Report: Estimating the size of the sex worker population in South Africa
As part of the research, sex workers were interviewed in 12 sites nationwide. Based on sex workers’ interviews and estimates of the number of peers working in the area, researchers estimated that about 153,000 sex workers are active in the country. Of this number,about five percent were estimated to be men and another four percent are transgendered.
Commissioned by the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), The research captures both street and brothel-based sex workers, as well as those working out of one adult store and via local internet sites.
Almost a quarter of all sex workers in South Africa operate in Gauteng province, according to the study that adds about 20 percent are located in KwaZulu-Natal province. Almost all other provinces accounted for about 10 percent of the total sex worker population each with the exception of the Northern Cape. The Northern Cape was home to only about four percent of all sex workers nationally.
According to a forward written by SANAC CEO Dr Fareed Abdullah, previously “no concerted effort had ever been made to estimate the total size of the sex worker population in the country.”
“This survey marks a new chapter in South Africa’s response to HIV and AIDS,” he adds.
Download the report: Sex Workers Size Estimation 2013
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Report: Estimating the size of the sex worker population in South Africa
by healthe, Health-e News
January 14, 2015