Examining Professionalisation as a Strategy for Sex Worker Empowerment and Mobilisation

Abstract

In this article, I examine the concept of professionalisation in sex work as a strategy shaped by political activism that aims to empower and mobilise sex workers to fight for labour rights. Using a participant-based action research approach, I investigated one sex worker professionalisation programme in Germany to better understand how the design, training and goals of the programme reflected ideas and priorities from the Association for Erotic and Sexual Service Providers, a nationwide sex worker rights organisation in Germany. Through my analysis, I found that the programme for professionalisation was mainly oriented around criticism against the new German Prostitute Protection Act (2017), framing data protection as a sex worker rights issue, and encouraging critical resistance to authorities enforcing the Act. Based on these themes, I offer two new perspectives on the aims of the programme in relation to empowering and destigmatising sex workers. First, the tools of resistance offered through the programme as a way of empowering sex workers were confounded by sex workers’ individual situations that limited their ability to practice resistance. Second, the politics of funding for the programme, guided by the goal of ensuring sex workers are less of a public health risk, may interfere with the broader goal of destigmatising sex work.

Introduction

As sex work is still not a recognised profession in most countries, there is a lack of formal education for sex workers about sustainable work practices and to learn about the legal and social circumstances affecting their work. In this context, sex worker rights activists in many countries have created peer-to-peer programmes to give sex workers the opportunity to learn from each other. These grew out of the sex worker rights movement, which strives to improve the lives of sex workers by challenging the social stigma and criminalisation of sex work. The peer projects aim to increase legal consciousness among sex workers and to encourage health and safety in the work environment (Benoit et al., 2017; Euser et al., 2012; Huschke, 2019; Menger-Ole et al., 2020). Within the growing body of literature on the sex worker rights movement, there are still a limited number of studies examining the approaches and broader goals behind peer-to-peer initiatives for sex workers (Geymonat and Macioti, 2016). In this article, I seek to fill this gap by taking a closer look at the views, beliefs and aims that shape the design of sex worker peer projects by investigating a sex worker peer initiative in Germany called profiS. Understanding how peer initiatives are designed, including how peer educators are trained, contributes to knowledge about how the sex worker rights movement reaches out to people working in the sex industry.

In the German-speaking context, sex worker peer projects have been understood as professionalisation initiatives. I share the definition of sex work with those of my research participants, as being the consensual provision of sexual services in return for financial or comparable compensation between adults, involving a particular set of skills and practices that vary across the different areas within the industry. ¹ This is rooted in the development of sex worker theory, which prioritises the lived experiences of the people involved in the industry to explain the circumstances, challenges and perspectives of sex workers (Jeffreys, 2018). Geymonat and Macioti (2016) have examined sex worker professionalisation projects in Germany and Switzerland, defining professionalisation as ‘all projects that proactively elaborate and spread better working practices in the sex industry’ (2). In their study, they identify the professionalising aspect of these projects as specifically ‘proposing forms of collective guidelines elaborated by sex workers as a category of workers, in a way that builds on and develops their professionality’ (2). I build on this definition of professionalisation by investigating how the concept of professionalisation was designed as a way of mobilising sex workers to stand up for their rights. In particular, I examine the different activities within the training programme for peer educators and show how the discussions that took place between participants were shaped by their background in sex worker rights activism.

Sex work in Germany is legalised, meaning that it is recognised as work, yet subject to particular regulations and restrictions intended only for the industry (Döring, 2018). This is different from decriminalisation, under which sex work is subject only to labour laws also pertaining to other types of work. Since the passage of the Prostitute Protection Act in 2018, activism has been focussed on criticising and negotiating the additional regulations imposed on sex work through the Act. The divisions between the different areas of sex work have become much bolder under a regulated system because not all regulations apply to all areas of sex work. This influences activism in the sense that within the movement in Germany, sex workers are focussed on the different ways that the regulations affect them, depending on which area they work in, and form their demands accordingly. As a result, one of the difficulties that emerges within the movement is sustaining a collective consciousness of the common challenges that all sex workers face that allows them to mobilise as a united force. Professionalisation initiatives such as profiS aim to overcome these divisions by fostering awareness of the common political challenges faced by all workers in the industry and thereby increasing solidarity among sex workers.

