Cops & Rubbers

Cops and Rubbers received the 2014 Meaningful Play award for Best Overall Non-Digital Game.

You can order your copy online at The Game Crafter today!

Cops & Rubbers: A game promoting advocacy and empathy in support of public health and human rights of sex workers on Vimeo.

Open Society Foundations’ Sexual Health and Rights Project (SHARP) commissioned Cops and Rubbers as an advocacy game to accompany their 2012 report Criminalizing Condoms. Players take on the role of sex workers and experience the negative consequence of the condoms as evidence policy including harassment and abuse by law enforcement.

The game is based on research conducted by SHARP partners in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Russia, and USA and includes quotes from actual sex workers in this country who have suffered violations to their public health rights and human rights because of this policy.

Cops & Rubbers launched at the 19th biannual International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., in Summer 2012, and is now available on the Open Society Foundations’ website at: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/cops-rubbers

In countries around the world police carry out legal and illegal searches of sex workers and confiscate or destroy condoms found in their possession. In many cases, possession of condoms has been used by prosecutors as evidence of prostitution. Treating condoms as contraband forces sex workers to choose between safeguarding their health and avoiding police harassment or arrest. Cops and Rubbers is an interactive demonstration of these policing practices and highlights the consequences on sex workers’ lives, including their vulnerability to HIV infection.

In Spring 2016, Cops and Rubbers was translated to a single-player online game and is available now at: copsandrubbers.com

PRESS

October 2013: The Communications Network wrote up a nice article featuring Cops and Rubbers, including perspectives from Brett Davidson and Rachel Thomas from Open Society Foundations and myself – http://www.comnetwork.org/2013/10/put-yourself-in-a-sex-workers-shoes/
September 2012: Rachel Thomas from OSF and I were interviewed at the International AIDS Conference (IAC2012) by Ejay de Wit, a Dutch reporter, for Hivnieuws, about the criminalization of condoms issue, OSF’s Criminalizing Condoms report, OSF’s “Condom Police” presence at the IAC, and the Cops & Rubbers game. If you can read Dutch, you can download the article here.