December 17th - International Day to End Violence against sex workers

Recently, 5 sex workers are murdered in Ipswich in England, but the murderer is not yet arrested. This ripper killer media frenzy is driving me – and most of the whore activists I know mad. So many aspects about it are sickening – the way journalists are almost frothing at the mouth (because whore murder victims make a case so much sexier than ‘soccer mom’ murder victims - the focus on 'the victims' - sexy pictures, descriptions of their physical characteristics, showing images of the crack pipes in one of the deceased's home....

The unsaid assumption that sex work is an inherently violent job, that if you choose sex work, you'll be lucky to survive the first week.... maybe you even deserve it....The complete lack of analysis as to the overwhelming affects of marginalisation and stigma, that presents sex workers to those who will be violent criminals (as well as the rest of the population) as sub-human, the impact of criminalisation, which reduces sex workers likelihood of reporting crimes against them, the risks of disclosure, which means sex workers will often not disclose about their sex work to their loved ones, so people don't know where they are when at work....

Often attitudes expressed by media sources and the police contribute to a culture that sees violence against sex workers as almost acceptable. During the investigation of the Yorkshire ripper, a senior West Yorkshire detective notoriously made a direct appeal to the killer, pointing out that he was now killing "innocent girls" and therefore "in urgent need of medical attention". The inference is clear - as long as he stuck to killing sex workers, he wasn't quite so much of a psycho...

In my now almost 17 years of sex work, encompassing private, brothel, opportunistic, escort and street-based sex work, I have honestly never experienced a clear case of violence from a client - however I've experienced the dehumanising attitudes of police and media, and the horrific attitudes of anti-sex work feminists who refuse to differentiate between sex work and rape - contributing to a culture that believes sex workers can't say no, that rape of a sex worker is more like 'unpaid overtime'. For those of us who care about social justice, for those of us that care about sex workers rights, for those of us who wish to see an end to violence against sex workers, these attitudes need to be challenged, sex work needs to be decriminalised in every country and police and media construction of sex workers as less-than human, as 'asking for it' needs to end.

To mark International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers, here is a statement from the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective.