Barcelona: Genera
Posted on | April 12, 2009 | No Comments
Genera es una organización sin fines de lucro que busca la redefinición de los roles sociales desde una perspectiva de género a través de la defensa y reivindicación de los derechos de las mujeres partiendo del ámbito del trabajo sexual.
(Genera is a nonprofit organisation that seeks to redefine social roles from a gender perspective through the defense and vindication of the rights of women, taking sex work as a departing point.)
Check out two publications available for download from the website:
- Manual de profesionalizacion de trabajadoras sexuales
(Manual for the professionalisation of sex workers)
- Revista Punto-G de Genera #01
(Review G Spot Like Genera #01)
Nuestras premisas de trabajo:
Proximidad: Mantenemos un contacto cotidiano con la realidad del trabajo sexual, contamos con un servicio de visitas periodicas a pisos, locales, clubes y zonas de la ciudad donde se ejerce prostitucion.
Genero y Derechos Humanos: Trabajamos desde una perspectiva de genero y hacia el reconocimiento y el respeto de derechos en todas nuestras actividades, programas y proyectos.
Solidaridad y Empoderamiento: Fomentamos el conocimiento como herramienta de cambio, la capacidad de apoyo y el empoderamiento. Creamos lazos y promovemos relaciones de solidaridad e intercambio.
Trabajo en redc social y comunitaria: Abarcamos tanto la sensibilizacion, la formacion como la accion politica. Participamos en mesas de trabajo, plataformas y redes. Promovemos un tratamiento respetuoso de la prostitucion en los medios de comunicacion. Atendemos consultas de periodistas, investigador@s y estudiantes. Organizamos acciones de sensibilizacion y debate.
email: genera@genera.org.es
Thank you from SWOP
Posted on | April 11, 2009 | No Comments
The organisers of London’s first Sex Worker Open University (April 1-5 2009) would like to thank everyone who participated for making the event an enormous success. Over 200 sex workers, sex workers’ rights activists, allies and visitors from the UK and abroad took part in workshops, discussions, actions and art exhibits over five days.
Read more
Photography Exhibition: Mathilde Bouvard
Posted on | April 11, 2009 | No Comments
Photographer Mathilde Bouvard, 24, was funded by the EU to take portraits of sex workers around Europe and record their testimonies. An exhibition of her work, organised by the Sex Worker Open University - as part of a week-long programme of events and workshops, opened at the London Action Resource Centre in east London. Bouvard’s images aim to ‘normalise’ and ‘humanise’ sex workers by portraying them in a variety of everyday circumstances
You can view more of the photos from the exhibition on the Guardian.co.uk website
Sex Workers Say ‘No To Criminalisation’
Posted on | April 1, 2009 | No Comments
On 31 March 2009, sex workers and our allies held a successful SPEAK OUT at the Eros Fountain, Piccadilly Circus against criminalisation and for labour rights for everyone who works in the sex industry. At 2.30pm, we took over one of the streets, bringing traffic to a standstill at Piccadilly Circus and unveiled a banner which read ‘SEX WORKERS ARE STOPPING THE TRAFFICK’. Sex workers took direct action today to highlight our opposition to the Policing and Crime Bill. Speakers at the SPEAK OUT included representatives from the x:talk project, English Collective of Prostitutes, Sex Worker Open University, academics and sex worker rights activists from across Europe.
The issue of human trafficking in the sex industry has been used by the Government and those intent on abolishing the sex industry to justify the further criminalisation of the sex industry. The existing criminalisation of sex work effectively excludes workers in the sex industry from the full protection of the law. Increased criminalisation will further exacerbate this exclusion. Trafficked workers, regardless of the industry in which they work, face gross violations of their rights. Women in the sex industry should not be defined by the area in which they work. For more information about trafficking and the Policing and Crime Bill.
“The Policing and Crime Bill will make it less, not more, safe for us to work, whether as strippers, escorts, working girls, maids or models. It is crucial that sex workers speak out about the current climate in the sex industry of fear, raids, deportation and arrests“ said Ava Caradonna from x:talk.
Ava Caradonna continued, “We also want to highlight the hypocrisy of the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. Purchases from our industry can find their way into her expense claims, while at the same time she has been leading the Government’s attack on the sex industry.”
The Policing and Crime Bill has passed through the committee stage following two readings in the House of Commons. If passed, this Bill will further criminalise people in the sex industry in the UK, whether they work by CHOICE, CIRCUMSTANCE or COERCION. It criminalises clients, increases penalties for soliciting and imposes measures for forced rehabilitation. It is based on a lack of evidence about the sex industry and has been drafted without taking the views of sex workers and their organisations into account.
