Commercial sex workers (CSWs) are as much at risk from police as from HIV, according to panellists in a community symposium Monday evening.

After an advocate from Hungary described how police broke up a successful CSW organising project, she sought advice from other session members on dealing with such harrassment.

Panelist Carol Jenkins of CARE responded by recalling her work in Papua New Guinea at a time when police were harassing and raping CSWs. "We squeezed them from the sides and the top," she said. They told policemen's wives what their husbands were doing, and they retained a civil rights lawyer to sue police. "And we won," Jenkins concluded.

Co-chair Norma Jean Almodovar, a sex worker in Los Angeles, stressed that CSWs' treatment by clients is not their main problem. "Since the beginning of the epidemic, sex workers have been targeted as purveyors of disease," she told The Bridge. "Research shows that is not the case. Most sex work doesn't take place on the street or involve penetration."

One project involving female CSWs in Moscow found that police brutality, STDs, HIV infection and other factors interact to threaten sex workers' health. Advocate Lucy Platt said the role of police is "highly ambiguous": they may extort sex, or even work as pimps.

Meanwhile, negotiating condom use on the street may be meaningless, since women must go back to a client's apartment for the transaction. There, several other men may be waiting. Doctors aren't much help, either, because they resent CSWs' higher income.

this story can also be found in The Bridge, the onsite print newspaper

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