New report from Pro Sentret, Norway https://prosentret.no/en/ summing up the experiences from one year with Covid-19 pandemic.
“By the time of the publishing of this report, we have lived with a global pandemic for around 18 months and it will continue to affect us for months or years to come. The first few months of the pandemic where confusing times with many regulations that directly and indirectly affected people who sell sex. In the summer of 2020, Pro Sentret published the report The exclusion of persons who sell sexual services in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic: Experiences from the field in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.1 The report dealt with the experiences of Pro Sentret and other service providers in Norway and the Nordic countries during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This report is a follow-up on the report from 2020 and covers the period June 2020-June 2021.
Marginalised groups tends to be both overlooked and more severely affected in times of upheaval. This has also been the case for people who sell sex during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first report showed how persons selling sex were excluded in the initial handling of the pandemic, and a lack of concrete regulation and guidelines for this group. It also highlights some of the more unintended effects of the COVID-19 pandemic such as increased police activity and the consequences from a stricter migration policy. Migration policy in particular, highly affected persons who sell sex due to the fact that most of the people selling sex both in Norway and in the Nordic countries are migrants.
Although the pandemic is still ongoing by the time of the publication of this report, history has shown that memories tend to be short, especially when marginalised and vulnerable groups are concerned. The report is a contribution to future assessments of the Norwegian handling of the pandemic in relation to vulnerable groups. Through the efforts and experiences made by service providers, we wish to show how the pandemic and the government’s handling of it has affected persons who sell sex in Norway and the Nordic counties. The report also emphasize how public discord, both media coverage and framing, in combinations with authorities communications, affects people selling sex.”