Maternity leave and ongoing consent: New rights for Belgium's sex workers

A new law gives some sex workers in Belgium more protection from exploitation and violence and more social benefits than any other similar legislation in the world, rights researchers and advocates say.

Belgium decriminalized sex work in 2022, a first for Europe. Under this new labor law, which passed in May and took effect Sunday, sex workers can choose to sign a formal employment contract -- although they do not have to do so.

"It is the most comprehensive labor law related to sex work that we have seen globally," said Erin Kilbride, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who focuses on women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

A labor contract will give sex workers of all genders, as it does other employees, broader access to the country's robust social security system, including paid maternity leave and sick leave, unemployment aid and the ability to make pension contributions.

The new law also focuses explicitly on protecting people who sell sex on the job by requiring ongoing and specific consent: Sex workers who sign contracts can refuse clients, refuse to do certain acts and interrupt acts -- without facing negative consequences from their employer.

They will also have workplace safety regulations, like emergency buttons in rooms where they see clients. They also gain broader protections against unlawful termination or forms of exploitation by an employer. And the law bars anyone who has been convicted of rape, homicide, trafficking and other violent offenses from employing sex workers.

"The law responds directly to what sexual exploitation often looks like in practice," Kilbride said, adding, "The list of rights and freedoms it affords sex workers are refreshingly practical and long overdue."

Kilbride described Belgian law as more expansive and more worker-centric than those in other countries where sex work is also legal.

Still, many of the most vulnerable sex workers are not eligible for contracts, perhaps because they do not have legal residency status. They will not be able to access all the protections available to contracted workers under the law.

And not all organizations agree with decriminalization. Isala, a Belgian organization that supports sex workers, although not their profession, condemned the law, which it described as the legalization of pimping. Isala said it normalizes sex work itself, which it calls prostitution and argues is exploitative.

"When Isala's volunteers meet women on the streets, the most recurrent sentences they hear are: 'I want a normal job, a normal life' or 'I would not do this if I had the choice,'" Isala said in a statement, adding that the law is "is entirely disconnected from the lived realities of most people involved in prostitution."

Members of the Belgian government acknowledged that sex workers are often vulnerable or are forced into the job.

"Whilst we recognize that not all sex workers perform their activities out of their own free will, we argue that it is much more difficult to get into contact and inform sex workers about their rights when they hide their activities," Sandrine Daoud, a spokesperson for the Belgian health minister, wrote in an email.

By allowing legal sex work and giving workers protection, she wrote, "we hope to enable all sex workers who want to leave the sector to do so."

For many sex workers, the law -- which builds on the decriminalization -- is an opening to a safer way to work and more access to the formal economy. Several Belgian advocacy groups, including UTSOPI, a Belgian sex work union, pushed for and helped to design the law.

Daan Bauwens, a leader of UTSOPI, estimated that there are between 8,000 and 26,000 sex workers in the country, though he said there was no official count.

He said that before the law passed, some had to work into their 70s because they did not have a pension, and others worked through their pregnancies because their employers forced them to or they had no paid maternity leave. Others, he said, have had to pay for housing with garbage bags of cash because they could not obtain proof of income. (Sex workers have long struggled to open bank accounts.)

Now, Bauwens said, more protections are available to people who work in what some call the oldest profession in the world. People are always going to buy and sell sex, he said, so sex workers should at least get sick days and pensions, like any legal employee in Belgium.

"Sex work is not a glamorous business," he said, which is precisely why they need access to stronger labor rights. "We are not saying it is a job as any other," he said, "but we say that sex workers deserve protection -- as any other worker."