By Marlise Richter, of the African Centre for Migration & Society (Wits University) A criminal justice system under which sex workers are not protected from abuse is unlikely to uphold any human rights. While the Law Commission continues its decade-long hemming and hawing over its recommendations to amend legislation, South Africa’s streets will remain places of rape, murder, bribery…
By Connect Your Rights! The majority of sex workers are women. Many of these women experience physical and psychological abuse - including by the police - in the course of their work. We demand that sex worker rights - which include, among other, the right to privacy and the right to life, liberty and security online - be recognised as…
By Kwanele Sosibo, Mail&Guardian On Klopper Street, near the Rustenburg Magistrate's Court, sex workers ply a brisk trade by night. The women, seemingly oblivious to the prying eyes of strangers, huddle together on the pavement and are casually approached by men. After a brief negotiation, they sidle into the disused buildings flanking parking lots at both ends of the block.…
By Mika Williams, Southern Suburbs Tatler, Independent Newspapers, Cape Town Gender advocacy groups hosted a training session with Woodstock SAPS to reduce the stigma attached to sex work. The Sex Workers' Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), the Women's Legal Centre, the Triangle Project and Gender DynamiX hosted the sensitisation training, at St Agnes Primary School hall, last week. [For the…
By Zara Nicholson, Cape Times POLICE and health-care workers must be trained to deal with sex workers and protect their human rights, MPs said yesterday after a briefing on the plight of women in the sex trade. In a bid to decriminalise the sex trade, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat) yesterday highlighted the effects of the stigma…
By Melissa Turley, of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Sex workers gathered at a meeting in Cape Town say it isn’t the clients they service they are most scared of – it’s the police. Angie de Bruin, a former sex worker turned paralegal and sex worker rights activist, says South African police took her condoms while she was working…
