Decrim now world news digest for april 2024

Parliamentary committee accepts framework to decriminalise sex work in Qld

Australia, Brisbane

April 12, 2024

A report examining the proposed legal framework to decriminalise sex work and improve the health, safety and rights of workers has recommended legislation to be passed.

A landmark review by the Queensland Law Reform Commission (QLRC) last year made 47 recommendations to decriminalise sex work, including removing the Queensland’s brothel licensing system, changing planning laws to allow brothels to operate away from industrial areas, adding protections for sex workers and repealing sex work specific health offences.

The legislation was referred to a parliamentary committee for consideration, with stakeholders and advocates submitting to the inquiry ahead of a final report, released on Friday, April 12.

After careful deliberation, the committee accepted the bulk of the draft legislation and recommended it be passed.

While the decriminalisation framework has been widely supported by peak organisations in the sex work, health and human rights space, there was opposition throughout the inquiry, including from the Queensland Hotels Association, the Office of the Prostitution Licensing Authority and The Australian Christian Lobby.

The decriminalisation framework will allow sex work businesses and sex workers to be regulated by Queensland’s existing Workplace Health and Safety framework. The committee supported regulation through general laws and industrial relations.

Nearly 180 submissions were considered by the committee. The Queensland government has three months to respond to the report’s recommendations.

Source brisbanetimes.com.au

Sex work from home row splits the Netherlands

Netherlands, Den Haag

April 22, 2024
Dutch cities have warned that plans to allow sex workers to work from home will be a “nuisance” for families.

Some authorities are in favour but other cities fear it will cause antisocial behaviour in residential neighbourhoods and make it harder to spot abuse.

Sex work is legal in the Netherlands but the laws have not been updated for 15 years.

Now, traditional brothels are increasingly being replaced by sex workers booking clients online and seeing them at their home. Supporters of modernising the law say regulation is needed to keep up with the practice.

The new sex work regulation act would make it possible for sex workers to welcome clients at home, just as hairdressers and beauticians can.

They must meet certain conditions, be at least 21, and apply for a permit, according to the controversial bill.

NOS, the state broadcaster, spoke to local authorities in a string of Dutch municipalities and found wildly divergent views.

The municipality of Kaag en Braassem in South Holland voiced concerns about the “nuisance” such a law could bring to its neighbourhoods.

“If sex work takes place in the private sphere, it is difficult to gain insight into possible abuses,” it said.

Some municipalities, including Rotterdam, Tilburg, Hilversum and Utrecht, already allow working from home for sex workers.

The conditions include a requirement for the worker to live at the address and be independent. They are not allowed to advertise too obviously or have a noticeable flow of customers.

In the municipality of Lingewaard, sex work is not permitted from rental properties.

In Enschede, sex workers are not allowed to work in flats or near schools and there cannot be too many working from home in the same area.

Other municipalities doubted that the permit requirement would be effective in stamping out abuse.

Many municipalities had not yet decided on their position on the national legislation.

Sex workers are against the mandatory registration because some want to keep their job secret and others fear clients will be criminalised if they don’t have the right papers, NOS reported.

Reforms to Dutch sex work laws have repeatedly been delayed. This bill was put on ice when Mark Rutte’s coalition government collapsed last year.

The law will not be progressed until the Netherlands has a new government.

Source telegraph.co.uk

Hamburg’s sex workers persecuted under Hitler to be commemorated

Germany, Hamburg

April 29, 2024

Sex workers in Hamburg’s historic red-light district who were persecuted under Adolf Hitler are to get their own memorial at Herbertstraße, a notorious street in Germany’s second city still blocked off to all but sex workers and their clients.

Few people, even residents, know that it was the Nazis who built the world-famous gates around the row of “houses of pleasure” in an attempt to shame sex workers while discreetly keeping business going.

St Pauli district council has answered the call of church leaders, community activists and local women working in the sex industry who agitated for Germany’s vaunted culture of historical remembrance to be expanded to include women such as Sophie Gotthardt, who was detained for “perversion” and only barely survived Auschwitz.

The memorial, which organisers hope to inaugurate by November, is modelled on the Stolpersteine “stumbling stones” – small brass plaques laid in cities and towns throughout Europe honouring individual Holocaust victims.

The marker will be embedded in the ground at the entrance of what is still a buzzing thoroughfare of brothels and sex shops, and include QR codes remembering the women of St Pauli whose fates are known.

Sieghard Wilm, the pastor of the Lutheran church that gives the neighbourhood its name, told the Guardian he had worked with residents and received the backing of local sex workers to launch the project aimed at “dignified remembrance”.

“Millions of people visit St Pauli and lots and lots of tourists every day stand in front of Herbertstraße and take pictures. I always found that cynical because I knew Nazis put up the gates,” he said.

Wilm called it “horrible” and a “crass contradiction” that the famously liberal district had until now excluded sex workers as an explicitly acknowledged group of Nazi victims. He wants to lift the stigma around these “long-forgotten” women and make them “visible” to all.

The fences were erected by the Hamburg Gauleiter, or regional Nazi party leader, in 1933 when the sex-for-cash trade on Herbertstraße was deemed a “sin and disgrace for the community”.

Between March and May 1933, Nazi officers arrested 3,201 “fornicating women” in Hamburg, Der Spiegel reported. Of these, 814 were taken into custody.

Although prostitution and striptease acts were officially banned at the time, St Pauli’s booming sex trade proved impossible to shut down, so authorities settled for making it invisible to passersby.

The women penned inside in the 1930s and 40s remained in the Nazis’ crosshairs as “female antisocial elements”. Many were imprisoned and deported to concentration camps. Others underwent forced sterilisation or were driven to suicide, researchers say.

After winning cross-party support, the approved measure in Hamburg earmarks €5,000 for the memorial, QR codes and an inaugural ceremony. Wilm said his initiative aimed to raise a further €15,000 to complete the project, including carrying out further historical research.

Source theguardian.com

Sex workers outraged as ‘AI girlfriend’ ads flood Instagram and Facebook

USA, New-York

April 30, 2024

Facebook and Instagram reportedly host thousands of explicit ads for AI-generated companions and “girlfriend” apps – and sex workers are accusing Meta of double standards when it comes to policing smut.

The online chatbots in the ads provide users with  AI-generated imagery of realistic, partially clothed and stereotypically pornographic women, including one promising to “get you off in one minute,” Wired reported. 

Some human sex workers raised concerns over Meta favoring the AI-powered sex services and letting them multiply while barring human sex work on Facebook and Instagram as “adult content,” according to Wired.

“As a sex worker, if I put anything like ‘I will do anything for you, I will make you come in a minute’ I would be deleted in an instant,” Gemma Rose, director of a UK-based sex-worker rights organization, told the publication.

At least 29,000 ads for explicit AI “girlfriends” have been published across Meta’s social media platforms despite the company’s advertising policies prohibiting “depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.”

While Meta prohibits showcasing nudity and selling sex, including sexting, Rose and other sex workers accused the platform of overlooking “NSFW”, not-safe-for-work experiences currently dominating the AI companion ads.

Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said the company prohibits ads containing adult content and is actively reviewing and removing any ads that violate its policies.

“When we identify violating ads we work quickly to remove them, as we’re doing here,” he told Wired. “We continue to improve our systems, including how we detect ads and behavior that go against our policies.”

Nevertheless, some 1,500 ads for “AI girlfriend” – 190 containing “NSFW” – were live across Meta’s social media platforms in the US as of April 30, according to Meta’s ad library. 

Source nypost.com