Legalizing and Decriminalizing Sex worker

Myra YT
Discussions & Debates
3 min readJan 6, 2024

Nowadays sex work are still criminalized based on selling sexual service for money. Legalizing sex work would result in the creation of laws, rules, and regulations restricted to the sex industry. Consent adults should have their choice to live. Decriminalizing sex work is the best policy for promoting health and human rights for sex workers, their families, and communities.

Respect human rights and personal dignity, there are many reasons that people have chosen to enter into sex work job. They might have done this job as their main livelihood, temporarily, or for short term revenue. Since we have no idea what they have been through, we have no right to criticize them based on what they do for a living. Sex work should be acknowledge as work, Sex workers must have the fundamental right to work in order to support themselves and their families. Many sex workers throughout the world are still fighting for their human rights. Criminal laws cause sex workers cannot access health care, social service, finance and justice.

Sex workers should receive the access to healthcare. They have a condition in facing a higher HIV buren but they have received less access to healthcare, treated differently compared to others. In New Zealand, following the decriminalization of prostitution in 2003, sex workers exercised greater power to demand safer sex. This has shown the evidence that it makes HIV and sexual health treatments more accessible to them, and it’s linked to extremely high condom usage rates and extremely low STI prevalence. Furthermore, the sex industry has been governed by the same fundamental laws as other industries with regard to occupational health and safety and anti-discrimination protection in decriminalized environments. Prostitution laws need to be changed in a way that promotes, protects, and respects the human rights of sex workers. This is essential to accomplishing public health goals and a requirement to improving the present situation, which will allow sex workers to work without fear of violence or any other risks to their health and safety.

Reducing abuse and violence, and increasing sex worker access to justice is one of the most important factors that should be supported and required laws in order to protect them. In many contexts, rape rates among sex workers are high. For instance, 58 percent of Kenyan sex workers surveyed said they had engaged in compelled sexual encounters. If sex workers are criminalized, they are unlikely to feel comfortable reporting violence against them to the authorities. Criminal law also cause a barrier to access to civil protections, such as restraining orders, to received a treatment, therapy and support after rape and abuse. Decriminalization makes it more difficult for violence against sex workers to go unpunished and eliminates a major barrier to sex workers reporting rape and other crimes.

Legalizing and decriminalizing sex work doesn’t mean that more people would choose this career path due to the fact it is not an easy choice for everyone to take on. It all comes down to human rights: each and every person has the right to make their own decisions, be treated fairly, and be protected by the law. Decriminalising sex workers is the only way to end all of the issues; the government should assist them in getting the justice and treatment that they deserve. In the end, sex workers rights are human rights, it’s based on a basic concept that everyone has the right to be treated equally, fairly, and with respect.

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