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Portugal

Articles by Portugal

Red umbrellas - sex workers' rights
20 December 2023

Supporting the health and safety of sex workers in Portugal

Providing healthcare and support to the sex worker community has been part of the work of APF, IPPF's Portuguese member, for over 20 years. The organisation’s northern regional delegation, APF Norte, has been operating Espaço Pessoa – a service providing care to sex workers and people who use drugs - in Porto since 1997. We spoke to Alexandra Ramos and Jorge Martins from APF Norte about Espaço Pessoa’s work. Espaço Pessoa has both a community centre and a street team working on the ground with people who do sex work. In addition to specialised psychology, nursing and social services, the centre’s users have access to changing rooms, clothing, and laundry facilities. Meanwhile, the street team provide sex workers with contraceptive care, information, and advice on STIs, as well as essential screening tests for syphilis, HIV and Hepatitis C, and vaccinations. By listening actively to the concerns and difficulties of the communities they support, they are able to build trust, to talk to people about their social rights, provide crucial psychosocial support and make referrals to more formal support services when necessary. Over the last decade, Espaço Pessoa’s team has observed a massive shift from people working on the street to indoor sex work. This is particularly true for trans sex workers, who face multiple layers of stigma and high levels of violence. Alexandra Ramos said, ‘Although when they are inside, sex workers are more protected from the everyday verbal abuse they face on the street, in many ways their vulnerability has increased; there is little to no protection from violent clients when working alone in an apartment.’ Legal framework falls far short of protecting sex workers Sex work is not criminalised within the Penal Code in Portugal. However, the law states that third parties are not permitted to profit from, promote, encourage or facilitate prostitution, which was originally intended to prohibit brothels and pimping. In some cases, this can be problematic for sex workers wishing to work together or in collective settings. Public and political discourse is very much focused on defining women who do sex work as victims, or conflating sex work with trafficking, despite these being two distinct issues. This perpetuates the notion that sex work can never be a choice; the reality is it is still not recognised as work. The Constitutional Court issued a statement in May 2023 in favour of sex workers’ rights, stating that criminalising all third parties without distinguishing between exploitative and non-exploitative ones is unconstitutional. Although this is a welcome move, APF believes that the national legal framework still has a long way to go to support sex workers, and underlines that there is still a lot of social and political division. Language plays a big part, and APF explains that the term sex work, preferred by the people who do the work, affirms the agency of sex workers and helps to destigmatise both the work and those who do it.  Sex workers experience many, often intersecting, systemic inequalities and oppressions, and the criminalisation of aspects of their work exposes them to high levels of violence and rights violations. APF explains that in Portugal, undocumented sex workers are at particular risk because of their lack of access to social rights, together with the current legal context and the social stigma that they face. These factors mean that they rarely report incidents to police for fear of repercussions. Many of those now engaging in sex work are non-nationals, predominantly from Brazil, which means most fall through the cracks. Jorge Martins underlined the difficulty in providing care for those excluded by the system: ‘Undocumented people face the greatest difficulties in accessing social and healthcare services. Unfortunately, referral becomes very difficult, which places them in increasingly marginalised, hidden and helpless spaces.’ At least, according to APF, migrant sex workers are rarely targeted by law enforcement and a service providing some healthcare for sex workers is provided within Portugal’s national healthcare system, although access becomes much more complicated in cases where coordination and referral to other services is required.   Adapting to the changing needs of sex working people Sex workers are some of the most marginalised and socially stigmatised groups in Portugal. The transient nature of their work means some lead extremely solitary lives. Alexandra said: “People are socially isolated, and many of them move from city to city, and room to room, without creating any links outside of the local bus station or airport. Opportunities to establish social support networks are increasingly few, particularly outside of the sex work circuit. Homelessness has also become an increasingly big problem with rent hikes making access to housing a massive barrier.” In response to changing needs, APF Norte has considerably increased the number of shifts of its street team, and initial contact is typically made through consulting sex workers’ adverts online.  Through their continuous presence, they have established a good level of trust with the sex worker community. Crucial to that is the presence in their team of a peer educator who has firsthand experience of sex work and is therefore able to play the role of trusted mediator with some members of the community, working in close collaboration with the technical team. APF’s approach has enabled it to support people with interventions that go beyond the delivery of contraceptives. Empowerment and education are key to eradicating stigma Espaço Pessoa tends to reach sex workers who have no other support system, so their outreach places a great deal of emphasis on empowerment. Sex workers navigate legally precarious territory, which means many have internalised stigma. Ingrained perceptions make some more likely to accept being subjected to sexual and physical violence, and/or non-consensual sexual practices. The Espaço Pessoa team works to build awareness of these issues amongst sex workers by educating them on their human rights, teaching them to recognise harmful behaviour, as well as deconstructing the myths and underlying prejudices surrounding sex work, always with a commitment to supporting the needs and autonomy of each person they reach. *** Read more about IPPF’s global policy position on sex work, which strongly supports decriminalisation of all aspects of sex work, together with social policies that address structural inequalities, as the only way to protect the health, safety and lives of those who do sex work.  Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash  

