Decrim now world news digest for July 2025

Three Major Wins for Sex Worker Justice and Survivor Safety in Rhode Island

USA, Rhode Island

July 1, 2025

Decriminalize Sex Work (DSW) proudly celebrates a historic moment in Rhode Island, where lawmakers have passed a trio of groundbreaking bills that protect the rights, health, and safety of sex workers and survivors of trafficking. DSW was honored to lead the efforts to pass the bills by working alongside local partners and legislative champions to help craft language, provide testimony, and build public awareness. These three policy victories reflect what is possible when survivors, advocates, public health experts, and lawmakers come together to prioritize human rights and practical solutions. Rhode Island is leading the way in proving that harm reduction, not punishment, builds safer communities.

This legislative session, Rhode Island passed:

* H5358: Immunity legislation protecting survivors and sex workers from prosecution when they report crimes or seek emergency assistance

* H5348: which ends non-consensual, mandatory HIV testing for people convicted under commercial sexual activity laws

* H5357: which eliminates discriminatory fines that were only applied to those convicted of prostitution-related offenses

Together, these laws mark a significant shift away from outdated, punitive policies—and toward compassion, consent, and public health.

Protecting Survivors Through Immunity Legislation

Rhode Island’s new immunity law offers critical legal protection for survivors of trafficking and sex workers who experience or witness crimes such as assault, trafficking, or domestic violence. For years, the fear of arrest has prevented sex workers and survivors from calling 911 or accessing healthcare and support services. By removing this barrier, Rhode Island is affirming a simple but powerful truth: no one should be punished for trying to protect themselves or others.

This law will improve public safety, strengthen trust between vulnerable communities and public institutions, and help ensure that perpetrators, not victims, are held accountable.

Ending Mandatory HIV Testing with H5348

Until this year, Rhode Island law required individuals convicted under commercial sexual activity statutes to undergo mandatory HIV testing — even in cases where no sexual contact had occurred. This outdated policy violated bodily autonomy and ignored public health recommendations from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), which affirm that HIV testing should always be voluntary.

H5348 modernizes Rhode Island’s approach by replacing non-consensual testing with an opt-in model. Individuals convicted under commercial sexual activity laws will now be offered HIV testing and access to care without coercion or penalty.

Repealing Harmful Fines with H5357

With the passage of H5357, Rhode Island has taken an important step toward ending the criminalization of poverty. The new law eliminates additional fines that were previously levied only on people convicted of prostitution-related offenses. The fees ranged from $350 to $500 or more, on top of standard court fines and went into the state’s general fund.

For individuals already experiencing financial instability, these fines created lasting harm: missed work, lost housing, and prolonged involvement in the criminal justice system. Repealing them reflects a growing recognition that justice should not come with a price tag, and certainly not one borne only by the most marginalized.

Source decriminalizesex.work

An ordinance decriminalizing sex work is passed Pittsburgh City Council

USA, Pittsburgh

July 7, 2025

City Council is considering an ordinance that would reduce the minimum penalty for individuals convicted of engaging in sex work, downgrading the offense from a misdemeanor to a summary offense.

Currently, the minimum penalty for engaging in sex work “can involve up to a year in jail, and it also can involve a sliding scale of fines that can go all the way up to $10,000,” Theresa Nightingale, executive director of For Safer Sex Work Pittsburgh, told City Paper. The proposed ordinance would lower the minimum penalty to “just a small fine similar to a traffic ticket, so it’s a summary offense instead.”

Current laws also require those charged with prostitution to show up to court, a requirement that the proposed ordinance would do away with.

“[Existing] penalties hinder future opportunities for employment, housing, custody over children, and other things like that for workers,” District 5 City Councilor Barb Warwick, who introduced the ordinance, said during a council meeting on July 2, noting that the people most often receiving these penalties are “those who are already our most vulnerable.”

Several Pittsburghers spoke in favor of the ordinance at the July 2 meeting. Speakers focused on how the ordinance would protect sex workers, who are often already marginalized because of their race, gender, and/or immigration status, from further criminalization and vulnerability to state violence by reducing their contact with the criminal legal system.

