Sex work plays a crucial educative capacity. Sex workers share tips and information on safer sex, sex and gender diversity, negotiation, boundaries and consent. We share these skills with other workers, clients, and the wider Australian community on a daily basis. In a range of capacities, sex work – including escorting, stripping, BDSM and pornography – involves interaction, transference of expertise, and sharing our voices. Sex work gives clients access to an important diversity of bodies, abilities, sexual practices, gender identities and intimacies.
For this reason sex workers often refer to themselves as the safer sex educators of Australia. Research in Australia – from the UNSW Law and Sex Worker Health Study, the Kirby Institute and Roberta Perkins – consistently demonstrates that sex workers have uniquely high rates of condom use, high rates of testing, and lower rates of STIs and HIV than the general population. Both Australia’s National HIV and STI Strategies note that the incidence of HIV/STIs in sex workers in Australia is among the lowest in the world. Sex workers have been at the forefront of the Australian response to HIV, enjoyed longstanding partnerships with governments and community sectors, and continue to engage in health promotion activities through peer education, outreach and safer sex practices.
Sex workers continue this work despite stringent and discriminatory legislative environments that actively hinder health promotion. In various states and territories, sex workers face mandatory STI testing, HIV positive sex workers are criminalised, and anti-discrimination protection is non-existent or ineffective. Peer education is underfunded and under-resourced. Policing practices (including harassment and entrapment) are in opposition to public health objectives. This presentation outlines the ways in which sex workers make up for the deficiencies of the state by acting as pivotal agents in health promotion and sex education in Australia.