profiS was started in 2008 by Stephanie Klee, a long-time sex worker rights activist in Germany who wanted to fill the gap in peer-to-peer support in the sex worker community, particularly among migrant and precariously working sex workers. Over the years, profiS received funding from the German AIDS Foundation to hold training seminars for peer educators and to conduct workshops in sex work venues. The three activities that I observed in the profiS training seminars were group discussions, thematic presentations and role-plays. In my analysis of these activities, I identify three perspectives that are reproduced and echo the approaches taken in the sex worker rights movement in Germany. These include a critique against the German Prostitute Protection Act (PPA), data protection as a sex worker rights issue and critical resistance to authorities enforcing the PPA. Based on this analysis, I offer two new perspectives about the role and potential of the profiS programme within the sex worker rights movement. First, the goal of empowering sex workers through knowledge-sharing and awareness-raising through the profiS programme is confounded by structural factors affecting sex workers’ social and economic circumstances. Second, the underlying aims for empowering sex workers differ in the mission of the profiS programme and the programme’s funding source in a way that conflicts with the destigmatisation of sex workers.

The article is divided into five sections. In the first section, I review the literature on women’s empowerment and on sex worker peer projects that provide a conceptual basis for my analysis of the profiS programme. The second section describes the profiS training programme in which I conducted fieldwork using the method of participant-observation with an action research approach. Following this, I provide background information on the sex worker rights movement in Germany and locate the profiS programme within the activities of this movement. The final two sections describe the findings of the research and discuss the two perspectives derived from these findings. I conclude with some thoughts about the implications of the study for sex worker rights activism and for future academic research on sex worker organising.

Literature review

There are two bodies of literature that offer relevant concepts for locating my analysis of the profiS workshops. These are studies on professionalisation and quality of work in sex work, and the literature on women’s empowerment. In the first part, I draw connections between definitions of professionalisation and the quality of sex work. In the second part, I review the feminist literature on women’s empowerment that provides a closer understanding of how this concept is put into practice in initiatives aimed at improving women’s self-determination.

Professionalisation and quality of sex work

The concept of the quality of sex work that framed my research is based on the understanding of sex work as a type of non-standard, precarious labour, characterised by non-contractual working arrangements, lack of social protection and the tendency towards the individualisation of risk when working (Keller and Seifert, 2009; Orchiston, 2016; Spilker, 2010). I examine the concept of professionalisation as intertwined with the quality of work, in that it was used as a strategy to improve the quality of sex work. In this vein, I draw on the definition of professionalisation developed by Geymonat and Macioti (2016), which is specific to the context of sex work. Rejecting the ideals of standard working rules, contracts, full-time employment and the building of a professional identity, professionalisation as defined by sex worker rights activists promotes workers’ autonomy, consent and collective organising (Geymonat and Macioti, 2016). Notions of good quality in sex work cannot be measured according to standards of quality in work for mainstream types of labour that are not affected by stigma and criminalisation. Therefore, the approaches taken in professionalisation initiatives for improving the quality of sex work must be understood within the context of the sex worker rights movement that has historically fought for the recognition of sex workers’ human rights and against state repression (Geymonat and Macioti, 2016).

Research in different sex worker communities around the world has examined definitions and strategies of professionalisation used by sex workers as well as the conditions that determine the quality of sex work (Benoit et al., 2021; Ho, 2000; Oso, 2016). The studies show that professionalisation and quality of work in sex work intersect in various ways that shape how sex workers perceive and experience their working conditions. Based on her study of Taiwanese sex workers and sex worker rights activists, Ho (2000) defines professionalism in the context of sex work as being primarily about boundary-setting, self-confidence and developing a sense of pride in providing sexual services as a strategy of successful working. Sex workers engage in professionalism by being sexually available on their own terms and creating a clear distinction between sexual practices at work and sexuality in their private lives (Ho, 2000).

The notion of autonomy as a key element of professionalisation in sex work is found in other studies about the quality of sex work in the European context. Oso (2016) explores the indoor working conditions of sex workers in Spain, both in in-call flats and clubs. Quality in sex work is dependent on the structural circumstances and personal choices that women make when they work in the sex industry, whereby working conditions vary according to the workplace and are defined by the women themselves (Oso, 2016). Importantly, Oso highlights two major structural circumstances that specifically hinder migrant women from seeking better quality under working conditions. The first is the Spanish immigration policy, which creates a ‘pool of undocumented workers’ (p. 7), and the second is the legal grey zone in which sex work is located, which results in sex workers being more dependent on those who provide workplaces for them, no matter how exploitative. Both circumstances make it difficult for migrant sex workers to claim their rights as workers.

