Much of this has been more positive to sex workers, …and both their tone and rhetoric have become more tolerant," Marina Avramenko of the Russian Forum of Sex Workers, which offers legal consultancy and support to sex workers, told IPS. She added: "Sometimes media outlets conduct informal opinion polls about attitudes in society towards sex work and according to the results of these informal surveys, it is evident that more people have begun to talk about the need to allow sex work.
This is down in part to the influence of the Orthodox Church, which has grown in popularity in the decades since the fall of communism, on society and government policy. As with many other minority groups, such as the LGBTI community, sex workers have been demonised by the clergy. Politicians also often publicly speak of sex workers in derogative or sometimes violently hostile terms. International rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch , have repeatedly highlighted the effects of criminalisation of sex work.
They point out it often leaves sex workers with no protection from police, unable to report crimes against them during their work for fear of getting a criminal record, or having their earnings confiscated or their work reported to others. This means that the perpetrators of the crimes against them know they can act with impunity, while police can also abuse, extort or physically and sexually assault them with equal impunity.
Indeed, this is often the case in Russia. According to the Russian Forum of Sex Workers, informal surveys have shown that in about 80 percent of police raids on brothels or independent sex workers' establishments, officers beat sex workers. Some sex workers also recount horrific incidents they know of colleagues gang-raped by police, or held for days at police stations and beaten and starved. Because of this, sex workers seldom report crimes to police. And, even if they do, these are rarely, or poorly investigated.
Evgenia Maron of the Russian Forum of Sex Workers' Executive Committee, spoke to IPS about some of the cases which the group had been involved in, including that of sex worker from Gelendzhik who was raped. Investigators refused to initiate proceedings against her attacker on the grounds that "the applicant provides sexual services, which means that the perpetrator's actions are not socially dangerous". He was eventually jailed for five years after Russia's Commissioner for Human Rights intervened.
