This speech was given by Audacia Ray at the International Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers event at the Metropolitan Community Church in NYC this evening. It is being cross-posted here with permission from Audacia's blog Waking Vixen.
Last April, while I was at the grocery store shopping for the meal I was cooking for the first crop of Speak Up sex worker media trainees, my phone buzzed and I got a message that a sex worker from New York had been found dead - bound and shot in the chest - in a hotel in Boston. The message was from a fellow sex worker who urged me to spread the word around and encourage other sex workers I know to be extra-diligent with their screening. Sex workers look out for each other - the community was responding to each other and the news media before the media even understood the developing story.
The case was big news for a few weeks, as the so-called Craigslist Killer went on a bit of a spree and then was revealed to be a clean cut Boston University medical student. Everyone freaked out about the dangers of internet prostitution, which led to Rhode Island legislators getting outraged over the little-known fact that indoor prostitution was legal in the state - and so began a successful campaign to recriminalize prostitution there. All in the name of protection of sex workers.
On that night back in April, I was supposed to be putting the finishing touches on a media training and advocacy workshop for sex workers that I'd poured a lot of time, energy, and resources into. But for an hour, all I could do was slump down on my kitchen floor and cry for Julissa Brisman, a sensual masseuse my age, and think - that could have been me.
There are a lot of different projects that sex workers and our allies must work on to ensure our rights: we must work to reduce stigma and encourage the general public to think of us as multi-faceted human beings; we must work to ensure our legal rights and protections not just from potentially violent clients but from law enforcement officers and the legal system; we must work to gain greater access to nonjudgmental health care services and providers who are educated on our needs; we must create culture and tell our stories to each other and the world at large; we must defend ourselves against people who supposedly have our best interests in mind yet won't listen to our statements of needs; we must challenge bad health policies and distribution of funds at the local, national, and international levels; and last but not least - we must create networks of emotional and spiritual support so we can stay strong and continue to do this very exhausting work. But it's hard to do even a sliver of that essential work when we are being killed, silenced by hate and fear and a deep and dangerous assumption that we are expendable, that no one will care when we do not come home.
The night that reports of Julissa's death reached me, I watched a flurry of messages roll through my email inbox and get posted online that said things like "Be careful out there!" and "Girls, do your screening!" And though I'm a strong believer in personal agency and safety and we all know that there are things that sex workers can do to stay safe, sane, and healthy - it's not Julissa's fault that she was killed. Taking safety measures and being on the defensive is a band aid, it is not a long term solution. We cannot stop violence against sex workers by ourselves. We need the support and participation of a culture that sees us as human beings - we are your mothers, sons, cousins, friends - who are worthy of living lives of dignity that are free of violence.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Guest post: International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers...My Thoughts.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://classic.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/17629
Sex workers have been such a historically stigmatized group of people that often all we know of them falls into either
a) judgmental moralizing that demonizes sex workers as less than human or little more than vermin
or
b) stereotypical associations in our own imaginations of who they must be or why they must have chosen the profession
And it's very tempting to spin out the same old explanations: they've been tragic products of childhood sexual abuse, they're drug addicts, they're in it for easy money, they're mentally ill...and the list goes on.
But for once, if we could all listen without automatic prejudice, I bet we'd find that sex workers and the services they provide vary from society to society, culture to culture, and country to country.
We need the support and participation of a culture that sees us as human beings - we are your mothers, sons, cousins, friends - who are worthy of living lives of dignity that are free of violence.
Amen to that. And, amen to that it recognizes that not all sex workers are women, either. It's important that sexism plays a role in how we view sex workers --
The paternalism and negativity come a lot from sexist notions against women. Even just broadening to accept that men are sex workers, too, is a step in the right direction to creating the change needed in our culture.