Young people in sexuality education session
15 December 2022

Sexuality education, gender equality and SGBV - a study of knowledge and attitudes in Portugal

Sexuality and relationships education is a vital tool for promoting gender equality and preventing gender-based violence among young people and within our societies more broadly. School environments are in a privileged position to reach young people and facilitate the development of fundamental life skills, attitudes, knowledge, and values. In particular, during compulsory schooling, there is a window of opportunity for schools to make a strong contribution to building students' skills and awareness of social inequalities and discrimination and empowering them with knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about their lives. In 2022, IPPF EN commissioned a baseline study to assess knowledge, attitudes and comfort relating to gender equality and prevention of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) among students, parents and teachers in northern Portugal. The findings of the baseline study can be downloaded below, together with a 1-page summary of the project.   We will continue to build on this study over the coming 3 years, measuring the impact of our gender transformative sexuality education programme delivered in school settings in Portugal. Going beyond the traditional focus on health outcomes of sexuality education, we aim to study the immediate and long-term effect on young people’s knowledge, attitudes and values regarding gender equality. The evidence we intend to provide is that that gender transformative sex and relationships education is key to the prevention of SGBV.

SGBV toolkit
09 December 2021

Safe from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence - toolkit

This is the Safe from sexual and gender-based violence (SfSGBV) toolkit. Its main purpose is to guide the delivery of sexuality education sessions that support young people at risk of marginalization to recognize and protect themselves from SGBV. The toolkit is designed for the use of experienced sexuality education educators. Equally, it is a valuable resource for young people interested to learn more about prevention of sexual and gender-based violence.   You can learn from the toolkit either through our interactive website or by downloading the resource below.

London_Brook_RSE_61039_IPPF_Laura Lewis_UK_IPPF.jpg
14 January 2022

Safe from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Our 2019-2021 project addresses sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a barrier to the social inclusion of young people. We know well that the groups who are already the most marginalized in Europe are also those who are most at risk of SGBV. YSAFE, IPPF EN’s regional youth network, formed a coalition to take action, joining forces in Portugal, Serbia and Romania with three community-focused organizations engaged in supporting young LGBTQ* people, young Roma people, and young women and others at risk of gender-based discrimination. Together, we have produced a comprehensive toolkit including 38 full new workshop plans and thorough advice on combining them into an appropriate series to respond to a target group's needs. It covers all major current SGBV issues, including SGBV topics that are often left behind in classical sexuality education. There is extensive guidance on how to deliver the toolkit workshops digitally as well as in person, and new monitoring and evaluation tools to measure the effectiveness of the toolkit activities when they are used online. We analysed the effect of our piloting on over 320 young people and have proven that our tool delivers real impact in shifting attitudes and increasing competencies around recognizing and preventing SGBV. Young educators in the three countries have had their capacities raised to deliver workshops using the toolkit, and our dissemination activities have resulted in many more organizations in the EU and beyond incorporating the new toolkit into their existing programme of educational activities. You can learn more about the process and its results directly from some of the young people involved, who collaborated on a mini-series of episodes of YSAFE’s podcast.

