In December 2025, the sex worker rights organisation Decrim Now published a briefing making the case for the full decriminalisation of sex work as a matter of HIV prevention. The briefing argued that decriminalisation was essential if the government wanted to meet its target to end new HIV transmissions in England by 2030. Co-signed by many organisations, including the National AIDS Trust, the British HIV Association and Positively UK, Decrim Now laid bare certain ironies of present-day policing tactics:
the police have used carrying condoms as evidence that someone is a sex worker, leading to fines and arrests. Sex workers are forced to decide between carrying condoms and reducing their risk of HIV, or not carrying them and reducing their risk of arrest and a criminal record.
How absurd, Decrim Now argued, for the state to seize condoms as criminal evidence while at the same time promoting their use as a crucial preventive of STI transmission.
The 2025 briefing was incredibly important, yet the argument itself was not new. Four decades before Decrim Now’s briefing the same contradiction – the condom as evidence and the condom as vital protection – was being questioned by activists and public health policymakers. It is this contradiction that I explore in this article. Through analysis of policymakers’ correspondence and sex work activist sources, I examine how the government recognised (but did not resolve) the contradiction in the 1980s and 1990s, and how sex work activists turned it into a campaign to argue against the criminalisation of sex work itself.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic reached Britain in the early 1980s, with the first death recorded in 1981. Early cases were concentrated amongst gay men, but infections soon spread more widely, particularly amongst intravenous drug users and haemophiliacs. Despite growing medical and activist concern, the government was slow to respond, and a coordinated state response did not begin until 1986.
In 1987, the government rolled out the first stage of its UK-wide AIDS education campaign. This included the infamous ‘tombstone’ TV advertisement which accompanied the ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ leaflet sent to every household in Britain. The leaflet urged that, to prevent infection, ‘it is safest to stick to one faithful partner’ and that ‘unless you are sure of your partner, always use a condom’. Putting it even more bluntly, the leaflet underlined the advice to ‘USE CONDOMS FOR SAFER SEX’. The epidemic transformed the condom’s cultural meaning. No longer primarily a contraceptive, it became a crucial tool against a virus with no treatment or cure.
At the same time, police in England and Wales were routinely searching those suspected of selling sex on arrest. Selling sex was not explicitly illegal, but the patchwork of laws that existed around sex work ensured that it was de facto criminalised: soliciting, importuning, loitering, kerb-crawling, brothel-keeping all carried penalties. The police used any condoms found on those suspected of selling sex as evidence to secure arrest.
In the mid-1980s, as the state began to respond to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, campaigners and experts within the field quickly identified the potential issues with the mixed messaging around condoms. In December 1986, government adviser Dr Robert Thin met with representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP). During the meeting, the ECP highlighted that condom use was essential to prevent the transmission of sexual infection and was consistent amongst those who sold sex. Yet, it was also acknowledged that ‘the presence of condoms … is considered by the police to provide strong corroborative evidence’. The ECP called for the cessation of this practice and for the abolition of laws around sex work. Thin recorded that the use of condoms as evidence was ‘seen by a group anxious to use condoms as a major problem’ and wrote to the Chief Medical Officer Donald Acheson that ‘the problem of condoms is the most useful one to address’. The condom’s position, in other words, was identified early within government discussions as something that needed to be reassessed in light of the epidemic.
Clearly, activists and policymakers were aware of the contradictions around the condom. Was this a life-saving device or one that brought the threat of fines and imprisonment? More broadly, who decided the role of the condom with regards to sex work: was this a matter of public health or policing? What followed was years of bureaucratic dithering. Acheson pushed the Home Office to stop police using condoms as evidence. Responding to Acheson, the Home Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary of State Brian Cubbon pushed back. Police, he argued, ‘cannot be asked to ignore what they see as confirming their own suspicions’. Despite acknowledging the contradiction, both parties believed that the condom had particular significance within their realm. By June 1987, a compromise of sorts was reached. Acheson conceded that one aim of the national safe-sex campaign was to ensure carrying condoms was ‘perfectly natural and acceptable’. And it therefore followed that once condoms were pervasive ‘the discovery of condoms in a woman’s possession will no longer be a valid pointer that the woman is a prostitute’. Acheson asked Cubbon for police to be made ‘aware that this is the view that is being taken centrally’. The government left police policy untouched and simply hoped the practice would fade away.
