Publications & Tools

This Smart Guide identifies some of the current (2021) trends in the use of ICT, exploring good and bad practices, and examines the threats and challenges to sex workers’ safety, privacy, and well-being. It highlights the need for ICT developments that meet the highest security standards, are community-led and owned, that protect the health and other human rights of sex workers, and that do not replace essential face-to-face services for sex workers or undermine community empowerment at grassroots level. The Smart Guide draws on the expertise of sex workers and key informants and concludes with recommendations for different stakeholders.

Around the world, sex workers are organising to improve protection of their rights, end exploitation and violence, access appropriate and respectful health care and build movements for lasting change. The Smart Sex Worker’s Guide to Sustainable Funding contains practical information on funding strategies for sex worker organisations. It discusses developing a funding strategy, applying for grants, financial management and community-based fundraising.

The Counting Sex Workers In! campaign also featured a webinar entitled Strengthening sex workers’ labor rights through cross-movement collaboration. “As the UN Women-led campaign “Generation Equality: Realizing women’s rights for an equal future” continues to move forward on an adjusted timeline, it demands equal pay, an end to sexual harassment and all forms of violence against women and girls, health-care services that respond to women?s needs, and their equal participation in political life and decision-making in all areas of life. All of these demands must encompass sex workers and sex worker advocates must be part of the process. With the deep and ongoing impact of COVID-19, this session celebrates achievements, shares good practices and promising innovations and discusses key challenges focusing on participation, representation and voice of sex workers and on ensuring sex workers? rights to bodily autonomy.”

Sex Worker Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA) is an all-volunteer, sex worker-led organization doing transformative mutual aid work. When they point out “the precious time that could be spent providing direct services to workers is wasted on another rejected application that won’t address the growing gap in our financial resources to support our community,” the SWOP LA team again highlights that unrestricted multi-year grants are essential to their work’s survival.

TAMPEP advocates for the human and civil rights of sex workers in Europe. TAMPEP resources include papers that outline the network’s position on a number of issues relating to migrant sex work, training manuals (in English, Russian, Ukranian), and a variety of reports.

For International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers 2019, Mama Cash invited two sex workers’ rights activists to join Mama Cash on the podcast: Velvet December, Advocacy Coordinator for Dutch sex workers’ union PROUD, and Vera Rodriguez, Programme Associate at international fund for sex workers’ rights activists – the Red Umbrella Fund. You also hear from Mama Cash’s grantee-partners the English Collective of Prostitutes about their current campaign.”The livelihood of sex workers must not be collateral damage to the dismantling of the patriarchy.”

The Podcast unpacked?about how sex work intersects with capitalism and patriarchy, recent developments in legislation and activism around the world, and why sex workers are calling for decriminalisation (and not the Nordic model). Plus, they share what we can all do to support our local sex workers’ rights movement. Transcript available, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or Stitcher.

A primer on sex work developed by OSF in 2015.

Supporting sex workers’ rights shouldn’t feel like a reach for the drug reform movement. Both exist to reduce the harm wrought by criminalisation

This survey forms one of the first steps of the Racial Equity Index
Working Group to create a definition of Racial Equity within the Social
Justice and Global Development space.
“Our first data report (released June 2021) which focused on the demographic and quantitative data was a starting point for us, as a collective, in understanding the state of racism in the global development sector.

As a volunteer, BIPOC-led collective the data analysis of the Global Mapping Survey was done deliberately to ensure that we asked all relevant questions of ourselves and of the data that was presented. The data you see before you, along with our analysis, has been peer-reviewed at every stage both internally by our working group members but also by our independent peer-review group.

An important note we want to make: The results of the Global Mapping Survey serve as a summary of both the quantitative and qualitative data collected. This edition of the Global Mapping Survey report contains additional analysis of the qualitative data that is meant to complement the existing quantitative analysis. The Racial Equity Index requests that individuals, groups, and organisations reviewing this data do not isolate or pull out specific data points without connecting them to the larger context of the work the Racial Equity Index is doing.”

The Hack List: Hustler Lessons From Community – Grantmaking By and For Sex Workers (Red Umbrella Fund, Sex Worker Giving Circle at Third Wave Fund, UHAI-EASHRI). This checklist was created to share some hacks (or creative work-arounds) that support funders to be more responsive to grassroots grantee experiences and needs.? It was first presented at the 2019 Funders Concerned About Aids (FCAA) conference in the Plenary – Hacks from the Frontline: Sex Worker-Sourced Strategies for Creative and Responsive HIV Funding.

The first of four briefing papers on Digital Rights ESWA intends to publish in 2022. This paper, written by Marin Scarlett, explores the imact on self-expression, freedom of speech and mental health; impact on financial stability; impact on agency and independence; and impact on community and political organising.

A video produced by OSF in 2022 exploring the disproportionately harmful impact COVID-19 and related policies has had on sex workers.

This report documents the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 pandemic measures on marginalized and criminalized communities. State responses to Covid-19 have magnified the inequalities faced by groups and communities that were already targeted or otherwise impacted by unjust and discriminatory criminal laws, including LGBTI people, sex workers, people who use drugs, people in need of abortion, homeless people and people living in poverty. Putting human rights at the heart of
government efforts to address public health emergency responses is not an optional consideration, it is an obligation.

“According to research published […] by the Network of Latin American and Caribbean Sex Workers (Red de Trabajadoras Sexuales de Latinoam?rica y el Caribe, RedTraSex) more than 1,200 sex workers in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean reported having experienced some form of human rights abuse since 2016. Among the abuses most frequently reported are discrimination, harassment, intimidation, threats, physical assault, rape and extortion.”

“Sex workers across the world are organising against criminalisation, which puts not just their livelihood at risk but their entire lives?and those of their loved ones. They are generally recognised as marginalised and highly vulnerable in today’s societies, embodying multiple layers of stigma because of the work they do, and also because they are often poor, lack formal education, belong to Indigenous or migrant populations, identify as trans or gay, or are single mothers. However, funding to support sex worker organisations and their community mobilisation efforts is scarce… Sex worker organisations call on funders to provide more funding that is long term and covers rent, salaries, trainings, legal services, and advocacy. They also want funders to speak up in support of sex workers? rights.” Written by former Coordinator Nadia van der Linde Time to Turn Up the Volume [Cited as N van der Linde, “Time to Turn Up the Volume”, Anti-Trafficking Review, Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 12, 2019, pp. 194-199, www.antitraffickingreview.org.] View