This event was been called by x:talk in partnership with the Sex Worker Open University.
:: photo’s from the action are available on flickr. if you have more photos that you would like to share please email: xtalk.classes@gmail.com
Tags: interventions > London > praxis > protest > red umbrella > sex work > trafficking
The Independent: Jacqui Smith is making prostitution less safe
Posted on | April 1, 2009 | No Comments
:: the original article can be found here ::
The Independent
by Sophie Morris
Jacqui Smith is making prostitution less safe
Ironically, she seems not to understand the sex industry
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
While the police force was getting its knickers in a twist over the expected G20 protests, an altogether more serene demonstration took place in central London yesterday. A swarm of red umbrellas surrounded the Eros fountain in Piccadilly Circus, carried by sex workers campaigning against Jacqui Smith’s new Policing and Crime Bill. “What the hell,” they were saying in effect. Why can the Home Secretary put porn purchases on expenses, when those working in the sex industry face increasing levels of criminalisation?
Eros has long been a rendezvous spot for lovers and would-be lovers. As such, it seems as good a place as any to campaign about a different type of tryst, that between prostitute and punter.
The Policing and Crime Bill seeks to better “police” prostitution. In doing so it will criminalise sex workers and their clients under the guise of making the industry a safer environment to work in. Safer for those working against their will, that is, as the Bill conflates sex slaves and sex workers, grouping together those working under force and those of their own volition.
The plan is to transfer the burden of blame from the prostitutes onto the punters, making punters so afraid of punishment they will always ask a prostitute his or her provenance before getting down to business. If they are working under coercion, goes the theory, the punter will then demur from any action, ergo killing the market for trafficked sex workers.
There are more than a few dropped stitches in Ms Smith’s woolly argument. Sex workers are insulted at being grouped together with slaves, and the Bill could penalise anyone involved in the sex-for-sale market, be it on celluloid, in print or in person, via a lap dance or penetration.
Ava Caradonna, a spokesperson for x:talk, the organisation behind the red umbrella protest, is keen to highlight the Home Secretary’s hypocrisy. “The Bill will make it less, not more, safe for us to work,” she says, “whether as strippers, escorts, working girls, maids or models. Purchases from our industry can find their way into her expenses, while she attacks us as workers.”
Apart from the embarrassment factor for Ms Smith and her husband – it was he, we are told, who watched the two adult movies charged to the public purse – this matter emphasises the lack of understanding of the sex industry by those who are trying to repress and contain it.
There is nothing to be celebrated when women feel the best way to make money is by selling sex. Punishing them for doing so is inexplicable and inexcusable. Yet Ms Smith has gone about further criminalisation of the industry with the assumption that she exists above and beyond its enclave. This has been shown to be untrue, certainly on one level. At least everyone else pays for their own porn.
contact Sophie Morris: s.morris@independent.co.uk
Morning Star: Sex workers rally against new Crime Bill
Posted on | April 1, 2009 | No Comments
:: the original article can be found here
by Paul Haste in central London
Tuesday 31 March 2009
SEX workers smothered London’s Piccadilly Circus in red umbrellas on Tuesday
to protest against the criminalisation of their profession.
Scores of workers from the nearby Soho district gathered at the Eros statue in
the heart of the capital, stopping traffic to highlight their opposition to the
government’s Policing and Crime Bill.
Carrying the red umbrellas as a symbol of their resistance to the new law, sex
workers’ rights activists declared that it would “push prostitution further
underground and push us into more danger.”
English Collective of Prostitutes organiser Karen Mitchell explained that the Bill, championed by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, would “make it easier to for the police to arrest sex workers on the street and give them powers to seize our earnings and property regardless of whether there is a conviction.”
Referring to reports that Ms Smith’s ministerial expenses included pornographic DVDs, Ms Mitchell said: “It is ironic that the minister makes expense claims for products from the sex industry while waging this fundamentalist moral crusade against us.”
Ms Mitchell pointed out that “many sex workers are single mothers and prostitution is a survival strategy to deal with debt, low wages and unemployment.
“As the recession hits harder, more women are likely to resort to prostitution and the government should be providing resources and support for them, rather than stigmatising and criminalising them.”
Sex worker activist Ava Caradonna, who organises English classes for migrant workers in Soho, insisted that the women and men who sell sexual services “don’t need and don’t want other people making choices for us.