young people
14 January 2022

Sharing Innovations

YSAFE, IPPF EN’s youth network, created the project “Sharing Innovations” as a response to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the impact they had on the delivery of relationship and sexuality education (RSE). It is an Erasmus+ project aiming to improve access to sexuality education online. We are collaborating with seven national sexual and reproductive health and rights organizations (IPPF EN members in Portugal, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, North Macedonia, Latvia, Serbia) and the End FGM EU network to create a new set of guidelines on delivering safe and effective digital sexuality education. It will incorporate everything that we have learned during the first year of the pandemic about pivoting quickly to online RSE delivery into a user-friendly tool. Young sexuality educators will be testing the tool out in 6-month programmes of activities they will design themselves, focused on different national priorities around sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) prevention. We expect the results to be published in the summer of 2022.

Associação Para o Planeamento da Família

Associação para o Planeamento da Família – APF (Association for Family Planning) is an NGO, established in 1967 with health purposes, whose mission is to help people to make free and responsible sexual and reproductive choices and to promote positive parenting.

APF develops activities around Portugal national territory through its six regional delegations. The Member Association teams engage more than 100 professionals and voluntaries from several domains of social intervention: health, education, community and youth intervention.

APF’s history has been always linked to the fight for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Since its establishment, APF has played a leading role in matters concerning Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE), Safe Abortion, Prevention and Combat of Trafficking in Human Beings (THB), Early and Forced Marriages and Female Genital Mutilation. APF services target vulnerable people such as sex workers, drug users, migrants and ethnic minorities but also young people, families and professionals of several areas.

The Member Association also promotes knowledge through investigation (diagnoses and new intervention strategies) and disseminates its results through their website, social networks, media and scientific events. Over the years, APF has been advocating in public policies concerning sexual and reproductive rights issues as human rights matters.

