Sex Work and the City - "We are tired of people speaking for us, blurring our reality, and making policy from ignorance and imagination"
Q&A with Valery Parra, President of the Sex Workers' Union of Antioquia, Sintrasexa
The Mayor of Medellín is cracking down on sex work: tourist area El Poblado is now under a six-month ban. This follows the arrest of a US citizen found with two children, aged 12 and 13, in a hotel room last month. Timothy Allan Livingston was released from custody and fled back to the USA.
Will these measures protect children from sexual crime? Why do media and politicians continue to conflate sexual exploitation of children and sex work? What are the risks and challenges faced by sex workers in Colombia? And what is the way forward for regulating this work and protecting its workers?
Valery Parra, President of Sex Workers’ Union Sintrasexa, told me about life as a sex worker and trans activist in Medellín, the challenges faced by sex workers, and how tired sex workers are of people speaking for them instead of listening and including them in debates and policymaking - plus how Mayor Federico Gutiérrez’s new measures won’t tackle the very serious issue of sexual exploitation of children.
What is life like for a sex worker in Medellín?
There is sex work everywhere in Colombia, but the dynamics vary from place to place.
Here in Medellín, it’s hard to be a sex worker because governments have tried to abolish, hide, end and cancel sex work. Sex work is not a crime – but we have never seen an integral or humanised response from institutions.
In Medellín, the armed and criminal groups are very visible: they control the spaces we work in, so we suffer their violence, and then get blamed for many of the bad things which happen in those spaces.
We want to work in safe places – but we are always pushed into more remote and unprotected ones, having to survive surrounded by violence, microtrafficking and narcotrafficking, then it’s us who end up with the stigma that we are bad and violent.
Governments left us at the mercy of criminal groups, and given a lot of visibility to sexual crimes, allowing those crimes to conflated with the sex work which is done by adults in a voluntary way.
Trans and gay people, anybody not conforming to heteronormativity, you can see that we face more violence, more violation of our rights, denied entry to motels etc. People link us to violence, and then we get sent back into violence by society. In a country like Colombia, we don’t have protection of our rights as LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people, who face violence, criminalisation, and often death.
What are the major challenges for sex workers in Colombia?
Our main challenge is how to get the national government to regulate sex work, and put labour safeguards and protections in place.
We at Sintrasexa are working on a legal project, a bill which we have presented to Congress. It has not yet been approved yet - they just keep legislating from a point of ignorance, still confusing sex crimes with sex work.
So we are seeking to educate the country’s institutions, to make clear that those are not the same dynamics, and that we also reject sexual crimes. We have to talk about regulation and guarantees.
The approval of this decree which we are proposing would open the door to a real public policy which would protect all of the forms and identities involved in sex work, with a gender perspective, in order to give real solutions.
You can’t make generalising decisions on the basis of ignorance.
A fundamental challenge is to demand a dialogue table – inter-sectoral, inter-institutional, and permanent – to create a local agenda where we can take action so that they don’t keep speaking or trying to make decisions or solve our problems without our voices.
Our situation changes all the time, but successive governments have failed to understand the law: Sentence T-629 of 2010 in particular demands protection of this population.
What misconceptions do people hold about about sex work?
Society still sees us from an abolitionist point of view – as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’, but we are not all victims or survivors. Those who identity in that way have not done this work voluntarily - they have been coerced. We must not confuse these two realities, or make either group invisible in these conversations.
Due to the lack of regulation, we do risk ending up in a situation of human trafficking or pimping, and we can be victims of sexual crimes, but with regulation we could avoid that. We need to identify the criminals groups responsible for those crimes.
The debate is happening in an anti-rights and whorephobic way – they make us scapegoats. We need to teach people – to educate, and with state support.
Let’s talk about SintraSexa - when did the union form?
Sintrasexa arose during the last mayorship in Medellín – that of Daniel Quintero – when they closed Plaza Botero and Parque Lleras to us.
It was a direct persecution of sex workers. They think about areas foreigners go to, and how to attract them to those areas, and they don’t think about who it affects – or about who their policy failures affect either.
