Neville Southall’s recent comments on sex work draw praise from Stella Brook of the English Collective of Prostitutes, while Labour MEP Mary Honeyball condemns Catherine Healy’s elevation in the Queen’s birthday honoursNeville Southall’s compassionate, commonsense support for sex workers (‘I’ve got a bit of flak because I stick up for sex workers’, 5 June) is much needed at […]
(The Guardian, unpublished).Dear Madam/Sir,Like our sisters in Haiti (‘Aid staff would pay more’: sex workers in Haiti speak out), sex workers who have survived disasters and face the calamity of criminalisation every day, must start with our need to support ourselves and our families. Women from Empower, a sex workers collective in Thailand, were in […]
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.UnpublishedMick Parkin’s in his article Prostitution Is Not Work – It Is A Uniquely Extreme Form Of Commodification And Abuse joins a long line of men (and women) with apparently no qualms about defining sex workers’ experience for us.He claims to be concerned that our “intimate parts” shouldn’t be objectified but says […]
November 2016.Dear Editor,We write to support the concerns raised by SCOT-PEP that police “SHAW (Support, Health and Wellbeing) visits” to sex workers’ homes or places of work may be used to gather intelligence to bring prosecutions for criminal offences.We share SCOT-PEP’s concern because that is exactly what happened here. In 2013 250 police raided 20 […]
Letter from the sex worker collective, Empower in Thailand to the UK Home Secretary protesting about the harm done to sex workers by raids done in the name of anti-trafficking.Dear Amber Rudd MP, Home Secretary,Empower Foundation, Thailand.Empower is a Thai organization promoting rights and opportunities for sex workers in Thailand for over 30 years. Empower is predominately […]
Unpublished. 9 September 2016 Why should Keith Vaz resign as head of the Home Affairs Select Committee which is considering the prostitution laws just because he may have consorted with sex workers? (Vaz to leave committee after sex claims, Guardian 5 Sept 16) The laws that criminalised sex workers have almost always (with some exceptions) […]
LettersLast week Amnesty International launched its global policy on sex work alongside new research which documents the severe human rights abuses suffered by sex workers (Amnesty in global programme to decriminalise sex work, theguardian.com, 26 May). Amnesty’s call on states to repeal laws that criminalise “the consensual exchange of sexual services between adults for remuneration” […]
Letters: Pros and cons of work in the sex industry I was at our women’s centre reading the Guardian editorial (8 April) when I took a call from a woman charged with brothel-keeping for working with a friend. I asked her how she got into prostitution. “A man came round to cut off the gas and I […]
Letters: Decriminalisation and sex workers Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on sex work (Report, 6 March) is in line with Amnesty International’s view that decriminalisation is “the best way to defend sex workers’ human rights and lessen the risk of abuse and violations they face”. We are currently fighting legal cases with women imprisoned for brothel-keeping for […]
The all-party parliamentary group that recommended the criminalisation of sex workers’ clients, which is cited as backing for Caroline Spelman’s views (Outlaw buying sex, says former Tory minister, 22 April), is a partisan group whose original remit was to “tackle demand for the sex trade”. Its moralistic stance is confirmed by its choice of secretariat – […]