December 17, Russia will also celebrate the International Day for the Protection of Sex Workers

So, on December 14 in Moscow in the gallery "This is not here" an exhibition of paintings by the former sex worker, and now the artist Marusya Morkovkina, opened.

In addition, sex workers conducted a flash mob under the tag #pravdavzerkale. Its results will be posted on the pages of the SW Forum in social networks and on the YouTube channel on December 17.

The SW Forum is a collegial body created to enable sex workers in Russia to discuss their problems, find ways to solve them and eliminate these problems.

Sex workers, according to the characteristics of their leaders, are capable people who voluntarily provide sexual services for a fee, in agreement with other capable people.

The Forum continues to see its tasks as decriminalizing sex work in Russia, combating violence against people, restricting access to justice and medical care, fighting stigma (derogatory attitudes) against sex workers, preventing and treating HIV and other socially - significant diseases.

It is no secret that, having become a victim of violence, a sex worker has to work hard to get a complaint about a crime, initiate a criminal case, a full-fledged investigation and a fair sentence to the offender.

Violence against sex workers is not a “fight for morality,” but an extreme manifestation of baseless, irrational aggression towards an unprotected group of people. Violence is all the more dangerous because it is hushed up and not investigated, making it unpunished.

By combating violence, sex workers protect the entire society from it. Because when a criminal goes unpunished, he can harm anyone.

But over the past two or three years, the situation has begun to change. More and more sex workers have begun to defend their right to access justice. Here are some of these cases:

- St. Petersburg: a gang was detained for a series of robberies on sex salons;

- Ufa: sex worker rapist and robber sentenced to 2.4 years in prison;

- Kazan: rapists of sex workers sentenced to 7, 5 and 8 years in prison;

- Tyumen: a local crime boss with henchmen arrested for extortion and threats to sex workers;

- Irkutsk: there are trials of a gang of pimps who forced girls into prostitution.

- Moscow: one of the (identified) rapists of a sex worker (the girl remained disabled, miraculously survived), sentenced to 8 years in prison;

- Stavropol: a gang of “cops-hairdressers (brillers) and their patrons from the police were sentenced to real terms of imprisonment;

- Gelendzhik: sex worker rapist sentenced to 5 years in prison;

- Yekaterinburg: a robber who took 50,000 rubles from a sex worker, was sentenced to 3 years' suspended imprisonment;

- Cheboksary: a gang of extortionists who kidnapped and robbed sex workers, sentenced to various terms of actual imprisonment.

However, there are no statistics on how many crimes committed against sex workers have been investigated. No one knows how many people have suffered from undeclared crimes, but it is generally accepted that sex workers are one of the most vulnerable social groups to violence.

In 2019, Forum SW held a face-to-face meeting of activists in Kazan. In 2020, an expanded meeting of the SW Forum was held in Moscow. This year, due to the pandemic situation, a face-to-face meeting is hardly possible, the organizers of the event told the editorial office.