It was a violation of rights, so we decided to join together. We didn’t know what we were going to do at that point, how we would join up, but we wanted to come together as sex workers and speak for ourselves.
Our first meeting was September 2022, and we’ve regularly met since, once we realised that a union was the best way to organise. As a union we can create petitions with juridical weight which people take notice of, and we can demand our rights. Together we can demand respect and protection.
We were tired of other organisations speaking for us, and blurring our reality – they even complicate our reality by speaking from pure imagination – confusing and equating sex crimes with sex work, often from an abolitionist lens.
We met with the Minster of Work, and the Comunes Party supported us too, helping us form the group, training us in law, feminism, advocacy, human rights. We got stronger.
We are making alliances with food provision and health groups, looking to have our needs met – the ones governments have failed to meet.
We are trying to heal the debt which we are owed: a dignified life.
It was me who called the first meeting, but I have been an activist for 15 years – 10 of those here in Medellín. The union later had an election for the Presidency, which I won. I’m bringing my years of expertise to this struggle: I communicate assertively and have a lot of background in advocacy.
I also run an organisation for trans people called Petra – Personas en Tránsito – we are thrown into the periphery of society by the lack of opportunities we are given, it’s always hairdressing or sex work for us. Petra is working to combat that.
The day I decided to raise my voice, I realised that my reality is the reality of many. But when you become a leader, your life changes. You become more visible, more politicised. This means the violence against you also increases. It’s complex.
And it’s complex because activism doesn’t generate income either. Some manage to join with institutions or companies, but most of us don’t - we do it off our own backs.
Life changes when you fight for yourself and others – occupying spaces of debate and dialogue where they don’t recognise your effort or your work. It can be tough.
What are your hopes for the new Mayor, Federico Gutiérrez? And what are your concerns so far?
We want space to debate where you can hear our voices – all of the actors: principally the voices of workers from all types of sex work. We want an open space to be heard and construct projects and institutional offers based on our reality.
It’s not the same to talk about sex work in the street, sex work in establishments, and sex work via webcam – we have different needs and face different types of violence.
It's fundamental that this new Mayor guarantees our rights under the country’s laws. You are not allowed to criminalise or persecute people who exercise sex work freely and voluntarily.
We are worried Gutierrez is giving more space to abolitionism – they want to criminalise us. There’s a hateful discourse which seeks to blame us, as sex workers, for sexual crimes, for sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.
We are not to blame for those dynamics of those criminal groups, for the people behind those crimes.
There is a project related to sex work in the mayorship, but its objectives are so detached from our reality - it’s punitive - it helps women who leave sex work, with no interest in those of us who stay in it.
What do you make of the new ban on sex work in El Poblado?
It confuses sex crimes and voluntary sex work, and it feeds his discourse of hate – meaning society – in the streets and on social media, continues the narrative of persecution and violence against us, blaming us for things for the current situation - the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents, as if it was being run by us.
We profoundly reject Gutiérrez’s new ban on sex work in El Poblado - it claims to protect children, but it punishes and criminalises us.
This decree has come out of the discovery of sexual exploitation of two children in a hotel in El Poblado at the end of March – but we haven’t seen any real investigation into that crime.
Those ‘services’ are not contracted in the street – they aren’t even done from the parks which they have closed . They haven’t even found out where he managed to contact those children.
I have also heard that one of those children was a trans child – but the Mayor hasn’t mentioned it. Human rights for trans people are easily violated here – and it raises the question of how early in life our bodies are sexualised, and how little institutions care when those bodies are violated.
Gutiérrez has also newly restricted closing times of bars in the sector – a pilot project – at 1am, and now those business owners are blaming sex workers for their losses of income.
And it won’t solve anything – they are just displacing the problem elsewhere to more remote places, exposing us to more violence and making us an easy target for gangs.
What would you say to foreigners who come to the city and pay for sex?
This is a key question: our clients are also persecuted - both local and foreign. There should be guarantees for them too.
We do have to speak about that other reality, in which a lot of the time gangs take advantage of those men, to kidnap and extort them. Then we end up getting blamed again.
