HIPS is seeking donations for their new stationary space! HIPS’ mobile outreach program, now over 20 years old, is expanding into a brick-and-mortar location which will offer medical, mental health, and drug treatment services as well as their usual harm reduction, advocacy, and community services.
A new take on a tired trend: in this new “John school,” unfortunate clients read poetry and look at art by sex workers as part of a process of viewing them as victims exploited human beings.
The latest entry in the growing file of Strippers’ Court Cases finds that yes, pregnant strippers can be sexy and thus pregnancy is not viable grounds for termination. Heya! Read the opinion here.
Sex worker activists and advocates from SWOP, Desiree Alliance, and Best Practices Policy Project are in Switzerland at the UN Human Rights Council, to present a report on the US’s failure to protect sex workers’ human rights.
In the least nuanced or ethical argument for End Demand yet, someone at the Zimbabwe National Aids Council suggested End Demand as a way to curb the spread of HIV. Rich men spread HIV, apparently, and
The best way is to stop these men from paying for sex first. From there on we will work with the sex workers by empowering them through various initiatives that stop them from visiting beer outlets.
In Nashik, India, the district government and several NGOs began issuing Aadhaar identity cards to sex workers, handing out five before the machines broke. The rest will begin being handed out 11-5 on Friday.
Emily Crockett takes over from Elizabeth Nolan Brown in outlining why we should all be grateful that the latest trafficking bill has died an early death, thanks in part to the Hyde Amendment.
Sex workers in Madagascar are protesting the legislative and medical discrimination they and their families face, and the way it makes it harder for them to enforce safer sex standards.
Closing sex work advertising boards endangers sex workers and trafficking victims by depriving them of a valuable screening tool, as Noah Berlatsky re-emphasizes. Tits and Sass contributor Tara Burns comments that,
It’s harmful to people who are doing sex work at the most survival level, who can’t afford more expensive advertising venues and are forced out on the street. And it’s harmful for sex trafficking victims who are also potentially forced out onto the street.
Noah Berlatsky gets it again, nailing Chris Hedges and this awful article.
Hedge’s concern is not, first of all, for sex workers, or for women being trafficked, but for himself. Looking at sex workers, or thinking about sex workers, leads him to a hideous, exciting dream of his own violation. “If we accept prostitution as legal, as Germany has done, as permissible in a civil society, we will take one more collective step toward the global plantation being built by the powerful,” he says, adding a slavery metaphor since he’s on a roll with appropriating the experiences of marginalized groups.
The Louisiana Department of Child and Family Welfare just got a grant to prevent, identify, and investigate human trafficking among kids in the state welfare system. If by this they mean sexual abuse or abuse in general, I’m sure that money is sorely needed. But if they’re going to ignore the general trauma of the welfare and foster system which leads to minors getting involved in sex work… we can write it off as another massive misuse of government money.
More on the labor rights win for sex workers in a Barcelona brothel, and don’t overlook the end, where labor unions and feminists throw escorts under the bus.
I’m having serious deja vu over this Australian article about a scuzzy guy who gets paid to pay for sexual services before then “brothel busting” the business.
The English Collective of Prostitutes is amping up their campaign for a change in their status after last winter’s defeat of End Demand.
“I’m a sex worker, and dating is awkward“: nothing but the truth there. It started life on XOJane, but don’t hold that against this post.
PolicyMic attempts to write about End Demand in Sweden 16 years after its implementation, and manages to quote actual sex workers for less than a third of it, devoting the most space to large pictures of women in skirts leaning over cars. A very thorough summation of 16 years of policy, indeed.
More on the Roman plan to create a red light district for sex workers, also endorsed by the Church.
Undeterred by protests and negative publicity, A&E is debuting “8 Minutes” in April.
File under “Know thine enemy and the research thine enemy bases their claims on”: this prohibitionist has a lot to say about “Dreamcatcher” and the horrors of prostitution.
Robot hookers: the headline was cool, the article was mind-glazingly dull and not, actually, about anything like Gigalo Joe.