Christy Mack, who was brutally beaten by her ex-boyfriend last week, inspiring this week’s series on domestic violence, now has a fund to help cover medical and recovery expenses. Donate if you can, and share!
Ruth Jacobs does a brief interview with Tara Burns on writing.
Brooke Magnanti, formerly Belle de Jour of book and Showtime fame, explores what decriminalization would look like for the UK. Safer, for one, allowing workers to work together and share flats without being charged with pimping or trafficking. She also brilliantly and succinctly illuminates the economic fallacies of the Swedish model:
The economic arguments are rarely taken into account by those who support the ‘Swedish model’ (or End Demand). By mistaking services for products, they imagine fewer customers would result in fewer sex workers. But this is unrealistic – the assumption that the number of clients and the number of prostitutes is necessarily linked is in itself faulty. If fewer people ate at fast food outlets, would the minimum wage workers there be better off without having to do anything else? Exactly.
In nearly the same vein, the Daily Beast tells us why it’s time to legalize prostitution. Their reasons are all solid, but would apply more to decriminalization, an option many people apparently don’t understand is both different and better than legalization.
The decapitated body of a murdered sex worker was found in Shallcross, Chatsworth, NZ. Her head has not been found, and she had been assaulted before her murder.
A New Orleans couple has finally been indicted for the murder and dismemberment of Jaren Lockhart, who thought she was being hired to do a private party for them.
The play Ugly Mugs, playing in Melbourne, is appropriating sex worker narratives and safety tactics to titillate audiences with the violation of sex workers’ privacy, even after their brutal deaths. One sex worker
described it as “just another dead hooker on a slab” and was “glad to be near an exit.” Many have complained that the autopsy scene in particular caused them a great deal of distress.
The Scarlet Alliance was unable to shut down the play.
More shocked reporting about the plethora of indoor workers using the internet, this time from Scotland. It’s now 2014, at what point do you think this will stop being news?
Sex workers in Uganda say they need access to female condoms since their male clients are so averse to using male condoms, some even sneakily using Vaseline to ensure the condoms break.
This op-ed from allAfrica ponders the economics of sex work in the wake of the Economist’s article, coming to no conclusion but observing that the jury is still out on the utility of the Swedish model.
Another unfortunately obvious article: despite making a lot of money, stigma still adversely affects sex workers. And the sun also rises.
Arrests are on the rise in Northern Virginia; police are claiming it’s the influx of West Coast workers, but it might just be that they’ve amped up the stings in collaboration with hotels. The interesting part is that, despite the Alexandria Attorney’s statements about trafficking, local police disagree:
But police in both jurisdictions say they aren’t seeing many similar trafficking cases. Instead, many cases are “women that are working for themselves,” said Crystal Nosal, an Alexandria police spokeswoman.
“The ease of the Internet . . . kind of eliminates the need for the old-fashioned pimp,” Malcolm said.
Runaways in the Midlands, like runaways in many other places, turn to sex work to pad the scanty incomes of panhandling. Though mostly sensationalist (the girls date “notorious robbers”!) it hits on some true and painful facts, like the stigma of sex work making it hard to return to homes and communities of origin.
A Nashua mother has been charged with facilitating her daughter’s sex work. I’m not willing to pay .36/day to finish reading, so judge for yourselves, but judging by the wording it seems like this is just about two adults working together.
Rolling Stone writes with surprising intelligence and integrity about human (agricultural, domestic, and sex) trafficking, quoting Denise Brennan and our own Tara Burns. They get in this paragraph on the very first page:
Sex worker advocates argue sex workers must be included in developing anti-trafficking initiatives. In a promising move, restrictions on funding for those organizations that work with active sex workers were lifted by the Obama administration in 2010. Organizations like the Sex Workers Project believe the move away from criminalization of sex work and instead towards harm reduction is paramount to more successfully addressing sex trafficking. This group is one of the first in the nation to assist survivors of human trafficking. The organization “provides client-centered legal and social services to individuals who engage in sex work, regardless of whether they do so by choice, circumstance or coercion,” and is the only U.S. organization working with both active sex workers and trafficking victims.
The Red Cross in Musina, South Africa has been working with sex workers and sex worker groups to conduct safer sex and STI trainings. They began with single workers and now work with groups like SWEAT and Sisonke.
For those in need of an angry laugh: a white man’s fatuous guilt over sex workers and sex tourism. HuffPo should be ashamed.