They should take measures and be careful of how and where they get a service, so that they don’t end up subject to armed groups or end up believing that sex workers are criminals.
And they should use sexual services respectfully, in a humanised way, respectfully to the service provider.
Children DO NOT provide sexual services. They are children and they must be respected. They are not for your sexual service.
We also reject the ‘Tinder Murders’ – those foreign men murdered in Medellin earlier this year by women they had met on dating apps – any violence against human beings is rejected.
But it’s clear hypocrisy: the media make a lot of noise when they kill a foreigner, but when they kill a sex worker or a trans person, it’s invisible – nobody cares.
All lives matter, we are all worthy of protection. We need protection of our rights and humanity.
What kinds of policies would really help protect sex workers?
Despite the legal framework, we have been treated punitively and in a criminalising way by local government, confusing sex crimes and sex work - and generating violence against us.
A lot of these policies also threaten personal expression: if you criminalise any woman who wears something expressive, low-cut, fishnets etc, you’re criminalising women’s self-expression.
This new decree for El Poblado, it’s a form of violence, it’s denying families their income and it is not solving the issue, just sending us into more violence and feeding the online discourse which blames us for sexual crimes.
We aren’t responsible, neither are we the competent authority to deal with those crimes.
Sintrasexa rejects exploitation of children and adolescents as well as the sexual exploitation of adults, and pimping – all of which are crimes.
TRANSLATION
PRESS RELEASE
For the Defence of the Rights of Sex Workers in Medellín
Medellín, 12 March 2024
SINTRASEXA opposes the punitive measures of criminalisation of poverty, stigmatisation and marginalisation of a group of the population subject to special constitutional protection that has historically been infringed upon and violated by the Colombian State, especially by the Mayor's Office of the municipality of Medellin. The Mayor's Office of Medellín is being questioned for its lack of transparency and action in relation to the current situation of sex workers and the issue of trafficking and sexual exploitation in the city.
Despite the importance and seriousness of the issue, the municipal administration has not provided accurate figures or adequately identified the criminal groups involved in trafficking and sexual exploitation networks, as well as the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, relying solely on punitive measures and criminalisation against sex workers.
As sex workers, we reject all forms of sexual exploitation and human trafficking. It is essential that regulations aimed at eradicating these practices do not curtail individual freedoms or contradict the recognition and protection granted by the Constitutional Court to sex work. It is alarming that, while this is happening, the Mayor's Office has not issued any statement regarding the femicides and transfemicides that have affected our fellow sex workers this year.
The Constitutional Court sets clear limits on the exercise of sex work, ensuring that it is carried out autonomously and voluntarily, free from any form of exploitation. We recognise the importance of protecting minors and those who do not have full decision-making capacity, but we also emphasise that the State must respect and protect those who have decided to exercise this work in a conscious and voluntary manner. And the Mayor's Office of Medellín is not the exception: during the first months of Federico Gutiérrez's government he has been characterised by exceeding the competences of his mayoralty, going beyond constitutional rights and guarantees.
It is the responsibility of the State, through territorial entities such as the Mayor's Office of Medellin, to guarantee access to opportunities that allow people to make free decisions in all aspects of their lives, including the workplace. It is not a matter of imposing punitive measures, but of offering accompaniment and support to those who require it, always respecting their autonomy and decision.
It is imperative to understand that the lawfulness of sex work cannot be determined by moral norms or outdated traditions, but by the free and reasoned exercise of sex workers. In a secular and pluralistic state such as ours, it is crucial to protect and defend the rights of all citizens, including sex workers.
We demand that the Mayor's Office of Medellín take concrete measures to address this issue, providing protection and guarantees to sex workers and actively combating sex trafficking and exploitation in the city, without stigmatising, marginalising, criminalising or making voluntary sex work a punitive matter. We commit to continue fighting for our rights and to work together with the authorities to find effective and just solutions.
SINTRASEXA
Sex Workers’ Union of Antioquia | sintrasexa@gmail.com | 304 218 6367