Bristol sex worker successes

Via the F-Word Blog, I want to highlight quickly this story:

In the last year One25 has seen 134 violent attacks against women involved in street-based sex work, and the level of brutality involved is horrific. Rape conviction rates for this group are extremely low nationally, with only 1% of rapes against sex-workers in the UK ending in a conviction. It takes courage to come forward after such a traumatic event, and it’s important that the victims of violence have the support they need.

We’ve seen an unprecedented number of women finding the courage to report such attacks in the last six months, and this has led to convictions. In the last two months alone one attacker was sentenced to a nine year prison term, and four attackers have been arrested, with two already charged and remanded in prison. This is a fantastic result for the women involved, for One25 and for all the local agencies that have supported them.

We feel that the improvements we have seen in the last six months are worth celebrating, but also hope they will raise awareness of the problem of violence in our city.

This is a tremendous success, but sadly it is all too little. With the law being much less able to protect sex workers while sex workers have reason to fear or avoid the law, getting the convictions up to a level where they will act as a realistic deterrent against attackers will be close to impossible. If you do the sums, then assuming that the attack rate is more or less constant, in the same 2 months (over which 7 people were arrested and/or charged), it seems that there must have been at least 20 attacks.

The One25 programme should be hailed as an unprecedented success; however, I think it would be remiss if we did not say that, at a national level, in legislation, much much more needs to be done.