The Week In Links—July 18

July 18, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-07-18 at 11.54.58 AM — (photo via Stoya’s Instagram page)

More from Vice on why the closure of MyRedbook is dangerous for sex workers.

Tech Savvy Sex Workers Trade Pimps For Web Pages: despite the cringe-inducing title the article is actually a pretty good look at class stratification among sex workers and the safety offered by internet advertising.

Sex worker advocate Ye Haiyan has been barred from leaving China to attend the World AIDS Summit. This is not the first time Haiyan has been persecuted by the government in her decade of sex work activism, but it is part of a new and larger crackdown against sex work.

25 sex workers were killed in Baghdad this week when a gunman attacked a residential building, leaving behind graffiti that read, “This is the fate of any prostitution.

How the Financial Sector Makes Sex Workers Lives Miserable: the recent closure of porn performers’ bank accounts isn’t the first time the financial sector has worked against sex workers; it’s part of a systemic problem called whorephobia.

A new study of Fiji sex workers reiterates what sex workers already know: sex workers have far lower rates of HIV infection than non-sex workers. Fiji sex workers point out that the study, which was part of the Fiji President’s new campaign against HIV, does not address other problems affecting sex workers like abuse and sexual violence which also need to be stopped.

Police in Scotland have decided on a new tactic to build a trusting relationship between law enforcement and sex workers: showing up at their doors unannounced. SCOT-PEP points out all the ways this tactic is a terrible idea, and comments that if safety were really a concern, it wouldn’t be illegal for two workers to share a flat.

Strippers in San Diego are suing the SDPD after a raid at Cheetahs where the dancers were lined up, forced to strip, and photographed.

[T]he officers not only violated the dancers’ right to be free from unreasonable searches, but also the Anti-Paparazzi Law which says you cannot hold a person against their will and take their picture.

Botswana has refused to register an association for sex workers despite the best efforts of local sex worker activists.

“Sisonke recognizes that decriminalizing sex work is an incredibly important step to reducing HIV infection among sex workers and their clients, which adheres to national goals for ‘Zero new infections, Zero AIDS-related deaths and Zero discrimination’ by 2016′,” Tosh Legoreng.

The vagueness of laws about sex work have left sex workers in Bangladesh vulnerable to abuse and persecution.

Does C-36 criminalize advertising on the internet? It criminalizes nearly everything else about sex work to an unconstitutional degree, as over 200 legal advocates have pointed out.

England’s 2013 Sex Worker of the Year is moving to London after being evicted from her home in Devon. Charlotte Rose, who took part in Rupert Everett’s series Love For Sale, will also be performing in Sex Workers’ Opera and, she hopes, changing cultural attitudes around sex and sex work. Same, Charlotte, same.

An Alaska madam has been charged with sex trafficking, once again proving the deliberate broadness of the legal definitions of trafficking.

We already have all the legal tools we need to make sex work safer; the problem is not lack of laws but patchy and inadequate enforcement, an op-ed on C-36 but no less applicable to the States.

More on the Mexican government credentialing 50 sex workers.

Introducing Johanna: one of several articles this week which walks a fine line between ostensibly normalizing sex workers (“they’re just like us”) and marveling at how well such an Other has assimilated (“she loves her job. She works from home. She has sex with men” *law and order music*).

Like Johanna, Cameron Diablo is also a sex worker. She starts her day with coffee and getting online. Sarah Petrescu of the Times Colonist is less confounded by Cameron than the Record was by Johanna.

Though beginning in the same vein (Jolene Parton also starts her day by getting online) Vivian Ho quickly segues from this into the effects the closure of Redbook has had on the Bay’s sex worker community, with many comments from sex workers and a feverish rebuttal from the Alameda County prosecutor, who says he believes 95% of sex workers to be under the control of pimps and traffickers.

Officious housewife acts on emotion, disrupts street workers’ business: Jennifer Adams wants sex workers out of her neighborhood; to that end she’s taken to standing on street corners with her Great Dane and a sign that says “PLEASE ARREST JOHNS.” Despite the fact that the reporter apparentlyalso talked to Sex Workers Action Network and Planned Parenthood, Adams and her tribulations (she had a cd thrown at her!) are the bulk of the article.

The Christian section of the Daily Beast gets some juicy clickbait in the form of an interview with Hookers For Jesus founder Annie Lobert. It’s not not-terrible.

Like every other sex worker activist group in Canada right now, Sex Worker Advisory Network of Sudbury (SWANS) is deeply concerned about C-36. Though the piece is otherwise completely unobjectionable, the author made the choice to end with a fretful comment from a non-sex worker. “Is this something that we want normalized?” Which misses the point that sex work is already normalized: thus the debate.

The Canadian Conservative government has amended C-36 from banning the sale of sex from anywhere children could “reasonably be expected” to be—at or near a playground, school, or daycare.

Another article on Silicon Valley sex workers. There can never be enough.