Dana
About the project
Sex workers are one of the most marginalized and invisible social groups in Greece and worldwide. More specifically, they experience exclusion from work, systematic violations of their rights and are more vulnerable to violence. They are often unaware of their rights and experience difficulties in accessing legal services or making use of the social services on offer (due to the stigmatising way in which they are addressed by staff of the institutions who lack training in this area). They are deprived representation and visibility in the public sphere, and have no access to targeted information services on sexual and reproductive issues.
The aim of the project "Dana* - Empowering sex workers" is to contribute to the removal of social exclusion of sex workers and to their full integration as equal citizens into the social fabric, through the operation of the day centres, "Red Umbrella Athens" in Athens and "Red Umbrella Thessaloniki" in Thessaloniki.
*The word "dana" in kaliarda refers to a sex worker. Kaliarda was a slang of the LGBTQ+ community in Greece, which first appeared in the 1940s and was spoken as an inter-communal code of safety, especially for transgender sex workers. It was born out of the need for peer communication and self-protection by the individuals themselves in order to avoid being harassed by the often hostile outsiders.
