Today marks on year since the murder of Petite Jasmine. Reading about her life and death is the most powerful argument we know against the Nordic Model.
Cool, some tourist filmmakers are fundraising to shoot a documentary in Dallas strip clubs. “The project ‘was started because the strip club and stripper industry was one of the few areas I felt created clear camps — men and women,'” OK!
Bitch Flicks writes about Shae on Game of Thrones, picking up on some of the same themes you saw covered here.
An interesting twist to opposition to Canada’s bill C-36: “A Saskatoon man whose money was stolen by people posing as licensed adult services workers says the federal government’s proposed prostitution bill will give ‘free reign’ to such thieves, or even human traffickers, by preventing people from going to the police.”
Looks like thanks to researchers in Brazil, after this World Cup we can finally put to rest the idea that big sporting events are a boon to sex workers. According to one sex worker,
the World Cup has hardly been the boom she hoped for, and that many tourists have come from Latin American countries with weak currencies and haggle over prices lower than what a Brazilian would pay. “The tourists have even less money than we have,” she said dryly.
In a confusing but highly illustrative example of how the stats around sex work and sex trafficking get manipulated for funding, an independent evaluator for the Indian NGO National AIDS Control Organization was discovered to have been inflating statistics about the sex worker population by including housewives in the mix, apparently in a battle over funding, although without NACO’s knowledge. NACO reported the fraud when it was noticed.
Hundreds of people went out to protest a real estate investors’ plan to evict a sex workers’ collective in Taipei.
“Sex work is work” and exploding the sex trafficking myth: Margaret Corvid writes about sex trafficking for the New Statesman, including the generally ignored voices of trafficked sex workers who knew they would be doing sex work after migrating.
On a similar note: This TruthOut piece explores the myths created by Somaly Mam specifically and the damage she’s done to sex workers’ rights.
The arrest, detention, and forced STI testing of over 400 sex workers in Tajikistan is cause for ongoing concern about violation of sex workers’ rights.
Lawmakers in France are scrapping legislation which would have criminalized clients of sex workers, saying,
The example set in Sweden shows this does not work,” she added. Benbassa’s argument was the same one put forward for sex worker groups last year, who argued their lives would become more dangerous if police began fining their clients as they would be forced to work in more remote areas.
A sex worker was arrested for the overdose-death of Google executive Forrest Hayes after she injected him with heroin last fall.
One of Bush’s laws against sex trafficking is causing problems with the deportation of the hundreds of refugee children fleeing violence in Central America.
The debate about brothel licensing in New South Wales is more about public opinion campaigning than sex worker safety or combating trafficking, Elena Jeffreys observes.
Berlin writes movingly about the importance of sex worker community and activism.
More Colombians are being trafficked for forced labor than for sex.
Sex workers in Balkpapan are traveling for Ramadan, and the Jakarta Globe gives them a voice without tsking over them contaminating male clients or neighboring Bali.
Siouxsie Q writes more about the community of MyRedbook and the ongoing repercussions for that community.
There are some complications that arise when you don’t have a more nuanced legal category for sex workers than “victim”:
The other problem is that the definition the city will be using to place potential victims is not the legal one used by police for trafficking. According to the Criminal Code Of Canada, human trafficking is forcing people to provide a service or labour by making them believe that their safety, or the safety of someone they know, would be threatened if they fail to provide, or offer to provide, the labour or service. In terms of sexual exploitation, those services include everything from lap dancing to the porn star experience – performing a sexual act without a condom.
Canada and C-36: The federal government is rushing the decision on Bill C-36, pushing it five months ahead of deadline and frightening sex workers given the fact if it passes, it will drive sex workers back underground and make their lives more dangerous, risky or illegal. Sex workers themselves aretestifying in the C-36 hearings. And finally we hear from a client! Albeit a kind of annoying-seeming one. “Prostitution is a legitimate form of work”: the Montreal Gazette gives a brief history on the feminist sex work wars and C-36.