The research so far has shown that across different countries and legal contexts, professionalisation and quality of work in sex work are defined by both structural circumstances and sex workers’ perception of their work, and initiatives that focus on enhancing the quality of sex work involve both the process of improving work practices and strengthening the autonomy of sex workers. In the next section, I review the literature on empowerment more closely and identify the key elements of this concept that I connect with professionalisation in sex work.

Empowerment

Empowerment is linked to awareness-raising and the fostering of critical consciousness, based on the work of Paolo Freire (1970), who coined the term ‘conscientisation’. In the process of conscientisation, subjects develop a critical awareness of their social reality through reflection and action (Freire, 1970). Empowerment has various dimensions, including economic, psychological, familial, legal, political and socio-cultural (Malhotra et al., 2002). In the more recent literature on women’s empowerment, scholars have called for a focus away from the economic dimension of empowerment, arguing that an improvement in material circumstances does not necessarily erase other inequalities that cause hardship in women’s lives (Bayisa et al., 2018; Cornwall, 2016; Stromquist, 2015). Instead, the other dimensions, particularly the familial and socio-cultural aspects, play an equally significant role in the realisation of empowerment. From this perspective, the concept of empowerment must be understood as more than a set of measures or indicators. Instead, empowerment is more precisely understood through ‘larger-scale patterns of women’s experiences of change and qualitative studies that reveal insight as to how change happens’ (Cornwall, 2016: 343). One of the vital levers needed for empowerment to be effective is a process that produces a ‘shift in consciousness’ (Cornwall, 2016: 345). Thus, the shift away from the economic dimension of empowerment represents the key to an empowerment programme’s success in getting women to critically reflect their circumstances and to share that process with other women.

Empowerment has been widely addressed in feminism, where it has been theorised as both a process and an endpoint (Stromquist, 2015). In her analysis of women’s empowerment in relation to education, Stromquist (2015) focusses on the micro and macro factors that enable women’s individual and collective agency as a prerequisite for empowerment. Her thinking on empowerment emphasises that education is only one of many factors needed to enhance women’s ability to make choices and that the role of education has been ‘overestimated’ as a vector for social change (Stromquist, 2015). Empowerment is defined as ‘the set of knowledge, skills and conditions that women must possess to be able to understand their world and act upon it . . .’, which is ‘inseparable from subsequent action’ at the individual and collective levels (Stromquist, 2015: 308). Stromquist argues that social interaction, by encouraging communication and knowledge exchange among women, can increase the effectiveness of education as a strategy of empowerment (p. 315).

In the literature on sex work, studies have been published about empowerment programmes within the sex worker community (Benoit et al., 2017; Euser et al., 2012; Huschke, 2019; Menger et al., 2020). An example of these is the risk-reduction workshops for sex workers in South Africa, designed as HIV prevention programmes to mitigate the harmful effects of criminalisation, in which sex workers’ access to health services is hindered (Huschke, 2019). Based on her fieldwork with sex workers in South Africa, Huschke reported that an important outcome of the workshops was the growth of solidarity and understanding between sex workers, which was important for them to be able to stand up collectively for their rights. Echoing studies done on women’s empowerment initiatives in other contexts, Huschke’s study of the sex worker peer workshops in South Africa found that empowerment among sex workers was achieved principally through raising critical consciousness and creating solidarity.

Sex workers writing about activism themselves have been critical about the use of the term empowerment within the sex worker rights movement. In their book Revolting Prostitutes, Juno Mac and Molly Smith have critically described the term ‘empowerment’ as ‘clickbait’ used as a defence against stigma in pro-rights narratives about sex work (Smith and Mac, 2018: 218). What they are referring to is the use of the term empowerment by sex workers who describe their work as a source of self-realisation and liberation. They argue that personal stories of empowerment distract from the greater context of sex work under colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. Too much focus on the possibility of choice in sex work denies the fact that sex work is generally done under conditions of lack of choice (Mac and Smith, 2018). Their critique warns against the use of the term ‘empowerment’ to spotlight self-fulfilment or sexual liberation as the principal justification for sex worker rights. In the same vein as Stromquist’s (2015) perspective discussed earlier, criticising the focus on the economic dimension of empowerment, Mac and Smith highlight the danger of measuring empowerment solely according to individual freedom and progress. The dimensions of empowerment uncovered by feminists, sex work researchers and activists provided the basis on which I explored the way empowerment was theorised and practised in my observations of the profiS programme.

