STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
1. ACESS TO JUSTICE
Criminalisation remains the single greatest barrier to sex workers’ access to justice in Europe. Whether through direct criminalisation, “end demand” models, administrative sanctions, or local by-laws, punitive legal frameworks push sex work into unsafe conditions, legitimise police harassment, and deter sex workers from reporting violence or abuse. Criminalisation also undermines access to labour protections, housing, healthcare, and social security, reinforcing cycles of precarity and exclusion.
ESWA supports rights-based legal frameworks that recognise sex work as work, protect freedom of association and movement, and ensure access to labour and social protections without stigma or exceptionalism. In recent years, ESWA has contributed to European-level advocacy opposing the expansion of punitive models, including engagement with EU institutions, European Court of Human Rights, UN mechanisms, and national governments. ESWA supports sex worker-led organisations to document the harms of criminalisation, engage in strategic advocacy, and intervene in legal reform processes.
2. ACESS TO HEALTH
Access to health is a fundamental human right. Yet for sex workers across Europe and Central Asia, it remains systematically obstructed by criminalisation, stigma, racism, migration control, transphobia, poverty, and punitive drug policies.
This Strategic Priority commits ESWA to advancing structural change alongside practical solutions. We will challenge laws and practices that undermine access to care, strengthen sex worker-led health models, advocate for inclusive HIV and SRH strategies, and expand traumainformed and mental health support. Health justice is inseparable from racial, gender, and economic justice and from the dignity, autonomy, and safety of all sex workers.
3. DIGITAL RIGHTS
Digital spaces are central to sex workers’ livelihoods, expression, and communitybuilding. Yet they are increasingly shaped by surveillance and control. Across Europe and Central Asia, heightened monitoring of social media and online platforms (particularly those hosting adult content) has led to growing restrictions, including platform bans, shadow banning, payment processor exclusions, and the introduction of age assurance mechanisms and access barriers. These measures are often justified under narratives of “online safety,” antitrafficking, or child protection, but in practice they frequently undermine sex workers’ rights and safety.
This Strategic Priority commits ESWA to defending sex workers’ digital rights as fundamental rights. We will challenge harmful narratives and discriminatory regulation, advocate for rights-based implementation of digital laws, address technology-facilitated violence, and strengthen community-led digital organising and innovation.
THEMATIC PRIORITIES
ESWA’s overarching thematic priorities are grounded in intersectional feminism, a framework that recognises that systems of oppression do not operate in isolation, but intersect and compound one another. As legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw first articulated, intersectionality describes how structures of power such as racism, patriarchy, and class inequality overlap to produce specific forms of marginalisation that cannot be understood through a single-axis lens. For sex workers across Europe and Central Asia, oppression is rarely singular. Criminalisation intersects with racism, migration control, transphobia, misogyny, poverty, and labour precarity. Migrant, trans, racialised, undocumented, disabled, and working-class sex workers experience layered forms of exclusion that demand structural responses.
Our three overarching thematic priorities reflect this analysis:
1. RACIAL JUSTICE
We confront racism, xenophobia, and systemic discrimination that disproportionately harm Black, Romani, migrant, and racialised sex workers. This includes challenging border regimes, racial profiling, discriminatory policing, and exclusion from services and protection mechanisms.
2. GENDER EQUALITY
We ground our work in feminist principles that centre bodily autonomy, women’s and LGBTQI+ rights, and freedom from gender-based violence. We reject frameworks that instrumentalise “protection” to justify repression, and instead advance sex workers’ self-determination and leadership.
3. ECONOMIC JUSTICE
We address systemic economic inequalities including poverty, austerity, labour exploitation, and exclusion from social protection that shape sex workers’ livelihoods and safety. We recognise sex work within broader struggles for labour rights, redistribution, and economic dignity.
Together, these pillars reflect ESWA’s commitment to confronting the structural foundations of inequality, across race, gender, and class, while building collective power and solidarity across movements.