Queen’s birthday honours: damehood for ex-sex worker

A former sex worker has become a dame in the Queen’s latest birthday honours list.

Catherine Healy was put forward for the honour by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in recognition of her work to decriminalise prostitution in the country.

She is now to be made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

As in the UK, the honours are bestowed twice a year, on the Queen’s birthday and in the new year.

While working in a Wellington brothel in the 1980s, Healy and a handful of her colleagues decided to form a union in order to make their profession safer and less stigmatised.

In 1987, she became a founding member of the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC), an organisation formed to advocate for the safety and wellbeing of sex workers.

“We just wanted to be treated like normal people,” she told Stuff.nz. “We wanted to change attitudes, we wanted acceptance. Most of all we wanted to change the law.”

The NZPC was instrumental in the battle to decriminalise prostitution, a battle which ended in victory in 2003 with the passage of the Prostitution Reform Act.

As well as campaigning for legal protections for sex workers, Healy also “championed Aids prevention, sexual health and human rights”, says Radio New Zealand.

Her public advocacy came at a cost. For years, “she endured the embarrassment of family members, which, over time, has turned to pride for the role she has played in the movement for change in the industry”, says Stuff.nz.

After decades of tireless campaigning to lift the stigma from sex work, the 62-year-old says she cried when she received the letter notifying her of her new title.

“I still keep thinking we are going to be arrested at dawn, not acknowledged,” she said. “I never, ever imagined this day would come.”

Healy is one of 192 New Zealanders named on this year’s birthday honours list, the first in which more than half of the recipients are women, says The Sydney Morning Herald.