Contact: Instagram

Red umbrellas - sex workers' rights
20 December 2023

Supporting the health and safety of sex workers in Portugal

Providing healthcare and support to the sex worker community has been part of the work of APF, IPPF's Portuguese member, for over 20 years. The organisation’s northern regional delegation, APF Norte, has been operating Espaço Pessoa – a service providing care to sex workers and people who use drugs - in Porto since 1997. We spoke to Alexandra Ramos and Jorge Martins from APF Norte about Espaço Pessoa’s work. Espaço Pessoa has both a community centre and a street team working on the ground with people who do sex work. In addition to specialised psychology, nursing and social services, the centre’s users have access to changing rooms, clothing, and laundry facilities. Meanwhile, the street team provide sex workers with contraceptive care, information, and advice on STIs, as well as essential screening tests for syphilis, HIV and Hepatitis C, and vaccinations. By listening actively to the concerns and difficulties of the communities they support, they are able to build trust, to talk to people about their social rights, provide crucial psychosocial support and make referrals to more formal support services when necessary. Over the last decade, Espaço Pessoa’s team has observed a massive shift from people working on the street to indoor sex work. This is particularly true for trans sex workers, who face multiple layers of stigma and high levels of violence. Alexandra Ramos said, ‘Although when they are inside, sex workers are more protected from the everyday verbal abuse they face on the street, in many ways their vulnerability has increased; there is little to no protection from violent clients when working alone in an apartment.’ Legal framework falls far short of protecting sex workers Sex work is not criminalised within the Penal Code in Portugal. However, the law states that third parties are not permitted to profit from, promote, encourage or facilitate prostitution, which was originally intended to prohibit brothels and pimping. In some cases, this can be problematic for sex workers wishing to work together or in collective settings. Public and political discourse is very much focused on defining women who do sex work as victims, or conflating sex work with trafficking, despite these being two distinct issues. This perpetuates the notion that sex work can never be a choice; the reality is it is still not recognised as work. The Constitutional Court issued a statement in May 2023 in favour of sex workers’ rights, stating that criminalising all third parties without distinguishing between exploitative and non-exploitative ones is unconstitutional. Although this is a welcome move, APF believes that the national legal framework still has a long way to go to support sex workers, and underlines that there is still a lot of social and political division. Language plays a big part, and APF explains that the term sex work, preferred by the people who do the work, affirms the agency of sex workers and helps to destigmatise both the work and those who do it.  Sex workers experience many, often intersecting, systemic inequalities and oppressions, and the criminalisation of aspects of their work exposes them to high levels of violence and rights violations. APF explains that in Portugal, undocumented sex workers are at particular risk because of their lack of access to social rights, together with the current legal context and the social stigma that they face. These factors mean that they rarely report incidents to police for fear of repercussions. Many of those now engaging in sex work are non-nationals, predominantly from Brazil, which means most fall through the cracks. Jorge Martins underlined the difficulty in providing care for those excluded by the system: ‘Undocumented people face the greatest difficulties in accessing social and healthcare services. Unfortunately, referral becomes very difficult, which places them in increasingly marginalised, hidden and helpless spaces.’ At least, according to APF, migrant sex workers are rarely targeted by law enforcement and a service providing some healthcare for sex workers is provided within Portugal’s national healthcare system, although access becomes much more complicated in cases where coordination and referral to other services is required.   Adapting to the changing needs of sex working people Sex workers are some of the most marginalised and socially stigmatised groups in Portugal. The transient nature of their work means some lead extremely solitary lives. Alexandra said: “People are socially isolated, and many of them move from city to city, and room to room, without creating any links outside of the local bus station or airport. Opportunities to establish social support networks are increasingly few, particularly outside of the sex work circuit. Homelessness has also become an increasingly big problem with rent hikes making access to housing a massive barrier.” In response to changing needs, APF Norte has considerably increased the number of shifts of its street team, and initial contact is typically made through consulting sex workers’ adverts online.  Through their continuous presence, they have established a good level of trust with the sex worker community. Crucial to that is the presence in their team of a peer educator who has firsthand experience of sex work and is therefore able to play the role of trusted mediator with some members of the community, working in close collaboration with the technical team. APF’s approach has enabled it to support people with interventions that go beyond the delivery of contraceptives. Empowerment and education are key to eradicating stigma Espaço Pessoa tends to reach sex workers who have no other support system, so their outreach places a great deal of emphasis on empowerment. Sex workers navigate legally precarious territory, which means many have internalised stigma. Ingrained perceptions make some more likely to accept being subjected to sexual and physical violence, and/or non-consensual sexual practices. The Espaço Pessoa team works to build awareness of these issues amongst sex workers by educating them on their human rights, teaching them to recognise harmful behaviour, as well as deconstructing the myths and underlying prejudices surrounding sex work, always with a commitment to supporting the needs and autonomy of each person they reach. *** Read more about IPPF’s global policy position on sex work, which strongly supports decriminalisation of all aspects of sex work, together with social policies that address structural inequalities, as the only way to protect the health, safety and lives of those who do sex work.  Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash  

Young people in sexuality education session
15 December 2022

Sexuality education, gender equality and SGBV - a study of knowledge and attitudes in Portugal

Sexuality and relationships education is a vital tool for promoting gender equality and preventing gender-based violence among young people and within our societies more broadly. School environments are in a privileged position to reach young people and facilitate the development of fundamental life skills, attitudes, knowledge, and values. In particular, during compulsory schooling, there is a window of opportunity for schools to make a strong contribution to building students' skills and awareness of social inequalities and discrimination and empowering them with knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about their lives. In 2022, IPPF EN commissioned a baseline study to assess knowledge, attitudes and comfort relating to gender equality and prevention of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) among students, parents and teachers in northern Portugal. The findings of the baseline study can be downloaded below, together with a 1-page summary of the project.   We will continue to build on this study over the coming 3 years, measuring the impact of our gender transformative sexuality education programme delivered in school settings in Portugal. Going beyond the traditional focus on health outcomes of sexuality education, we aim to study the immediate and long-term effect on young people’s knowledge, attitudes and values regarding gender equality. The evidence we intend to provide is that that gender transformative sex and relationships education is key to the prevention of SGBV.

