Cheryl Overs

Cheryl Overs is a researcher and human rights activist from Melbourne, Australia, who is known for her work in promoting sex workers rights. She founded the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria, the Scarlet Alliance Australia and the Global Network of Sex Work Projects.

Overs was born in 1957 and educated at University High School and LaTrobe University. She joined the Prostitutes Action Group in 1981.

She worked with Bebe Loff and others to develop it into the Prostitutes Collective of Victoria (PCV). The PCV advocated for law reform and pioneered innovative programmes for sex workers including peer education, needle and syringe exchange, and the Ugly Mugs List, a tool for preventing violence against sex workers. These were models for international adaptation and replication.

As leader of the PCV Overs represented the sex industry on the Ministry of Planning Working Group on Prostitution that advised the Victorian government leading up to law reform in that state. In 1988 the PCV hosted the Prostitution and the Aids Debate Conference in Melbourne which led to the formation of the national federation of sex workers groups Scarlet Alliance.

Overs moved to Europe in 1989 to advocate on sex work issues with those formulating the global response to HIV/AIDS. This included working as an advisor to the Global Program on Aids at the World Health Organisation, contributing to International Aids conferences and publications such as Harvard Aids Institute’s ‘Aids in the World’ and helping establish the International Council of Aids Service Organisations (ICASO). At the Opportunities for Solidarity Conference of HIV/AIDS NGOs in Paris in 1992 Overs met Paulo Henrique Longo and they founded the International Network of Sex Worker Projects (NSWP). The NSWP supported new sex worker organisations, led global advocacy on sex work issues, created an information clearing house and international discussion groups and organised delegations of sex worker advocates to attend conferences and other key events such as the Beijing Women’s Conference, World Social Forums and the International AIDS Conferences.

Since 2000 Overs has worked on health, human rights and sex work programming and policy for various UN and civil society agencies. This has taken her to more than twenty countries including Ethiopia, India, UK, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mongolia and Brazil.

In 2009 her focus shifted to research and to spending time in Australia with her elderly mother. Since then she has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK and is currently Senior Research Fellow at Michael Kirby Centre for Public Health and Human Rights at Monash University in Melbourne. With those organisations she has developed an on-line resource centre on sex work, researched the impact of law on sex workers, developed legal services for sex workers in Cambodia and published a number of journal articles. In 2011-2 she was a member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and in 2012 she delivered a plenary speech at the International Aids Conference in Washington DC.

Several of Overs' publications are key resources on sex work; these include Making Sex Work Safe: a guide for program managers, field workers and policy makers (1996) and (2010); Sex Workers; Part of the Solution and Sex Work and the New Era of HIV Prevention and Care (2009) and The Tide Can Not be Turned Without Us (2012).