health care, legislation, legal resources, and labor rights. In a study of U.S sex workers, 43% of interview participants reported exposure to intimate-partner violence, physical violence, armed physical violence, and sexual violence in the forms of sexual coercion and rape. In this same study, a sex worker reported, "in this lifestyle nothing's safe". Sex workers experience police abuse as well. Police use their authority to intimidate sex workers. Police officers have been reported to exploit street-based sex workers' fear of incarceration to force them to have sex with the police without payment, sometimes still arresting them after the coerced sex. Police also compromise sex workers safety, often holding sex workers responsible for crimes acted against them because of the stigma attached to their occupation, also known as victim-blaming. The effects of whorephobia impacts sex workers' agency, safety, and mental health. There is growth in advocacy organizations to reduce and erase prejudice and stigma against sex work, and to provide more support and resources for sex workers. Legal dimensions of sex work Depending on local law, sex workers' activities may be regulated, controlled, tolerated, or prohibited. In most countries, even those where sex work is legal, sex workers may be stigmatized and marginalized, which may prevent them from seeking legal redress for discrimination (e.g., racial discrimination by a strip club owner), non-payment by a client, assault or rape. Sex worker advocates have identified this as whorephobia. The legality of different types of sex work varies within and between regions of the world. For example, while pornography is legal in the United States, prostitution is illegal in most parts of the US. However, in other regions of the world, both pornography and prostitution are illegal; in others, both are legal. One example of a country in which pornography, prostitution, and all professions encompassed under the umbrella of sex work are all legal is New Zealand. Under the Prostitution Reform Act of New Zealand, laws and regulations have been put into place in order to ensure the safety and protection of its sex workers. For example, since the implementation of the Prostitution Reform Act, "any person seeking to open a larger brothel, where more than four sex workers will be working requires a Brothel Operators Certificate, which certifies them as a suitable person to exercise control over sex workers in the workplace. [In addition,] sex workers operating in managed premises have access to