Article written by:Frankie Miren For 12 days in late 1982 the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied a church in King’s Cross to protest police brutality. Frankie Miren interviews women who were at the centre of the dispute, and explores explores the legacy of their action today. It’s November 1982 and you wake up on the […]
Ray Filar Photo by Juno Mac/SWARM ‘Sex workers are the original feminists’, say Juno Mac and Molly Smith in Revolting Prostitutes. It’s an incendiary claim–not least because tracking ‘firsts’ is a fraught pursuit–but it might well be true. Mac and Smith point toward the medieval brothel workers who formed guilds and […]
This profound and disturbing true-crime show lays bare the case’s outrageous misogyny – and lets silenced women be heard at last. Over the course of three nights, the film-maker Liza Williams is revisiting one of the biggest – and longest – murder manhunts in British history. The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story […]
Written by the English Collective of ProstitutesIn 1975, two immigrant women living in England heard about church occupations and a strike of sex workers in France protesting brutal murders and the refusal of the police to investigate them. Encouraged and inspired, the two women formed the English Collective of Prostitutes to campaign for the abolition […]
A life in writing: Selma James’By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society’The last time Selma James was interviewed by the Guardian was in 1976, by the feminist columnist Jill Tweedie. At that time, James was a household name – in feminist households at least – and […]
Caroline RyderYou’d have thought people would have finally got used to prostitution by now, what with it being the oldest profession in the world.But it wasn’t until 1982, when a group of angry “sex workers” occupied the Church of the Holy Cross in Kings Cross, that politicians and the media sat up and listed to […]
Buy the book here.Jenny Kitzinger, director Centre for Media and Communications Research, Brunel University, UxbridgeVice girl, social pariah, the victim who “asks for it”—these are some of the stereotypes about prostitutes. Rape, beatings, and abuse are often seen as inevitable, almost justified, hazards of “the lifestyle.” The murder of at least six prostitutes in Glasgow over […]
Los Angeles Conference 14 March 1997All sex workers must be decriminalised whether they work on the street or in premises.Scrap the prostitution laws: they criminalize sex workers, divide us from our families and friends, make us vulnerable to violence, and set us apart from the rest of the community — separate is never equal.An end to […]
