Cost of living crisis: Sheffield sex workers who escaped prostitution back on the streets to make ends meet

Sheffield Working Women's Opportunities Project, which supports 30-50 sex workers each week, offering food parcels, needle exchanges and benefit system support, claims women have been forced back onto the streets again because of cost of living increases.

Rosie Peers, specialist crisis support worker and deputy manager at the charity, said: “It is very difficult to exit prostitution, and we've seen that recently. A lot of people who know us from 15 or 20 years ago and have come back to sex work now to pay the bills.”

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According to a survey by Street Light UK, a frontline specialist support service providing women with pathways out of prostitution and violence, 90 per cent of female sex workers want to leave prostitution.

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SWWOP has launched a new hygiene project after noticing an increase in requests for basic personal hygiene items by users of the charity, who are prioritising other costs.

The project provides items such as shampoo, soap and cleaning products, including washing powder that works in cold water for those who cannot afford gas.

Ms Peers said: “Most of these women are in domestic abuse situations or have a pimp. There is usually a partner in the background making them work. They are not working for themselves but often to fund drug use.”

Only one or two of the weekly users of the charity will be non-drug users, the rest using heroin, crack cocaine, or prescription drugs, the charity says.

Ms Peers added: “Some are able to choose sex work, but it is important that we recognise that there are women who don't. They aren't doing it as a choice, they're doing it because if they don't, they're going to get battered.”

In the UK consenting adults selling or paying for sex is legal, but a number of related activities such as pimping, kerb crawling or managing a brothel are crimes.

SWWOP has seen sex work move off the streets and towards phone or internet sex work over the years, but this trend has been reversing more recently as many women are unable to pay the relevant phone and internet bills.

Some of the charity's clients had no internet access through the pandemic, and lost access to their benefits for missing meetings they did not know they had when the Department for Work and Pensions went online, SWOPP says.

Donna Thompson, a specialist crisis support worker at SWWOP, said: “It's about giving them a lifeline. You feel like you are keeping someone afloat.

“Just supplying them with toiletries and clean underwear lets them feel like they have got themselves in tact for the day ahead. They don't get dignity otherwise, so we get them that. It's a bit of recognition that they are human, that they are women.”

According to Street Light UK, around 105,000 individuals in the UK are involved in prostitution, the majority of these being women.

Ms Peers said: “There is absolutely no stereotype for who these women are, or who the punters are either. They can be literally anyone you see walking down the street. People are blind to it. Even in the neighbourhoods where it happens most, they just don't see it.”

“They are so strong, and so resilient. Awful things happen to these women on the streets,” she added.