Pulling together both bodies of literature discussed above informs my understanding of the link between professionalisation and empowerment. Both concepts emphasise the importance of education as the main element in the practice of achieving better quality in work and a greater capacity to change one’s circumstances. Examining the profiS programme as an example of how both concepts are brought together, I show how professionalisation is encouraged as a strategy to promote empowerment among sex workers through knowledge-sharing about sustainable work practices. However, what is overlooked in this linkage is how receptive individuals are to education and to what extent they are able to use new knowledge to improve their circumstances, particularly when they are situated precariously. It is worth questioning more closely how education functions as a process to link professionalisation and empowerment, and how effective this process is for enabling sex workers in all their diversity to maintain or improve their autonomy.

Background: sex worker rights movement in Germany

The sex worker rights movement in Germany goes back to the 1980s when Hydra, the first support centre for sex workers, opened in Berlin in 1980. Hydra was founded by women working in various sectors, including sex work, who came together to fight against moral double standards oppressing women. It was inspired by both the women’s movement at the time as well as the French sex workers’ protest in Lyon in 1975. ² Since then, the movement has grown steadily across Germany with the founding of support centres in all major cities across the country. The movement was born out of an alliance between sex workers and social workers who were active in the women’s movement in Germany (Heying, 2018). In 2013, the first sex worker-only activist association (Association for Erotic and Sexual Service Providers – BesD) was founded in response to the drafting of the Prostitute Protection Act (PPA 2017), that aimed to increase regulation of the sex industry. Over the past 9 years, the BesD has taken the lead in shaping the demands and strategies of sex worker rights activism in Germany.

The main goal of the BesD is the decriminalisation and the destigmatisation of sex work. ³ By demanding that special regulations affecting sex workers, such as the PPA, be repealed, they promote their vision of a society in which sex work is treated like any other occupation. When parliamentary discussions about the PPA began in 2013, the BesD shifted their focus to protesting the passage of this new law. The main issue that activists raised at the time, and continue to emphasise, is the violation of sex workers’ right to privacy and data protection under the PPA. One of the regulations set out in the Act was a sex worker registration mandate, accompanied by mandatory health counselling. The BesD strongly opposed the introduction of such measures, demanding instead more labour rights and funding for the support centres that provided free services for migrant and precariously working sex workers. The strategy of critical resistance to authority gained strength after the passage of the PPA. In view of the registration mandate for sex workers, the BesD cooperated with support centres to organise information sessions for sex workers about the new legal context and published an FAQ section on their website to provide sex workers with information on the consequences and their rights if they decided not to register. The information sessions were designed as a space for the BesD to both inform sex workers about the requirements for working legally as well as to encourage them to critically reflect the new measures. In the findings section, I trace how these specific elements of the BesD’s activism were embodied in the profiS programme.

Methods

The study is based on fieldwork conducted in Germany in September 2017, February 2018 and June 2018 during two profiS training seminars and one profiS workshop that I facilitated. The fieldwork was carried out according to action research methodology using the ethnographic method of participant-observation (Brewer, 2000; Greenwood and Levin, 1998, 2007). The training seminars lasted for 3 days each and the subsequent workshop lasted for 2 hours. I participated for the full duration of both seminars and the workshop, during which I took part in all activities during the seminars. Both training seminars were organised by Stephanie Klee, who founded the sex worker professionalisation initiative move e.V. I gained access to the training seminars via invitation from Klee through the Association for Sexual and Erotic Service Providers (Berufsverband für erotische und sexuelle Dienstleistungen), in which I was doing fieldwork at the time. Half of the other participants in the training seminars were activists and sex workers and the other half were social workers. After the second training seminar, I volunteered to conduct one workshop in an erotic massage parlour in Berlin, where I put into practice the profiS training method that I had learned during the seminars. In this way, the design of the fieldwork followed the technique reflection and strategisation followed by action (Greenwood and Levin, 1998, 2007; Somekh, 2006).

