This work explores a part of the violences that affects those who practice prostitution. After an ethnographic work, analyzing the speeches of activists of two organizations of sex workers in Buenos Aires and Seville, we find the relevance of what they call institutional violence and its origins in the whore stigma, the prohibitionist and abolitionist ideologies, their shape in policies actions against prostitution and trafficking and its result in the form of direct violence by specific agents, such as the police forces. Since stigma is consistent with the idea of cultural violence, hegemonic anti-prostitution ideologies, and repressive legislation with structural violence and police repression with direct violence, an inductive process ...