Yet without any public or official intervention the confiscation of condoms continued, albeit unevenly. Cultural change had made little dent in policing practice by the late 1980s. In 1988, the Metropolitan Police reassured a Cabinet sub-committee that condoms were no longer used as evidence in sex work cases. But in that same year, prosecutors in Birmingham continued to defend their right to do so. A West Midlands police spokesman told a newspaper in August 1988 that condoms found on a sex worker at arrest formed ‘an important part of the evidence’. In Liverpool, one outreach worker reflected that in the late 1980s:
the area where the women worked, it was a very heavily populated student population as well. And women were actually getting stopped and searched by the police who weren’t sex workers and arrested for common prostitution because they had condoms on them
Although condom possession was becoming more ubiquitous in the wake of the AIDS crisis, condoms were still regarded as crucial evidence of sex work. In areas associated with sex work, carrying condoms put young women at risk of arrest.
In practice, whether condoms were deemed evidence by the police depended on which town you were in, which officer stopped you and how local cultures responded to the epidemic. Some forces used the AIDS panic as licence to crack down on sex work. In Manchester Chief Constable, James Anderton, described gay men, drug users and sex workers as ‘swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making’. And police publicly framed a 1987 crackdown on street prostitution as part of the ‘battle against AIDS’. Police in Leicester refused to distribute a council leaflet aimed at sex workers which provided information on the virus and safe sex, calling it ‘obscene’.
Elsewhere, many HIV prevention projects worked to negotiate with local police to stop the confiscation policy. In Cardiff, an outreach worker was thanked for helping end the practice. One sex worker told her she’d ‘done us a big favour’ as she had been arrested ‘without the vice squad going through her bag and counting her condoms’. But even these local wins were fragile. A year after stating the practice had stopped, a report from Cardiff noted that while senior officers had reaffirmed the change, ‘claims that this ruling is not always followed at street level continue to be reported’.
Sex worker activists didn’t just point out the hypocrisy within policy meetings; they organised around it. In 1991, the ECP wrote an open letter to the Home Secretary demanding an end to the practice: ‘prostitute women are criminalised for practising what the government preaches to us’. Fifty AIDS organisations across England and Wales signed in support.
The following year, the ECP took the argument to the streets, with a poster campaign displayed across London. The posters urged readers to lobby their MP to abolish the prostitution laws, with one arguing that safe-sex messaging meant little while carrying a condom could get you arrested.
For sex worker activists, the stakes around condom use went well beyond policing tactics and included the broader socio-economic framework in which sex work took place. Niki Adams of the ECP voiced it plainly at a public meeting in 1988:
if you’re standing on the street corner for hours on end and it’s raining and you have children, a family to feed, and a client comes around and tells you that he’s going to pay double if you go with him without condoms then it is very difficult to refuse.
Government cuts to child benefit, she argued, were pushing more women into exactly that position. ‘Safe sex’ was never just a matter of sex education or willpower, the ECP argued, it was shaped by poverty, violence, and criminalisation.
Research reviewed by Decrim Now in 2025 found that criminalisation of sex work roughly doubles a sex worker’s likelihood of acquiring HIV. In some contexts, criminalised sex workers are more than seven times as likely to be living with the virus. Full decriminalisation is now the policy UNAIDS names as a key intervention against new HIV infections among sex workers. While it has been adopted in New Zealand, several Australian states, and Belgium, it is not yet the policy in England and Wales.
While fragile local agreements were reached around condom confiscation in the late 1980s, the ongoing criminalisation of sex work ensured that the condom remained a tool of policing. The ECP’s poster campaign used the condom to argue not merely for an end to the practice, but for the abolition of ‘prostitution laws’. Until selling sex is decriminalised, sex workers will keep being asked to choose between protecting their sexual health and protecting themselves from arrest.