Sex workers in Catalonia have created Spain’s first formal lobby group for the profession, with the aim of encouraging candidates in the upcoming municipal and regional elections to back them in their push to regulate the sector.



“We are the most stigmatised and criminalised group of women in society,” said Montse Neira, as she and other sex workers launched the Assembly of Sex Work Pro-rights Activists of Catalonia. “From now on, nobody else is going to speak for us.” The lobby group includes sex workers as well as others who work closely with them, such as lawyers and advocates.

The violence we face doesn’t come from clients, but from institutions that govern in the interest of a moral minority Paula Vip

As Catalonia gears up for municipal elections in late May and regional elections in September, the group will focus on lobbying candidates to recognise sex work as they would any other job, guaranteeing prostitutes’ basic labour rights, said Paula Ezkerra. “The first thing we’re looking to do is to recuperate our dignity.”

Prostitution in Spain exists in a legal limbo; while not illegal, it is not regulated in any way. In 2012, authorities in Barcelona sought to crack down on prostitution, introducing fines for clients and sex workers working on the street.

The law forced prostitutes to carry out their work in more precarious conditions, said Ezkerra, and in some cases led them to abandon their only means of earning an income. One of the priorities of the new group is to push the city to drop the 2012 laws.

The group is made up of several associations representing sex workers, which said they were spurred into action earlier this month after a building where 30 prostitutes had lived and worked for the past 13 years was boarded up. The city of Barcelona bought the building, in the El Raval neighbourhood, in December.

The incident is one of many in a disturbing trend, said Paula Vip. “The violence we face doesn’t come from our clients, but from the institutions that govern based on the interest of a moral minority.” She added, “From now on, we prostitutes will be organised, convinced, ready to fight and ready for war.”

The decision to form a lobby group comes after a pioneering ruling in February by a Spanish judge. In a judgment hailed by many sex workers as a crucial first step towards recognising the rights of those in the profession, the judge said that three women in a Barcelona brothel had a right to healthcare and benefits contributions from their employer.

A 2007 parliamentary report on prostitution – the latest figures available for the sector – estimated there are 400,000 sex workers in Spain. The number is thought to have swelled since then, as Spaniards struggle to cope with a crippling economic crisis that has left one in four unemployed. According to the Spanish government, the sector generates €3.8bn a year, much of it undeclared to authorities.

In 2006, a parliamentary commission began exploring the possibility of regulating the sector. The idea was later dropped, partly because of worries about the high number of women trafficked into the sector.

As the women behind Spain’s newest lobby group plotted out its course of action in the remaining months before the elections, Vip insisted that authorities must distinguish between those who engage in the profession willingly and those who are forced into it. “Otherwise it’s not prostitution, it’s slavery.”

By refusing to make this distinction, authorities are failing to adequately address the needs of either group, she said, and relegating sex workers like herself to the margins of society. “Prostitutes do not live in the sewers. We have our lives, we are free, we have our rights and we’re prepared to fight for them.”