“Ministers want to criminalise our work, but we want to do what we do - and we want to organise and take charge of our own lives to make conditions better,” she added.
International Union of Sex Workers and GMB union organiser Catherine Stephens stressed that unionising the industry would empower those who choose to be sex workers.
“This is not a job for everyone, but we ask those who criticise our choices to at least respect that choice and respect my right to do what I want with my body,” she declared.
Danish activist Zanne agreed, pointing out that “sex workers all over the world are organising,” while Italian Andrea added that the government should “legalise the industry instead of attacking us.”
Ms Caradonna added that “those who want more oppressive laws need to listen to the workers and their union.”
“Abolition is not the answer because prostitution will never end. Instead we need some respect,” she stated.
Feminists Need Sex Workers, Just as the Sex Workers Movement Needs Feminism
Posted on | March 31, 2009 | No Comments
:: talk given on behalf of Feminist Fightback for the Sex Worker Open University, 1st April 2009 ::
So in a forum like this, its probably stating the obvious to remind ourselves that many feminists are sex workers and sex workers are often feminists. Nevertheless, I think we would also all agree that, outside of this room, feminists and sex workers are generally seen as oppositional groups, even by feminists and sex workers themselves.
I’m speaking here today as an activist with Feminist Fightback which has sought to build links between the feminist and sex worker movements. I want to argue that feminists need sex workers just as the sex worker movement needs feminism. In other words, I want to think about how taking a feminist perspective on sex work can help to develop and strengthen the politics of both movements.
Feminist Fightback is a network of socialist and anti-capitalist feminists, which emerged out of two large conferences we held in 2006 and 2007. Since then we’ve been meeting regularly in London and have recently started another group in Manchester. We’ve been involved in a wide range of activity, on issues ranging from reproductive freedom, to supporting the tube cleaners strike here last summer, to opposing detention centres for asylum seekers, to going into schools to talk about feminism. But most often we’re characterised within the feminist movement as ‘the people who support prostitution’.
This is because we support the decriminalisation of the sex industry and sex workers’ right to unionise. And we’ve done a lot of work in alliance with sex worker organisations. Some Fightback members, for example, have been involved in x:talk, a sex worker led project that provides free English classes for migrants in the sex industry. Feminist Fightback also organised a red umbrella contingent on various feminist marches, including the Reclaim the Night March, to demand safe streets for sex workers. We’ve put together a workshop exploring the myths, morals and immigration policies that lie behind the ‘trafficking’ discourse; and just yesterday we supported the sex worker speak out, where some of us blocked the road to unfurl a banner proclaiming ‘sex workers are stopping the traffick’, in protest against the Policing and Crime Bill currently in parliament in the UK.
Such activity has meant that some other feminist groups have refused to work with us. Most unfortunately we had the venue for the Gender/Race/Class conference that we held in February cancelled at the last minute because an anti-domestic violence organisation who had originally booked the venue for us decided that they could not support an event that “glamourised prostitution” (in fact there was only one workshop in the entire conference which touched on the issue of sex work).
This experience revealed to us the extent to which sex work has become THE dividing issue within the feminist movement at the moment. Regardless of all the other issues that we might agree on, many feminists who support the abolition of the sex industry feel that if you take a different position on this question then it’s not possible to work together at all. While this is extremely frustrating and counter-productive, it also tells us something about the wider political fault lines that run through feminism in the UK at the moment.
Abolitionist feminists, those who support the criminalisation of the sex industry, who tend to depict all sex workers as victims, and who refuse to listen to sex worker organisations – these feminists seem to me to be promoting a very distinctive form of feminism which places its faith primarily in the state. Those who campaign for the closure of lap dancing clubs, who support the Swedish model, and who champion Home Secretary Jacqui’s Smith’s Policing and Crime Bill, seem to think that the only way to improve the lives of women is to look to the state to impose change from above. They do not trust women to transform their own lives through collective action, and they do not seem to think that the people who might know what’s best for sex workers might be sex workers themselves.
By contrast, Feminist Fightback’s support for sex workers’ organising, seems to us be the only logical outcome of the kind of feminist movement we want to build. In response to the genuine concern of many feminists about the conditions in the sex industry, we argue that the best way to fight such exploitation is to support workers within it organising to transform their work and their lives. We also feel that this approach is the only one consistent with our wider political commitments to workers’ self-organisation, to bringing about change from below and to a rejection of moralistic, didactic and authoritarian attitudes to sex. For us, then, this was the only possible ‘feminist’ approach to the question of sex work.
