Xenia’s Reviews > Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights > Status Update

“Maggie’s, a sex worker group in Toronto, have developed a document, ‘Safer Border Crossing Tips for Sex Workers’, which details recommended precautions for sex workers to take when traveling to the United States. It is available on the ‘Resources for Workers’ section of their website, maggiestoronto.ca.”

“At borders all over the world, sex workers are treated as both villain and victims.”

(2) “As Black persons across the Americas are literally fighting for our lives, it is urgent to examine the actions and goals of any mostly white and conservative movement who [claim] to be the rightful inheritors of an ‘anti-slavery’ mission which aims to abolish prostitution but both ignores and indirectly facilitates brutalities waged against Black communities.”

(1) “By hijacking the terminology of slavery, even widely referring to themselves as ‘abolitionists’, anti-sex work campaigners … in pushing for criminalization … are often undermining those most harmed by the legacy of slavery.”

“There is a direct correlation between the degree of difficulty in obtaining and maintaining documentation and vulnerability of interviewees to exploitation, whether they work in sex or in other industries…”

“… if an undocumented worker reports violence or criminal labor exploitation to the police, they face arrest and deportation, rather than protection and justice.”

“…the solution to their [migrants] exploitative situation is to enable them to migrate legally and with rights. Everything else is at best a distraction (sexy chains! evil villains!) and at worst, actively worsens the problem by pushing for laws which make it harder, not easier, to migrate legally and with rights.”

“The vast, vast majority of people who end up in exploitative situations were seeking to migrate and have become entrapped in a horrifically exploitative system because when people migrate without papers they have few to no rights.“

„…a huge amount of money is poured into anti-prostitution work done through the prism of anti-trafficking. In 2012, in the US alone, the collective budget of 36 large anti-prostitution anti-trafficking organizations totalled $1.2 billion. The vast majority of this money is spent on campaigning, as opposed to supporting survivors; in 2014, the US had only about 1000 beds available for victims of trafficking.“

„Moving towards a better society-one in which more people’s work does have wider value, one in which resources are shared on the basis of need-cannot come through criminalization. Nor can it come about through treating marginalized people‘s material needs and survival strategies as trivial. Sex workers ask to be credited with the capacity to struggle with work-even hate it-and still be considered workers.“