SGBV toolkit
09 December 2021

Safe from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence - toolkit

This is the Safe from sexual and gender-based violence (SfSGBV) toolkit. Its main purpose is to guide the delivery of sexuality education sessions that support young people at risk of marginalization to recognize and protect themselves from SGBV. The toolkit is designed for the use of experienced sexuality education educators. Equally, it is a valuable resource for young people interested to learn more about prevention of sexual and gender-based violence.   You can learn from the toolkit either through our interactive website or by downloading the resource below.

London_Brook_RSE_61039_IPPF_Laura Lewis_UK_IPPF.jpg
14 January 2022

Safe from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

Our 2019-2021 project addresses sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) as a barrier to the social inclusion of young people. We know well that the groups who are already the most marginalized in Europe are also those who are most at risk of SGBV. YSAFE, IPPF EN’s regional youth network, formed a coalition to take action, joining forces in Portugal, Serbia and Romania with three community-focused organizations engaged in supporting young LGBTQ* people, young Roma people, and young women and others at risk of gender-based discrimination. Together, we have produced a comprehensive toolkit including 38 full new workshop plans and thorough advice on combining them into an appropriate series to respond to a target group's needs. It covers all major current SGBV issues, including SGBV topics that are often left behind in classical sexuality education. There is extensive guidance on how to deliver the toolkit workshops digitally as well as in person, and new monitoring and evaluation tools to measure the effectiveness of the toolkit activities when they are used online. We analysed the effect of our piloting on over 320 young people and have proven that our tool delivers real impact in shifting attitudes and increasing competencies around recognizing and preventing SGBV. Young educators in the three countries have had their capacities raised to deliver workshops using the toolkit, and our dissemination activities have resulted in many more organizations in the EU and beyond incorporating the new toolkit into their existing programme of educational activities. You can learn more about the process and its results directly from some of the young people involved, who collaborated on a mini-series of episodes of YSAFE’s podcast.

young people
14 January 2022

Sharing Innovations

YSAFE, IPPF EN’s youth network, created the project “Sharing Innovations” as a response to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the impact they had on the delivery of relationship and sexuality education (RSE). It is an Erasmus+ project aiming to improve access to sexuality education online. We are collaborating with seven national sexual and reproductive health and rights organizations (IPPF EN members in Portugal, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, North Macedonia, Latvia, Serbia) and the End FGM EU network to create a new set of guidelines on delivering safe and effective digital sexuality education. It will incorporate everything that we have learned during the first year of the pandemic about pivoting quickly to online RSE delivery into a user-friendly tool. Young sexuality educators will be testing the tool out in 6-month programmes of activities they will design themselves, focused on different national priorities around sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) prevention. We expect the results to be published in the summer of 2022.

Associação Para o Planeamento da Família

Associação para o Planeamento da Família – APF (Association for Family Planning) is an NGO, established in 1967 with health purposes, whose mission is to help people to make free and responsible sexual and reproductive choices and to promote positive parenting.

APF develops activities around Portugal national territory through its six regional delegations. The Member Association teams engage more than 100 professionals and voluntaries from several domains of social intervention: health, education, community and youth intervention.

APF’s history has been always linked to the fight for sexual and reproductive health and rights. Since its establishment, APF has played a leading role in matters concerning Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE), Safe Abortion, Prevention and Combat of Trafficking in Human Beings (THB), Early and Forced Marriages and Female Genital Mutilation. APF services target vulnerable people such as sex workers, drug users, migrants and ethnic minorities but also young people, families and professionals of several areas.

The Member Association also promotes knowledge through investigation (diagnoses and new intervention strategies) and disseminates its results through their website, social networks, media and scientific events. Over the years, APF has been advocating in public policies concerning sexual and reproductive rights issues as human rights matters.

Contact: Instagram