Nawara Women’s Network for the Middle East and North Africa wants to give women in all our diversity a way report violence and seek help. In 2022, during the strategic planning process, Nawara members exhibited strong support for the creation of a tool to collect information about violence against sex workers, because sex workers face significant risks including gender-based violence—particularly those who engage in prostitution, which is criminalized in many places. Sex workers are typically motivated by the need to earn income. During economic lean times, such as recessions, sex workers like others may have declining income, and research already shows that limiting income may have had ripple effects; for example, literature demonstrates that less monetary income can lead to sex workers accepting riskier interactions and this may include risk of violence. Street-based sex workers have more frequent interactions with police, including arrest; this may in turn increase their risks for violence, stigma, and arrest.
Longtime Nawara supporter Melissa Ditmore developed a prototype data collection tool in English. ReportVASW is a website, not an app, so nothing needs to be downloaded; it is not be stored on a person’s phone or other device. ReportVASW was translated into Arabic and French, and Nawara members expressed a desire to have a single trilingual version, so all three languages appear together. Nawara member Tahani Abbas of Sudan did the Arabic translation, and the language was fine-tuned with the Nawara secretariat in April 2024. The tri-lingual survey asks whether the violence was online (e.g. sharing personal information) or in real life (e.g. physical violence), what happened, where, and whether the survivor would like to be contacted by Nawara.
Nawara Coordinator Amal ElKarouaoui successfully applied for funding from Association for Progressive Communication’s (APC) small grants program conduct “beta testing”. In technology fields, beta testing is the practice run before software or an application is implemented. After this test with sex workers from across Morocco, Nawara will test again with sex workers in other parts of the region. At that point it will be time to go live and then Nawara can explore ways to expand across the region and to include more general GBV. Moving ahead, we will evaluate how easy it is to use, and offer input on how to improve the user interface, what questions to ask, and how to phrase them. Then we will ask sex workers in Morocco to try to answer the questions with information taken from a real-life situation. All the information collected will be used to improve ReportVASW. Then we will open it to a small number of sex workers near the Nawara office for a pilot study, to help fine-tune and prepare to launch. Sex workers are not the only people affected by gender-based violence, and so, Nawara is considering how to adapt the tool for broader use and how to support people throughout the MENA region.
