Publications & Tools

In preparation for our second strategic plan, we reflected on our work to date: what have we accomplished, what have we learned, and how can we use these lessons to plan for the future. To understand the impact of our work, we gathered feedback from grantees, other activists, funders, members of the International Steering Committee (ISC) and Programme Advisory Committee (PAC) and staff.

This document has been developed for sex workers’ rights activists as a template on how to approach some of the most commonly asked questions by media representatives. It can be intimidating for activists with no experience to work with journalists and you might not feel confident enough to engage with them. But sex workers have the real-life knowledge from their experiences, and this makes them an expert on sex work. Still, it is important that sex workers feel able to communicate their thoughts and arguments in a way that is useful and safe for themselves, for their community and sex workers’ rights. We hope that this guide will give some directions so that sex workers can become more confident. This document is not meant to tell sex workers what they should think or say but merely to make them aware of the common topic of interests shown by media when talking about sex work and of the rhetoric commonly used by sex workers? rights movement to tackle these questions.

“The Anti-Trafficking Review promotes a human rights-based approach to anti-trafficking. It explores trafficking in its broader context including gender analyses and intersections with labour and migration. It offers an outlet and space for dialogue between academics, practitioners, trafficked persons and advocates seeking to communicate new ideas and findings to those working for and with trafficked persons.
The journal presents rigorously considered, peer-reviewed material in clear English. Each issue relates to an emerging or overlooked theme in the field of anti-trafficking.”
This issue includes 14 articles drafted by leaders from sex worker-led organisations, Nadia van der Linde (Red Umbrella Fund) and others on the topic of sex worker organising.

In this piece, Red Schulte and contributors from the Support Ho(s)e collective share their personal experiences with the best and worst funders. There are so few funders in the space that when mistakes are made there is a lack of accountability for funders that leads to compounding violence for organizers.

This joint briefing paper by NSWP and INPUD highlights the specific needs and rights of sex workers who use drugs, as a community that spans two key populations. This document provides an overview of some of the most endemic and substantive ways in which sex workers who use drugs face double criminalisation and associated police harassment, intersectional stigma, compounded marginalisation and social exclusion, heightened interference and harassment from healthcare and other service providers, infantilisation, pathologisation, and an associated undermining of agency, choice, and self-determination. A Community Guide is also available.

This joint briefing paper by NSWP and INPUD highlights the specific needs and rights of sex workers who use drugs, as a community that spans two key populations. This document provides an overview of some of the most endemic and substantive ways in which sex workers who use drugs face double criminalisation and associated police harassment, intersectional stigma, compounded marginalisation and social exclusion, heightened interference and harassment from healthcare and other service providers, infantilisation, pathologisation, and an associated undermining of agency, choice, and self-determination. A Community Guide is also available.

Globally sex workers experience a number of barriers to comprehensive
sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, ranging from explicit
exclusion from international financing to discrimination within SRH
services leading to lower access rates.

This paper discusses the obstacles sex workers face when accessing
SRH services, and examines the quality of services available to them. It
also provides practical examples and recommendations for improving the
accessibility and acceptability of SRH services for sex workers.

A Community Guide is also available.

This Briefing Paper documents the stigma and discrimination experienced by LGBT sex workers and highlights differences in their experiences when compared with other members of their respective communities. It also includes recommendations for addressing the double stigma and discrimination experienced by those at the intersection of the sex work and LGBT communities.

This case study focuses on sex workers’ meaningful involvement in the development of rights-based sex worker program in national Funding Requests to the Global Fund in Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

This page intends to provide a guide to the potential resources accessible for sex-workers during the crisis of the COVID-19. It includes potential financial support, best-practice resources and right-based tools.

“This study examines lived experiences of gender-based violence as faced by lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women, transgender people, and female sex workers in Burundi, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The study examines how state efforts to exercise control over women’s bodies, combined with patriarchal social systems, result in a wide array of types of violence. As Ugandan feminist lawyer Sylvia Tamale goes on to say in her introduction to the anthology African Sexualities, such systems of control have origins in British colonialism, at which time “A new script, steeped in the Victorian moralistic, antisexual and body-shame edicts, was inscribed on the bodies of African women and with it an elaborate system of control. The instrumentalization of sexuality through the nib of statutory, customary and religious law is closely related to women’s oppression and gender constructions.” Post-independence governments discovered that sexuality could be instrumentalized to suit their needs, too. Over 50 years since colonial power was vanquished on much of the African continent, patriarchal power over women’s bodies and sexualities persists.”

This toolkit offers key organizing lessons, strategies, and political visions from migrant worker and sex worker-led political formations: workers who are forcibly excluded from the economy or working in the shadows of formalized economies. This toolkit features a summary of research conducted between February 2021 & July 2021. It also draws from collective learning during the Informal, Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers conference.

A blog post in which PSJP explores “the idea of leadership and some of its many facets with four social change organizations, Red Umbrella Fund, Ikhala, the Dalit Foundation and the Neelan Tiruchelvam Trust.”

“Hacking//Hustling used a participatory action research model to gather quantitative and qualitative data regarding the impact of the removal of Backpage and the passage of FOSTA-SESTA on two groups of sex workers: those who work online, and primarily street-based sex workers who have limited access to technology. The results of our online survey (98 participants) and street-based survey (38 participants) indicate that the removal of Backpage and FOSTA-SESTA have had detrimental effects on online workers? financial stability, safety, access to community, and health outcomes.” Advised by Naomi Lauren at WCIIA (our Grantee-Partner).

Third Wave Fund’s Sex Worker Giving Ciricle, NCRP’s 2021 winner of the “Smashing Silos” Impact Award, shares four key lessons funders can use as they support sex worker-led organizations: provide unrestricted, multi-year grants, center trauma-informed, empathetic grantmaking, build multilingual grantmaking structures and emphasize language justice, and stop demanding fiscal sponsors, an imposition for some of the most effective groups. They write, “Directly funding the well-being, bodily autonomy and organizing of sex workers most impacted by oppression is in itself a radical vision and our biggest impact.”