When it’s convenient for police officers to do so, sometimes they take a break from criminalizing street sex workers to engage in another kind of abuse against them. They are exploited as an unpaid labour force of informants on their clients.
Category Archives: Sex Trafficking
NPCC Sex Working Guidance
This is a breakdown of the newest UK police guidance regarding sex work (due for review between April 2024 and August 2025), including criticisms from a sex worker perspective.
Applying the Label “Sex Worker” to People Selling Sex Throughout History
When it comes to researching historical prostitution, it is incredibly difficult to find accounts which come directly from people selling sex. The further back in history we go, the more true that is. Since the term “sex worker” is a recent invention, coined in the late 70s, and most works will use euphemisms or derogatory terms, there is often debate over whether it is appropriate to retroactively call people sex workers if they sold sex.
Contemporary Prostitution Translation – 1884, Léo Taxil.
Preserving sex worker history is a goal that is extremely important to me; all too often we are spoken over, our stories suppressed or lost to time. When I started reading “La Prostitution Contemporaine”, a book in which the author argues for the full decriminalization of prostitution, I became obsessed with it and decided it needed to be translated and preserved in English.
How the Online Safety Bill Will Harm Sex Workers
As is typical with legislation that targets sex workers, the name of the Online Safety Bill is misleading and intends to make the average member of the public believe that its purpose is to protect people. This was also the case with FOSTA/SESTA in the US (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex TraffickingContinue reading “How the Online Safety Bill Will Harm Sex Workers”
Whoring Out Our Trauma
With the global conversation around sex work focusing on sex trafficking and the trauma many sex workers face, sex workers’ stories are subject to being weaponized to deny them the very rights which would protect them from that harm. In Whoring Out Our Trauma: Prostitution and Sexual Abuse, these issues are presented from the pointContinue reading “Whoring Out Our Trauma”
My First Brothel Experience
I got into the car of someone I didn’t know and whom I had barely texted in response to an ad about working in a brothel. Sounds like the start of a story someone would tell as a cautionary tale where someone ends up dead, but I was fine.
“All Prostitution is Rape”: A Response
Radical feminists generally lay out the argument that all prostitution is rape as follows: all work under capitalism involves coercion due to the fact that people must earn money to survive, any sex where someone is coerced is rape, therefore prostitution is rape. This is a very simplistic explanation of the argument, but anyone familiarContinue reading ““All Prostitution is Rape”: A Response”
A Response to “Sold: Sex Slaves Next Door”
Members of the public know very little about sex trafficking or about sex work, and this documentary does nothing to educate them about it. The BBC feed people a bunch of misinformation or vague comments about sex work, interspersed with the real and important trauma histories of sex trafficking survivors whose experiences are used to imply we should do things that would in reality make them less safe.