In my role as a sex worker activist participant, I engaged in the discussions and group work with the other 14 participants during the training seminars. The training seminar was designed for two groups of people interested in providing educational workshops for sex workers. The first group was composed of social workers from the support centres for sex workers across Germany. For them, the training seminars were a form of professional development, as they already had experience in disseminating knowledge to sex workers. The second group was sex workers wanting to become peer educators through the profiS workshops. I joined as part of the second group and made my intentions as a researcher clear before attending the seminars.

As a researcher, my role consisted of listening and taking field notes throughout and after the seminars. I kept a field diary in which I recorded all impressions, reflections and questions, and summarised the discussions that were held during the seminar, including quotes from participants. The participants were aware of my role as both a sex worker activist and researcher at the seminars and during the subsequent workshop. During fieldwork, I managed my different roles during the group reflection periods by constantly balancing how much I contributed to the discussions and how much I listened to other participants.

The research was approved by the university ethics committee as part of my PhD research project at the time. Before attending the seminar, I obtained permission from the seminar coordinator to study the profiS training sessions. On the first day of the seminar and before the workshop, I explained my research intentions during the introductory round and obtained verbal consent from the participants that I record their insights during the seminar. All quotes that I recorded in my field diary were anonymised immediately, with the only indicator of the speaker being whether the participant was a social worker or a sex worker. On the last training day and at the end of the workshop, I approached specific participants that I had quoted in my field notes to verify what they had expressed and to give the opportunity to withdraw their contributions. My own experience in the industry made me more attune to how the profiS training methods might be received by sex workers outside of the seminars, which I constantly reflected during field note analysis.

The main challenge of conducting the fieldwork was related to the large volume of data that accumulated through the intensity and length of the discussions that took place over the course of the training seminars. For this particular study, engaging in participant-observation provided abundant and rich enough data to better understand how profiS was shaped by ideals from the sex worker rights movement and how the specific training techniques employed during the seminars aimed to mobilise sex workers for activism.

Findings

In this section, I examine thematic presentations, group reflection discussions and role-plays during the profiS training seminars that contained strategies for sex worker professionalisation and analyse how critique of the PPA as a regulatory measure, concerns about sex workers’ personal data and activist resistance to authorities shaped these strategies.

Presentations of specific workshop themes relevant to sex workers

Through formal presentations during the training seminars, the seminar facilitators went through the themes that they wanted the participants (sex worker peer educators and social workers) to focus on during the workshops. One of the main themes covered by the profiS workshops was the new Prostitute Protection Act (PPA) (2017). Participants prepared cards for the workshops containing details about the new registration requirement and mandatory health counselling that sex workers were obliged to undergo to keep working legally. The cards included the participants’ specific views and experiences with the implementation of the PPA. For example, during the facilitator’s presentation about the PPA during the training seminar, one sex worker participant voiced her view of the underlying motive behind the law:

In my view, the purpose of the law is not just to enforce more tax collection from sex workers, or to make sure everyone in the business has health insurance, or to protect sex workers, but rather to try to get all sex workers into employed working arrangements so that they are easier to keep track of. (Field notes, profiS training seminar, February 2018)

As sex worker rights activists, the participants were critical of the PPA and the way that the new obligations imposed bureaucratic barriers to doing sex work legally. For them, the new law was mainly a measure for increased surveillance and ultimately suppression of sex work, expressed by framing ‘employed working arrangements’ that are easier to ‘keep track of’ as an impingement on sex workers’ spatial and temporal freedom of working. The seminar facilitators encouraged participants to share their views of the purpose of the law as a method to encourage sex workers to think critically about its implications on their working arrangements. In this way, the profiS workshops were oriented around developing a process of conscientisation (Freire, 1970).

Group reflections

Group reflections were a second activity in the profiS training seminars in which views from sex worker activism were reproduced and developed. After the formal presentations given by the facilitators, participants were invited to ask questions and share their own experiences related to the topics covered in the workshops. One theme that repeatedly arose during these group reflections was data protection under the PPA. As discussed previously (see ‘Background’ section), the issue of data privacy and security was a key issue in the sex worker rights movement in Germany. During the discussion on data protection related to the PPA, participants voiced many insecurities and assumptions regarding the transfer of data. There was much speculation on how the data would be shared. One of the social worker participants described how this uncertainty of information affected her ability to advise sex workers who came to see her for advice about registering as a sex worker.

