Google announced last week that they are making the largest-ever corporate donation to “ending modern day slavery”: an impressive $11.5 million dollars. We applaud and support Google’s desire to fight slavery, forced trafficking, and exploitative labor conditions, but Google’s funding recipients include three NGOs that cause serious harm to sex workers around the world: International Justice Mission, Polaris Project, and Not for Sale. As front line sex worker support services struggle for funding to serve their communities, it is offensive to watch Google shower money upon a wealthy faith-based group like the International Justice Mission, which took in nearly $22 million dollars in 2009 alone. (In contrast, the St. James Infirmary, a San Francisco clinic that provides free healthcare to sex workers, operated on only $335k in 2010.)
Archive | December 2011
High whore holy day: A San Francisco tradition turns nine
Speaking out for sex: Posters from the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
PHOTO BY JOHN BONNAR
It was Saturday, December 17. A jazz funeral was being held for victims of violence against sex workers at the Center for Sex and Culture. Post-event, its message was still resonating in its attendees. “The holiday was beautiful,” sex activist and post-porn star Annie Sprinkle told the Guardian about the ninth year of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers that she helped to found.
Sex workers call for hate crime law, end to violence
As the Missing Women’s Inquiry continues, sex workers and supporters lit candles on the steps of a police detachment yesterday, part of a global day of action.
By David P. Ball
Sex workers and their allies rallied outside the Downtown Eastside (DTES) police station Saturday, calling on Vancouver police to treat women in the neighbourhood with respect, and to put a stop to violence against people in the sex industry.
Sex workers won’t be ‘victims’
Protest draws attention to recent violence against prostitutes
By Meghan Hurley, Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa-based sex workers and their allies called for an end to prostitution sweeps Saturday during a protest held on Parliament Hill.
About 50 people participated in the protest, which took place just more than a week after Ottawa police chief Vern White issued an unprecedented public safety warning to women after police investigators discovered a pattern in homicides among city prostitutes.
Sex workers squeezed out as once-debauched Montreal neighbourhoods go mainstream
BY ALLISON LAMPERT, POSTMEDIA NEWS DECEMBER 17, 2011
Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay looks up while work (reflected in window) at the corner of Saint Catherine St. East and St. Laurent Boulevard in 2008.
Photograph by: Graham Hughes, Gazette file photo
MONTREAL — Megan huddles in the doorway of a St. Laurent Boulevard bar, her bare, blackened hands turning red in the Saturday morning cold.
The petite 19-year-old emerges onto the sidewalk to greet Jack and Mitch, two regulars of Montreal’s Main district who’ve been out drinking since Friday night and are ready for another round.
The dangers of sex work in Canada
By Andrea Houston
Every night Lexi Tronic risks her life at work.
If she gets beaten or raped, she feels she can’t call police to report the attack because – at least for now – Tronic is also a criminal.
“What happens when you’re trapped in someone’s car with the doors locked? You don’t have any options. It’s fight or flight,” she says.
Tronic is a 10-year veteran in the sex trade who has worked both on the streets and from her home, as many sex workers have, she says.
On Dec 17, the transgender and sex-worker-rights activist will join others to mark the ninth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Such violence is a pervasive problem that is largely preventable and often ignored, she says, noting that most violent crimes against sex workers go underreported, unaddressed and unpunished.
Ottawa police warn sex-trade workers after finding pattern in unsolved murders
OTTAWA— The Canadian Press Published Friday, Dec. 09, 2011
Women working in the sex trade in Ottawa are being warned by the city’s top cop to watch out for their safety.
Chief Vern White issued the warning Friday, saying police have found a pattern in unsolved homicides in Ottawa involving sex trade workers.
Police aren’t saying how many homicides have been linked, what the pattern is or how far back it goes. But they’ve confirmed a link and they want the community to know, Chief White said.
All women, especially those who work in the sex trade, should “be vigilant and exercise good safety practices,” he added.
Who gets a say? The sex work lobby and the silencing of feminist voices
Megan Murphy has been writing about sex work on rabble.ca and has been causing a bit of a stir… Please visit the site to post on the comments!
It’s become so predictable that, now, I just sit back and wait. I’ve written several pieces about prostitution and the abolitionist movement, and several more that don’t directly address these issues, but perhaps mention the word “prostitution.” And really, that’s all it takes these days.
What I’ve come to realize is, no matter what I write, no matter what argument I make, no matter the points I bring up, the sex work lobby doesn’t care. Because if you aren’t agreeing with them, you must be stopped.
Public use of the word “prostitution” is enough to justify skimming right past the contents of any article and heading straight to the silencing. The silencing is the most important work, after all. It is the goal. “If we can bully them into shutting up, maybe we’ll win,” is what they seem to be thinking.
Fighting violence against women in Vancouver’s sex trade
It’s been 22 years since the Montreal massacre. We talk violence against women, and ways to end it, with survival sex work organizer Jennifer Allan, founder of Jen’s Kitchen. She experienced violence in the survival sex industry first-hand, but today, she supports those in the trade and pushes for change. By David P. Ball.
Jennifer Allan knows first-hand what it’s like to sell one’s body in order to feed it.
About ten years ago, the 34-year old founder of Jen’s Kitchen – an advocacy, outreach and food relief service for women in Vancouver’s survival sex trade – found herself pacing the streets of Calgary and Vancouver, the pain of hunger in her belly.
Analysis: What is Canada to do about its sex trade?
by Melissa Martin
[Nikki Thomas]
THE spotlight swings around and the debate, once hushed, grows loud: What happens to sex work in Canada now?
There’s only one thing everyone knows for sure. “The public does not want to see any more bodies in pig farms,” said Nikki Thomas, executive director of the Sex Professionals of Canada. No more Picktons and no more exploitative pimps. But how best to stop the violence?
This is where the dialogue, even in exclusively feminist circles, suddenly diverges. Split into passionate but incompatible paths it goes: abolitionists on one side and the sex-worker rights advocates on the other.
escorts are for women too 
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