Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) Shadow Report: Removal of Recommendation to Criminalise clients (2018)
The Women’s Resource Centre (WRC) draft shadow report to CEDAW initially included the recommendation to criminalise sex workers’ clients through adopting a “sex-buyer law” in England and Wales. The ECP alerted its network and coordinated complaints en masse from sex workers who argued they had been ignored.
While the recommendation for the criminalisation of clients was successfully removed in the final Shadow Report, the new wording still problematically categorised prostitution as violence – ‘We recommend that the government recognise prostitution as a form of violence against women and girls, rather than legitimising the purchase of access to women’s bodies as a form of commerce.’.