One of the most common questions that my clients (sex workers) ask me is ‘what happens to my data?’ and I can’t give them a clear answer or guarantee on anything.

(Field notes, profiS training seminar, February 2018)

Other participants in the seminar echoed this feeling of insecurity when advising sex workers about the registration mandate. The scepticism regarding data security under the PPA showed that participants were critical of the registration mandate for sex workers. At the start of the discussion, the facilitator mentioned that she observed ‘a lot of uncertainty evoked through the new law’ which set the tone for the rest of the discussion. One of the sex worker participants asked whether sex workers who were ‘outed’ (publicly exposed through leakage of personal details) through registering would have a chance to take legal action. This encouraged the tone of critical resistance against the new law during the group reflection. A social worker participant who worked at a public health agency talked about how easily data could be leaked, even though the authorities were legally obliged to handle data confidentially. In response, participants took turns asking critical questions and sharing doubts about the PPA. As the participants exchanged thoughts about the PPA, they reproduced the discourse of resistance to the new law, echoing sex worker activist views against the new legal measures.

In sex worker rights activism, strengthening the community and creating solidarity through transformative learning are key strategies that are used in outreach initiatives seeking to empower sex workers (Benoit et al., 2017; Huschke, 2019). Through the group reflections during the profiS training seminars, participants were trained to create an environment of transformative learning for their workshops. As the profiS seminar facilitator stated, ‘One of the goals at a profiS workshop should be to get sex workers to talk to each other more and share knowledge with each other’. Participants were encouraged not only to explain the PPA but also to encourage sex workers to think critically about the new law and particularly the registration mandate. Through this approach, the process of sharing work-related knowledge was intertwined with the goal of evoking change in the way sex workers understood the legal circumstances affecting their work.

Role-plays

The third activity that took place in the training seminars were role-plays. These were designed to help participants prepare for specific situations in which they would be disseminating information to sex workers. During fieldwork, I observed and took part in two role-play situations that revealed how activist discourses shaped the profiS workshop approach.

In one role-play exercise, participants were asked to simulate a confrontation with the police in a brothel. One of the themes in the profiS workshops was how to communicate with authorities, particularly when the police visited a sex work venue. This was an important topic because migrant sex workers often feared discrimination by law enforcement authorities due to lingering stereotypes about migrants working illegally or being victims of trafficking and coercion (Krüsi et al., 2016). The stigma surrounding sex work, particularly the notion that sex work attracts criminal activity and therefore requires close surveillance, shapes the way police approach sex workers and the way that sex workers have been conditioned to behave around police officers (Benoit et al., 2016). Therefore, the profiS programme aimed to advise sex workers on how to interact with the police.

In the role-play, some participants played the role of the police, while others played the role of sex workers. The mock police officers staged a visit to a brothel and attempted to question the mock sex workers. The instructions given to the mock sex workers were to only state the information that was already on their ID cards and nothing further. The following excerpt from my field notes describes my participation in the role-play as a mock sex worker:

I volunteered to be a sex worker in the role play and received a cue sheet. Two other seminar participants played a public health official accompanied by the police, demanding entry for questioning about receiving welfare payments. They approached me immediately and started to question me. I immediately went into defensive mode and actually thought about answering the first question, but then I looked down at the cue sheet and remembered that I didn’t have to say anything except what was on my mock ID card. They tried to pressure me to answer other questions, but I played clueless until they stopped. (Field notes, profiS training seminar September 2017)

The role-play constructed the police as an antagonistic force that sex workers needed to be aware of and defend themselves against. As depicted in the excerpt above, the participants portrayed the police as forceful, intrusive figures who try to pressure sex workers into speaking with them, whereas the participants playing the sex workers resisted their pressure and only provided minimal information. The message conveyed through this training activity was that sex workers needed to be vigilant in the face of authorities. I argue that in this way, the profiS workshop was designed as a space for encouraging sex workers to question authorities and to be resistant to their interrogation tactics. This reflected a key approach within sex worker rights activism, whereby sex workers were encouraged to be critical of the system in which they worked and to resist pressure from police as a mindset for claiming their rights.

