Drawing a Line Between Sex Work and Bar Work

A man in a bar gets progressively more drunk and disorderly, his speech growing more slurred and his sexual advances to a waitress becoming more aggressive as he tries to get her to go home with him.

The scene is from a sketch at the second national bar hostesses' conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where bar staff told the gathering they often had to deal with sexual violence and harassment.

"People don't respect you as a bar worker; they treat you badly and expect that you are an easy target for sex because of your job," Catherine Wacira, a bar hostess in Nairobi, told the conference on 27 October.

"Our managers rarely take our side when we are being harassed because the customers are paying a lot of money; they prefer to keep them happy rather than defend us."

Participants at the conference on preventing HIV and sexual violence among bar hostesses said their working conditions sometimes made it difficult for them to refuse punters' sexual advances.