Owning the narrative: a roundtable discussion on sex work, stigma, and resilience in the Baltics

Because of the pervasiveness of anti-sex work stigma in the region, Baltic sex workers' experiences are still underrepresented in both scholarly and activist literature. Produced in collaboration with two sex workers' rights organisations - the Sex Workers Alliance, based in Latvia, and Sex Workers Rights Lietuva, based in Lithuania - this paper focuses on Baltic sex workers' everyday realities, the issues they face, and their collective struggle for safer working conditions and for the destigmatisation of their work. Our work uses a roundtable methodology to explore the complexity of sex workers' experiences within the unique intersection of stigma, flawed legal frameworks, and economic precarity in the Baltics. By situating sex workers' experiences within the broader historical, geopolitical and socio-economic context of the region, the paper contributes to wider debates on gender, sexuality, labour and justice, and highlights the importance of knowledge co-creation.