Discussion

In the previous section, I showed how specific approaches within sex worker activism are reproduced and developed in the thematic design, planning and preparation of the profiS workshops. Within the three activities during the training seminars, I traced how critique against the PPA, framing data protection as a sex worker rights issue and encouraging critical resistance to authorities reproduce the activist strategies taken by the BesD since the passage of the PPA. I now take a closer look at the implications on the fight for sex worker rights that emerge through the intersection of professionalisation and activism. I present two new perspectives on empowerment and stigma from my analysis of the profiS programme as both a space for sex worker education and political mobilisation.

Fostering empowerment

Critical reflection has been put forth as an important process for empowerment (Cornwall, 2016). Cornwall (2016) has described a shift in the approach taken in women’s empowerment initiatives over the last 20 years from one that focusses on the provision of resources and assets to one that aims to change how women ‘see themselves as women, citizens and as human beings’ (p. 356). This shift was exemplified in the profiS workshop, particularly through the role-plays. During the police role-plays, the aim of empowering sex workers to stand up for their rights was constructed through the scenario in which the mock sex workers were instructed to resist giving the authorities more information than they were legally obligated.

During the workshop that I facilitated in an erotic massage parlour a few months after the training seminar, I addressed the theme of police confrontation. I emphasised to the sex workers in the workshop, as suggested during the training seminars, that the only thing they were legally required to do was show their ID and they did not have to answer any questions. In response, they insisted that standing up for their rights confidently in the face of authorities was not a straightforward option for them.

‘They always ask questions’, one of the masseuses explained, ‘our German is not so good . . . and we are afraid, so we just answer’. The masseuse sitting beside her nodded. (Field notes, profiS workshop, June 2018)

As their apprehension showed, the process of knowledge-instilling empowerment and confidence was much more complex. Although the knowledge that strengthened sex workers’ ability to navigate and integrate into the German system was provided through the profiS workshop, sex workers’ individual life circumstances impacted how effectively this knowledge could lead to empowerment. The barriers faced by participants that must be overcome before empowerment through knowledge can be put into practice became clear during the workshop (see Stromquist, 2015). The four masseuses who took part in the workshop were all non-EU migrants, as I learned at the start during the introductory round. They had a good understanding of German (the language of the workshop) but were still learning to speak fluently. In view of these language barriers, communicating with authorities was a challenge, particularly questioning and resisting the interrogation process. Therefore, the masseuses responded that when the authorities questioned them at their workplace, they ‘just answer’ because they were ‘afraid’. As non-EU migrants, who potentially did not have a stable residency status in Germany, standing up to authorities was perceived as too high of a risk.

As the example from the workshop shows, profiS is only a first step for empowering sex workers, but what the programme cannot influence is the way that sex workers put the knowledge that they gain into practice. Simply telling sex workers how to interact with the police, for example, overlooks dimensions such as migrant status, language skills or socioeconomic circumstances among other factors, that influence sex workers’ self-perceived ability to mobilise for their rights.

Funding for sex worker rights

The influence of funding bodies has been analysed in studies about the sex worker rights movement in various countries (Healy et al., 2010; Jeffreys, 2018; Jenness, 1990). These have confirmed that state and non-state public health agencies are a key funding source for sex workers’ rights organisations and that activists are aware of the impact that funders can have on their activities. They employ strategies such as re-framing funding agendas in line with their organisational positioning, diversifying funding sources and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of working with funders to balance out their interests with those of funding bodies (Jeffreys, 2018). In view of profiS goals and training activities, I examined the financial support behind the profiS programme and compared the goals of the funding body with goals of the programme itself. The profiS programme was entirely funded by the German AIDS Foundation (Deutsche AIDS Hilfe – DAH), an NGO that has historically been a strong ally of the sex worker rights movement and other sexually marginalised groups. According to the mission statement of DAH, the NGO strives to:

• Enable people and create the circumstances for them to want to protect themselves and others as much as possible.

• Enable people with HIV/AIDS and hepatitis to exercise their right to self-determination, participation and solidarity.

