The Week In Links—October 17
Help Tits and Sass contributor Peechington Marie’s fundraiser to offset funeral costs for murdered young Black strippers Tjisha Ball and Angelia Mangum meet its goal in its final week.
The Daily Dot covers an online campaign to have the AP style book replace “prostitute” with “sex worker.” Want more on this? You’re in luck, as Tits and Sass will be running a series on sex worker nomenclature, including posts debating the merits of “prostitute” vs. “sex worker.”
Monica Jones is still fighting her case in court over a year after being arrested and funneled into her own school’s diversion program, but the flaws in Project ROSE are becoming more apparent and more public.
Government officials and social workers need to come to terms with the fact that the victim/criminal binary simply doesn’t fit the majority of underage sex workers, points out Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
There are more male sex workers in England than the government thinks! Which is not surprising as government stats have a male sex worker population of 0.
Another Christian anti-trafficking organization is using sex workers as labor for their tacky little products, and the products as a metaphor for the reformed sex workers’ transformation from something no one wants into something beautiful. Such empathy! Wow.
The Daily Mail appears to be having a slow news week, as Amanda Goff hugging a football player she ran into at brunch was judged newsworthy. (Amanda Goff made headlines earlier this year after outing herself and writing a book about her work as an escort, to much handwringing over the psychic damage this revelation will do to her children).
Trans sex workers in Pattaya, Thailand are being targeted by the police as part of an across-the-board morality drive:
Officials in Pattaya say they need to be seen to be doing something to scrub up the city’s reputation before the army is tempted to intervene in ways which local officials say might be bad for business.
More on the five year study that resulted in its researchers having the revelation, “Sex workers! they’re a lot like us!” Still, as fatuous as that comment was, the study is a nice respite in a week dominated by anti-trafficking organizations: its findings show that most sex workers are not coerced.
Backing this up is yet another report from Operation North Star: police officers in Regina also found that sex workers were working because they wanted to (despite the police interviewers’ apparent inability to accept that fact.) Guess it’s just that hard to accept an escort’s word at face value.