So that’s a few of the reasons why feminists need to support sex workers, but why do I think that the sex worker movement needs feminism? Well, while we recognise that sex workers are of all genders – women, men and trans – we also have to acknowledge that the vast majority of sex workers are women. And also that we cannot understand why the sex industry works in the way that it does unless we look at the gendered power dynamics that operate within it.
I don’t mean this in some abstract way – that we need to have a really excellent analysis of sex work or something. I mean it in the sense that we need feminism in order to fight to win. For example, one of the reasons why sex workers historically have been stigmatised has a lot to do with the desire to regulate women’s sexual activity – prostitutes were women who didn’t behave properly – and the will to control women’s bodies continues to inform much of the repressive anti-sex worker legislation that exists all over the world. We also need to stop people like Jacqui Smith appropriating ‘feminism’ for her disgusting anti-women, anti-immigrant policies, to be able to answer her when she says that anyone who wants to stop violence against women has to call for the abolition of the sex industry.
And in Feminist Fightback, we not just feminists but anti-capitalist feminists. And one of the most slippery arguments being made by some abolitionists at the moment is about the capitalist nature of the global sex industry – about the vast profits being made by the likes of Peter Stringfellow from the labour of others. This also calls into question the concept of choice. Of course its crucial to challenge the idea that all sex workers are forced into prostitution against their will, and to point out that many people choose to work in the sex industry for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, I don’t think that the liberal concept of choice is adequate to explaining or opposing the conditions that exist within the sex industry. It’s not enough to say that we should all be free to do what we like with our bodies and that that’s the end of it. No one is free, in our society, while we continue to have to work to stay alive, and while we have to negotiate powerful forces that restrict and control how we express our sexuality. While demanding the right to work has to be the starting point for the sex worker movement, we’ve got to be able to go beyond this and to look at all the other forms of exploitation that continue to take place (migration etc.)
So perhaps this is something we can all discuss in a minute, but I want to end by calling for not only for a feminist sex worker movement, but also for a sex worker movement that challenges the bosses as well as the abolitionists. We need to be able to talk about how sex workers organising together can find ways to stop exploitation not only in the sex industry, or the work place, but to end it full stop.
Speak Out + Stand Up for Sex Worker Rights
Posted on | March 23, 2009 | No Comments
Tuesday 31 March
2pm at the Eros Fountain, Piccadilly Circus
Bring your red umbrellas
Workers in the sex industry and their allies are speaking out against the Policing and Crime Bill.
This Bill will further criminalise those of us in the sex industry in the UK, whether we work by CHOICE, CIRCUMSTANCE or COERCION. It criminalises our clients, increases penalties for soliciting and imposes measures for forced rehabilitation. It is based on a lack of evidence about the sex industry and without taking the views of sex workers and our organisations into account.
The Bill will make it less, not more, safe for us to work, whether as strippers, escorts, working girls, maids or models. It is crucial that the current climate of fear, raids, deportation and arrests be met with solidarity and a demand for justice. It is time to make sure our voices are heard.
Join us.
This Speak Out has been initiated by x:talk. To add your name to the Speak Out please email: xtalk.classes@gmail.com
please help spread the word and distribute this information to all networks and allies.
Migrant Workers Take Action in Airport
Posted on | March 1, 2009 | No Comments
As a part of the ongoing cleaners’ campaign in Holland on Thursday about 120 migrant workers did a civil disobedience at Schiphol airport’s main plaza (a sit-in).
They shouted for respect and demanded back pay, full time for all the temporary (agency) workers there, and paid transportation. There was a lot of press due to the plane crash the day before so we got a lot of coverage “we remember the dead but we fight for the living” was their slogan, allies from the Turkish airline came to support the action too since a lot of the workers are Turkish themselves.
All of this was also a proactive way to tell the new airport management that the workers wont be paying for the crisis and we wont accept staff cuts or work load increases in the future. Our next escalating action is
on March 16th.
Check out photo’s from the action here.
Madrid Sex Worker Fashion Show
Posted on | February 25, 2009 | No Comments
pasarela lumi fashion 08
In the spirit of building networks and links across borders.. some news and links to sex worker organisations in Spain (both websites are in Spanish).
And some great photo’s from a sex worker action in Madrid ‘Pararela Lumi Fashion’- a sex work fashion show.
Imágenes del desfile organizado por el Colectivo Hetaira para reinvindicar los derechos de las prostitutas. Celebrado el 26 de junio de 2008 en la plaza de Carlos Cambronero (Madrid).
Check them out!
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