• (translated from the DAH website: https://www.aidshilfe.de/leitbild#) ⁴

The goals in DAH’s mission statement indicated that its aim was primarily about health and protection, in particular STI prevention. The approach taken to achieve this was to promote ‘self-determination, participation and solidarity’. This was the same approach taken by the profiS programme to nurture empowerment among sex workers. As shown in the analysis of the activities during the training seminar, the concept of professionalisation that guided the profiS programme was defined as a process of developing self-determination among sex workers through knowledge and consciousness-raising. Overall, the long-term aim of the programme was to empower sex workers to mobilise for their rights, reflecting the activist ideology underlying the programme.

I argue that although profiS and DAH followed the same approach to supporting sex workers, the outcome targeted for supporting sex workers was different. In the profiS workshop, the goal of empowerment through professionalisation was to mobilise sex workers for their human and labour rights, whereas for DAH, the goal of empowerment through professionalisation was an improvement in public health. For DAH, encouraging work habits that promote health and safety among sex workers is part of self-determination, but the underlying motivation for producing self-determined sex workers is to make them, as a key population, less at-risk for STIs. Historically, across different countries, the fight for sex workers’ rights has often been framed in the context of improving public health (Healy et al., 2010; Jenness, 1990). Previous studies on sex worker community initiatives that aim to empower sex workers have found that these initiatives are often sponsored by public health organisations that aim to reduce cases of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections through education and safer sex practices (Huschke, 2019; Jeffreys, 2018). Huschke (2019) has observed that many sex worker peer-education programmes are funded by and based on ‘biomedical models of disease control with the aim of changing the behaviour of individuals to reduce HIV and other STIs’ (p. 7). Since the rise of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, sex work has become a major focus in epidemiological studies, with research on HIV/STIs dominating in the sex work research literature (Murray et al., 2018). If most funding comes from foundations and NGOs devoted to improving public health, this not only explains the overwhelming focus on health-related aspects of sex work in the literature but also shows how sex workers continue to be viewed by dominant institutions as a significant risk to public health. One of the key motivations for the sex worker rights movement is to reduce various stigmas against sex work, including the stigma against sex workers as vectors of disease. In this vein, from a destigmatisation perspective, the congruent approaches, yet differing aims, of DAH and profiS may present a contradiction that impacts the fight for sex worker rights. On one hand, profiS seeks to empower sex workers to better resist stigma and discrimination. On the other hand, accepting funding from an organisation whose target group within the public health context is high-risk populations, including sex workers, contributes to reinforcing the stigma against sex workers as a major risk to public health.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how the views, beliefs and aims of sex worker rights activism, particularly from the BesD, are found in the profiS programme and shape sex worker professionalisation initiatives in the German context. It has become evident how activist approaches of empowering sex workers and protesting the PPA were interwoven into the strategies for knowledge dissemination. These findings support two perspectives about the process and implications of sex worker empowerment through professionalisation in the profiS programme. First, while knowledge-sharing and processes of consciousness-raising give sex workers the tools to feel empowered, there are structural factors impacting their situations that make it challenging to put these tools into practice. Second, the funding from DAH for the profiS programme is motivated by the goal of empowering sex workers with the underlying intention of making them less of a public health risk, which may destabilise the broader goal of destigmatisation in the sex worker rights movement.

The findings contribute to studies on sex worker peer projects within the growing body of literature on sex worker rights activism. In particular, I have expanded on Geymonat’s and Macioti’s (2016) research on sex worker professionalisation initiatives in Germany by further examining the approaches underpinning the concept of professionalisation. The study could have been strengthened by more participant-observation of the profiS workshops following the training seminar. However, due to time constraints during the fieldwork period, I was only able to conduct one workshop. Conducting more workshops would have enabled a more in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of the profiS method in the workshops themselves.

To conclude, I return to the perspective that promoting sex worker empowerment with the primary intention of improving public health may reproduce the stigma against sex workers as a high-risk group for public health. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the stigma and discrimination against sex workers have increased (International Committee of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), 2020). In Germany, sex workers were even called ‘super spreaders’ of the coronavirus by policymakers. ⁵ This was used to justify the long-term closure of sex work businesses, even when other businesses were allowed to re-open. As long as the stigma against sex workers as a major risk to public health persists, the more this stigma can be used against them, especially in times of crisis. Therefore, it is relevant to continue uncovering and questioning the processes through which this stigma is reproduced to prevent further marginalisation of sex workers.