Italy's sex workers fight for decriminalisation

For the first time in almost 20 years, sex workers in Italy gathered in the city of Bologna to discuss how the country's sex work legislation affects their daily lives.

Maria Pia Covre, better known as Pia, spent four decades working as a sex worker in Italy and almost as many years campaigning for better rights for herself and her colleagues in a country where, she says, stigma against the profession is still very strong.

This month, Carpet was among many sex workers who reunited in the city of Bologna to discuss how Italian prostitution laws are affecting their daily lives. It was the first such event organized in Italy in almost 20 years, symbolically timed to coincide with the International Day of Sex Workers - a date commemorating the occupation of the church in Lyon by hundreds of sex workers in 1975, calling for better working conditions.

This year's event, which followed a march through the streets of Bologna, brought together groups, associations and individuals of sex workers fed up with the country's jurisdictional approach to them, which has been fundamentally hostile since 1958, when Italy closed its "closed houses" , also known as "houses of tolerance".

These "homes", which were introduced in the late 1800s, allowed sex workers to meet with their clients in the safe space of the home, which was also their designated place of work.

Since then, sex workers in Italy have been forced to move to the streets, where conditions are often unsafe. According to a 2019 group studying human trafficking and sex trafficking in Italy and sex work, the majority of the country's sex workers who go out at night are 79.4% women. Many of them, 19.6%, are transgender women, one of the groups most vulnerable to gender-based violence.

At the same time that Italy decided to close "closed houses" with the Merlin Act of 1958, the country also introduced the crimes of exploitation, aiding and abetting prostitution, which means that any third party who is not a sex worker or their client can be prosecuted if she is found to be involved in the profits of prostitution.

This legislation can be used in a positive way when it aims to combat human trafficking and sexual exploitation, but it creates a lot of problems for sex workers. For example, a landlord who rents out his apartment to a sex worker can be sentenced to several years in prison if he is found to have knowledge of the nature of his tenant's job.

While sex work has remained technically legal for decades in Italy, sex workers complain that it is de facto criminalized due to legislation criminalizing the involvement of third parties.

“Our request is to decriminalize sex work,” Kovre said. “Sex workers are already punished by law. When you add to this the fact that sex workers, such as migrants, refugees or transgender people, may be more vulnerable, the situation becomes unbearably complicated.”

Italian sex workers are also calling for the elimination of stigma around the profession, normalization of the profession and becoming socially respectable so that they can pay taxes, rent housing or file a complaint with the police if they are attacked while working without fear of humiliation or ridicule.

"The problem with sex workers is that we are often seen as 'other', someone who can be treated like they're dangerous, different," Elettra Arazata, an Italian sex worker based in London, told Euronews. .

“We stand next to you in line at the supermarket, at the post office, outside the school to pick up our children; You may not know them, but there is probably a sex worker in your network of friends and acquaintances,” Arazata said. “We are an integral part of society, not others.”

The current law on prostitution, according to Elettra, isolates sex workers and prevents them from forming a solidarity network or cooperative where they can take care of each other.

European countries divided on how to tackle sex work as debate reaches EU parliament

Sex workers in Italy are asking the government for the country to follow in the footsteps of Belgium, which recently decriminalized sex work. Under this model, consenting adults can buy or sell sex without committing any crime, while laws against trafficking, violence, rape, and sex work involving minors remain in place.