Vision & Mission
Vision
Safer sex work and resilient sex workers
- Ghapro helps sex workers better understand the risks to their health and offers them preventive health care
- Ghapro makes sex workers more resilient by providing support in various areas of their lives.
Mission
- Ghapro is an organisation that works on the ground, focusing on the needs and requirements of male and female sex workers in Flanders.
- Ghapro offers preventive sexual health care and social assistance, free of charge and on an anonymous basis.
- Ghapro is a contact point for questions and problems, not only about sexual health but also about psychosocial care.
Preventive sexual health care
- Ghapro believes that, due to the nature of their work, sex workers are at greater risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
- With that in mind, Ghapro works to minimise unsafe sexual activity bought and sold as part of a transaction between sex worker and client.
- Key initiatives include free STD tests, hepatitis B vaccinations, and STD prevention and treatment.
- Ghapro believes in the role of the sex worker as health educator in the sex worker/client relationship and helps sex workers to fulfil this role by providing correct, up-to-date safety information.
- Ghapro targets the most vulnerable and difficult to reach sex workers to ensure that they too are able to benefit from its preventive health services.
Social assistance
- Ghapro wishes to promote the general wellbeing of sex workers by providing support in their day-to-day lives on and off the job.
- Ghapro offers administrative, legal and psychosocial assistance, with referral to specialist assistance where desired.
- Ghapro always works on the basis of a belief in the dynamism of people, stressing the opportunities people have to grow and the skills they have to solve their own problems.
- Ghapro works to identify a different professional or alternative future together with the sex worker and on the sex worker’s own initiative, based on the legal and social context.
- Ghapro targets the most vulnerable and difficult to reach sex workers to ensure that they too are able to benefit from its social assistance services.
Values
- Ghapro presents itself as an approachable assistance organisation that handles the target group with due respect and without stigmatizing individuals.
- Ghapro takes a pragmatic approach to prostitution without expressing an opinion on the desirability of prostitution as a social phenomenon.
- Ghapro is exclusively there to assist sex workers and does not collaborate with control agencies or on crime prevention campaigns.
- Ghapro also rejects coercive or compulsory cooperation with the people who run sex establishments. Ghapro is an independent organisation and will not accept their demands.
- Ghapro condemns every form of forced prostitution in which the free will of the sex worker is undermined. If a sex worker says that force or violence is being used against them Ghapro will always call in other organisations and agencies in consultation with the sex worker.
- Ghapro promises a relationship of trust within the assistance context, based on discretion, safety, free will and openness. Professional secrecy is always guaranteed.
- Ghapro wishes to establish a coherent health and wellbeing policy for sex workers through consultation and collaboration with other organisations.