The ordinance is the product of two years of conversations with elected officials and community groups, and Nightingale said that the majority of people and groups that advocates have approached with the idea have been supportive. Local organizations, including Pittsburgh Action Against Rape, NAMI Keystone, and SisTers PGH, have voiced their support for the ordinance.

The ordinance passed Pittsburgh City Council unanimously on July 8.

Source pghcitypaper.com

Belgium officially recognises first employer of sex workers under new labour law

Belgium, Brussels

July 8, 2025

A landmark moment has been reached in the legal recognition of sex work in Belgium. For the first time, an employer has been authorised to hire sex workers under a formal employment contract, De Standaard reports.

The federal Ministry of Employment has confirmed that this recognition was granted to the operator of a sex club near Gembloux and took effect on Tuesday. This is the first concrete implementation of a pioneering law that has allowed sex work to be carried out within the framework of standard labour rights since December 2024.

The law has been praised internationally for its progressive approach and aims to improve working conditions and legal protection for sex workers. It guarantees the right to refuse sexual acts, decline clients and terminate the contract at any time without notice.

Workspaces must be equipped with safety alarms, and contracts must ensure full autonomy for workers. Although sex work was decriminalised in 2022, until now it could only be practised legally on a self-employed basis.

Despite the law’s ambition, implementation has faced serious hurdles. As of May 2025, only four applications for official recognition had been submitted, none of which had been approved.

Prospective employers cited refusals by banks and insurers as key barriers, effectively stalling the legalisation process. Critics have highlighted systemic discrimination as a significant obstacle to the practical implementation of the law.

According to the Ministry of Employment, nine applications have now been submitted since the law came into force. Of these, two were rejected for failing to meet the legal requirements, one was deemed inadmissible due to missing documentation, and the remaining cases are under review. The recognition of the first employer is seen as a crucial breakthrough.

Source belganewsagency.eu

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is being urged by campaigners to abolish ’prostitute’s cautions’, which leave sex workers criminalised for life

United Kingdom, London

July 17, 2025

Campaigners from more than 100 organisations claim that prostitute’s cautions trap women in sex work, prevent them from leaving abusive and violent relationships, and push them further into poverty.

While prostitution is not against the law in England and Wales, loitering or soliciting in a public place is. The police can give prostitute’s cautions to women they believe are loitering or soliciting as sex workers. Unlike other criminal cautions, sex workers don’t have to admit guilt and may not even be informed that they have received one.

In a joint letter organised by the English Collective of Prostitutes, the organisations say that the cautions are used against street sex workers who face “the greatest need, the most dangerous working conditions and the harshest and most punitive policing”.

They say that “thousands of women in the UK have received a prostitute’s caution” over a two-year period, of which at least 800 are in the West Midlands.

As the campaigners point out, there is no right of appeal against a prostitute’s caution and they remain on a person’s record until the age of 100. They add: “There can be no justification for this unjust and draconian practice continuing.”

In November 2024, the English Collective of Prostitutes launched a report on the impact of the cautions on sex workers’ lives.It concluded that prostitute’s cautions have a devastating, lifelong impact on women’s lives. They put women at greater risk of exploitation and violence and can mean that sex workers lose custody of their children, are denied compensation and/or insurance and are deported or prevented from travelling. Having a prostitute’s caution on your record is an immense barrier to getting another job and leaving prostitution.

The impact of a prostitute’s caution is compounded for sex workers who are migrant, trans, coloured, street workers and working class. Victims of rape, trafficking and other violence are deterred from reporting these crimes to the police by the threat of prosecution and of ending up with a prostitute’s caution on their record.

There are widespread calls to end prostitute’s cautions, including in Parliament, in the House of Lords and in the London Assembly. Labour MP Nadia Whittome said: “It’s absolutely shocking. We’ve got an institutionally misogynistic police force that has been proven to have routinely failed”, and she added: “I think that all [prostitute’s] cautions – no matter somebody’s status as a sex worker, former or current – should be taken off their records. The government should be investing in anti-poverty measures so that fewer people feel that sex work is the best option in the circumstances that they’re in.”

