinion I have about the subject is at best not fully informed. However, some sex workers I have known fairly well--exotic dancers--with whom I have broached the subject of a union for protection from predatory (both monetarily and otherwise) club owners, and benefits like health insurance and child care, thought it was a marvelous idea.
The largest problem that faces sex workers in terms of demanding equal protection under the law, as well as an end to persecution by society as a whole, is that there is strength in numbers, and that sex workers of every description need to organize on a large scale, across a broad spectrum of sex work, for it to work. The suspicion that too often exists between exotic dancers and professional sex providers must be overcome. A union needs to be created to start the ball rolling for decriminalization and the other necessary prep work to establish this new system.
As I said before, due to the social safety net provided by the New Deal and the Great Society, we have reduced the need for women to use prostitution as a full time profession. One source gives the number as four percent of the nation's women at the time of our country's founding (Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, PhD.; One Nation Under Sex; 2011; p. 5). This number has fallen to between two-tenths and three-tenths of one percent today .
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