Anger about the injustice of prostitute’s cautions is helping highlight the unjust criminalisation of sex workers generally, whether working on the street or together from premises. Women are forced to choose between keeping themselves safe and possible arrest, or avoiding a criminal record and putting themselves in danger.

Source centralbylines.co.uk

Supreme Court of Canada finds sex work laws constitutional—at least for now

Canada, Alberta

July 24, 2025

In a decision some say fails to account for the lived realities of sex workers, the Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed a constitutional challenge of Canada’s sex work laws. 

At issue in R v Kloubakov were two parts of Canada’s sex work criminalization scheme, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), related to receiving a material benefit from sex workers and the procuring of sexual services.

The Court unanimously found that the current sex work laws are constitutional and don’t prevent sex workers from invoking safety measures. Those can include anything from working from fixed indoor locations, hiring bodyguards or drivers, and providing their services in cooperative and cost-sharing arrangements with other sex workers. 

At the heart of the case are two escort service drivers convicted under the current laws.

Jenn Clamen, CASWLR’s national coordinator, says the Court’s analysis is largely based on a fantasy notion around cooperatives that doesn’t account for the lived reality of sex workers. Her organization was denied intervenor status in this case.

“We’re obviously very disappointed, but not surprised that this happened,” she says. 

“One of the problems with this case was the very narrow reading and understanding of these provisions. The regime needs to be looked at completely, including the criminalization of the purchase [of sex].”

Clamen says the fundamental premise the Court worked with was wrong, that even if sex workers have immunity from arrest for selling their sexual services, it’s only an immunity from arrest. The sex work itself remains criminalized, meaning they still can’t rent a location and can have their bank accounts frozen because the money made is a proceed of crime.

“This decision doesn’t take stock of what’s happening in reality,” she says. 

“It only takes stock of these very bogus notions of who third parties are, what a co-op is, or these ideas of what it means for people to work together. They’re fictitious—they’re not actually real context.”

In the cases before them, the courts struggle with the nature of what sex work is and rely on “unicorn” contexts that don’t exist in real life, even if you have a collective of sex workers who have banded together to share a website or in-call spaces.

“They can’t use those in-call spaces because they are considered illegal,” Clamen says.

“The piece that everyone is missing is that you’re not actually allowed to do crime. You can’t say a sex worker is able to hire a third party in any context because she’s still committing a crime, her money is still illegal, and she can’t live in a society in a normal way. This idea that she could work is a farce.”

Source nationalmagazine.ca

Sex workers of South Africa plea for arrest moratorium

South Africa, Cape Town

July 30, 2025

Sex workers are calling for a moratorium on arrests and fines until politicians finalise the redraft of a bill to decriminalise sex work. 

This comes nearly two years after the bill was withdrawn and sent back to be revised. In 2022, former Deputy Minister of Justice John Jeffery held consultations on decriminalisation. The public comment period opened for the draft bill in January 2023.

It followed many years of advocacy by sex workers and activist organisations.

Despite the commitments from the Department of Justice and consultations for the redraft bill underway, arrests and fines of sex workers are on the rise, according to SWEAT.

Megan Lessing of SWEAT told GroundUp that they’ve noted a “concerning spike” in fines issued to sex workers in Cape Town. The organisation is now lobbying for a moratorium on the arrests of sex workers.

According to Wayne Dyason, spokesperson for Cape Town Law Enforcement, 780 sex workers have been arrested or fined so far in 2025. Compared to last year’s total of 575, and 544 in 2023.

SWEAT recently highlighted the arrests of nine sex workers by the Durban Metro Police Service in January. The eThekwini municipality issued over a 1,000 notices to sex workers in the 2022/23 year.

Arrests related to sex work reflect on SAPS crime statistics under “sexual offences detected as a result of police action”. According to SAPS crime statistics from 2023/2024, about 10,800 sexual offences were detected as a result of police action. This is an increase from about 9,600 from the previous year and up from 7,200 in the 2021/2022 reporting period.

Source algoafm.co.za